The Geopolitics of Great Power Intervention, 1815-2015

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‘For the Happiness of the World’: The Geopolitics of Great Power Intervention, 1815-2015

Christopher David LaRoche

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science University of Toronto

For the Happiness of the World’: The Geopolitics of Great Power Intervention, 1815-2015

Christopher David LaRoche

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Political Science University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

Why do great powers sometimes invest significant resources in efforts to secure approval from other great powers for their interventions, but other times do not? This dissertation argues that explicit or implicit agreements between great powers called geopolitical bargains have shaped great power intervention by delineating where they can acceptably intervene. When a great power intervenes in an area that a geopolitical bargain delimits as its own area of preponderance—its sphere of influence—it need not worry about making its intervention acceptable to its peers, and it can tailor its intervention coalition to closely meet its military needs. When it intervenes outside of its sphere, the great power must resort to other methods to legitimize its actions, such as formal multilateralism and legal approval. I trace the effects of geopolitical bargains across three periods of great power peace: the Concert of Europe, the Cold

War, and the post-Cold War era.

Acknowledgments

Gustav Mahler said “a symphony must be like the world… It must embrace everything.” Anyone who has heard a Mahler symphony will know this is dangerous advice for a doctoral student already predisposed to excess. The list of people who helped stop me from making a Mahler symphony out of this dissertation is long, but must start with my committee: Steven Bernstein, Seva Gunitsky, and Todd Hall; and the internal and external readers, Matthew Hoffmann and Brian Bow, respectively. I am supremely indebted to their efforts, advice, compassion, timeliness, and collective wisdom. I must also thank Lilach Gilady and Emmanuel Adler, who helped me formulate the ideas here in their early stages.

Professors who did not have a direct hand in this dissertation but who I must thank for their encouragement and tolerance are Aisha Ahmad, Ronnie Beiner, Nancy Bertoldi, Ryan Balot, Rebecca Kingston, Peggy Kohn, Frank Harvey, Paul Evans, Yuen Pau Woo, Steven Kimber, Denis Stairs, Clifford Orwin—to whom I owe an education—and Jerome Davis, who set me on this path. Many thanks also to the staff of the University of Alberta’s China Institute, especially Gordon Houlden and Jia Wang, whose hospitality allowed me to edit this dissertation into its current form.

A strength of the Toronto doctoral program is the great number of colleagues who surround you in what is ultimately a lonely undertaking. Here I must thank Jonas Schwab-Plug for his limitless intellectual and personal friendship (and Emma Schwab-Plug for her equally limitless patience). I am also especially indebted in similar terms to Scott Dodds, Anthony Sealey, Maïka Sondarjée, and my coauthors, Joseph Mackay and Simon Frankel Pratt. Vive mes amis de l’ABC.

Other colleagues and friends to whom I am indebted:, Lincoln and Lindsay Rathnam, Beesan Sarrouh, Jordan Guthrie, , Clifford Smith, Seth Jaffe, Kiran Banerjee, Alena Drieschova, Joelle Dumouchel, Sophie Flemig, Emma Planinc, Jamie Levin, Yao Wen, David Polansky, Lama Mourad, Taylor Putnam, Cameron Cotton-O’Brien, Andrew Gross, Larissa Atkison, Rachael Desborough, Andy Paras, Erin Hannah, Alanna Krolikowski, Kristin Pue, Nathaniel Gilmour, Igor Shoikhedbrod, Sophie Borwein, Ann Staver, Ajay Parasram, Michael Millerman, Zak Black, Timothy Berk, and everyone at the North Korea Research Group. Carthago delenda est.

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Friends outside of academia who also contributed to this dissertation, sometimes simply by having the good sense to not ask about it, are David Henry, Li Dong, Mate and Aron Bojti, Jessica McDiarmid, Brian Walker, Bennett Tansey, Heather Black, Mary-Catherine Charters, Natalie Fehéregyházi, Kathleen Cook, Maleika Mohamed, and many others over the years.

A very special thanks to all my former students who have kept in touch—you have made this worth it.

Last, I am most deeply indebted to my family in Halifax, Nova Scotia—Nadine, Patrick, Lois, and Robert LaRoche—the LaRoches—for all their support, matériel et moral, as Metternich would have it.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iii

Table of Contents ...... v

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

1.1 The argument: geopolitical bargains ...... 3

1.2 Implications of the argument ...... 5

1.3 Plan of the dissertation ...... 9

Chapter 2 Geopolitical Bargains and Military Intervention ...... 13

2.1 The Problem of Great Power Intervention ...... 13

2.2 Geopolitical bargains ...... 19

2.3 Geopolitical bargains: a taxonomy ...... 26

2.3.1 Geopolitical bargains in miniature: the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact ...... 33

2.4 Methodology and research design ...... 36

2.4.1 Alternative arguments and interactive effects ...... 39

2.4.2 Case selection ...... 41

2.4.3 Athens and Melos ...... 45

2.5 Conclusion ...... 47

Chapter 3 The Concert of Europe ...... 50

3.1 Existing accounts of the Concert spheres ...... 56

3.2 The Concert bargain ...... 59

3.2.1 Mapping the spheres ...... 63

3.2.2 Intervention purpose during the Concert ...... 67

3.2.3 Assurance strategies ...... 69

3.3 Intervention in the Concert ...... 72

3.3.1 Collective intervention in a de jure sphere: Austria in Naples, 1821 ...... 73

3.3.2 Semi-collective intervention in no one’s sphere I: France in Spain, 1823 ...... 79 v

3.3.3 Unilateral interventions in a de jure sphere: Britain in Portugal, 1826, 1834 & 1847 ...... 87

3.3.4 Collective intervention in no one’s sphere: the Allies in Belgium, 1831-33 ...... 96

3.3.5 Unilateral intervention in a de jure sphere: Russia in Poland, 1831 ...... 103

3.3.6 Unilateral intervention in a de jure sphere: Austria in Central Italy, 1831-32 ... 111

3.3.7 Intervention in a de jure sphere: the Eastern Courts in Kraków, 1846 ...... 116

3.3.8 Intervention in a de jure sphere: Austria in Italy, 1848 ...... 122

3.3.9 Intervention in a contested sphere: Russia and the Allies in the Ottoman Empire, 1827-1853 ...... 124

3.4 Case comparisons and competing explanations ...... 138

3.4.1 Limited revision: France and Russia as Concert spoilers ...... 139

3.4.2 Austria’s Allied supplication in Naples and French contention in the Papal Estates ...... 143

3.4.3 French semi-grouping in Spain ...... 152

3.4.4 British multilateralism in Portugal ...... 154

3.5 Conclusion ...... 157

Chapter 4 The Cold War ...... 159

4.1 Existing accounts of the Cold War spheres ...... 163

4.2 The Cold War bargain ...... 168

4.2.1 Mapping the spheres ...... 169

4.2.2 The geopolitical bargain ...... 175

4.2.3 Intervention purpose ...... 184

4.2.4 Assurance strategies ...... 186

4.3 Military intervention during the Cold War ...... 189

4.3.1 “A substitute for World War III”: U.S. intervention in the Korean War ...... 190

4.3.2 “Peaceful Coexistence”: Soviet interventions in the Eastern Bloc ...... 204

4.3.3 Preventing “another Cuba”: U.S. Interventions in Latin America ...... 220

4.3.4 Interventions outside the spheres: Lebanon, Vietnam, and Afghanistan ...... 242 vi

4.4 Case comparison and alternative explanations ...... 253

4.4.1 Similarities across the cases ...... 253

4.4.2 Dissimilarities ...... 256

4.4.3 Differences between Soviet and American hegemony ...... 257

4.5 Conclusion ...... 258

Chapter 5 After the Cold War ...... 263

5.1 Order and intervention after the Cold War: existing accounts ...... 270

5.2 Geopolitical bargains ...... 273

5.2.1 Getting to the sphere ...... 274

5.2.2 Mapping the post-Cold War geopolitical bargains ...... 279

5.2.3 Intervention purpose ...... 285

5.2.4 Assurance strategies ...... 286

5.3 Military intervention after the Cold War ...... 288

5.3.1 Interventions in the spheres: Panama and Haiti ...... 288

5.3.2 Interventions outside of the sphere: Iraq (x2), Somalia, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Libya ...... 297

5.3.3 Interventions on the margin of the sphere: Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999) .. 314

5.4 Case comparison and competing arguments ...... 328

5.5 Conclusion ...... 331

Chapter 6 Conclusion ...... 333

6.1 The Balance of Power ...... 334

6.2 Paradigm wars ...... 337

6.3 Resurgent powers and spheres of influence ...... 339

Bibliography ...... 343

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This is true; that the wisdome of all these latter Times in Princes Affaires, is rather fine Deliveries, and Shiftings of Dangers and Mischiefes, when they are near; then solid and ground Courses to keep them aloofe. But this is but to try Masteries with Fortune: And let men beware, how they neglect, and suffer Matter of Trouble to be prepared: For no Man can forbid the Sparke, nor tell whence it may come. —Francis Bacon, “Of Empire”1

1 Bacon (1985, 60).

viii 1

Chapter 1 Introduction

“Systems are either maintained or transformed.” —Kenneth Waltz2

The great power politics of the last two centuries are marked by periods of stability and periods of change. In periods of change the great powers launched revisionist wars against one another, violently transforming the system in bids for hegemony.3 But they sometimes also sought to maintain the balance of power between them. In these periods of stability, great powers waged a different kind of war—military intervention—to restore rulers and contain rebellions that threatened to the balance.

Globally stable but locally violent, these periods raise a puzzle: because military interventions can annex territory, change regimes, and start wider wars, they are an essential but dangerous tool in a great powers’ arsenal. A great power can use military intervention to maintain the system, or transform it. Efforts to maintain the system thus may spark potentially transformative great power war. In stable system where great powers nonetheless jealously guard their status and security, a would-be intervener faces two choices: credibly assure its peers it has status-quo intentions and is committed to restraint, or risk triggering contestation, counterbalancing, or war. How can great powers intervene without provoking pushback?

One answer is political legitimacy. By consulting with others according to accepted norms and rules or building multilateral coalitions, an intervening power credibly commits to restraint and

2 Waltz (1979, 199).

3 Gilpin (1988); Gunitsky (2017).

reduces the potential for costly pushback.4 In the 19th Century, for example, the Concert of Europe’s powers jointly consulted and assured one another at formal conferences before multilaterally intervening in crises in the Ottoman Empire and the Netherlands.5 More recently, the United States spent time and resources building and buying Security Council consensuses— including from China and Russia—needed to legitimize interventions in Iraq and Libya.6

But great power consensus and contestation do not always line up. Great powers do not always pursue broad legitimacy strategies, suggesting they sometimes do not feel the need to assure their peers. In the 19th Century, various great powers intervened uncontested in Portugal, Italy, and Poland, consulting their peers only by courtesy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and United States intervened in Eastern Europe and the Western Hemisphere, respectively, without building large international coalitions or investing in Security Council approval. Apart from formally condemning each other’s interventions at the United Nations, the superpowers did nothing else to contest each other or balance against these interventions.

This variation also cuts across purpose: the United States did almost nothing to build international consensus or send costly signals before it unilaterally removed the Taliban regime from Afghanistan in 2001. Likewise, Washington’s 1989 removal of Emanuel Noriega from Panama, though it not particularly well-received, was not seriously contested by other states in the system. And the United States engaged in horse-trading with Russia and China to legitimize its removal of a military junta from Haiti in 1994.

Regime change elsewhere cost the United States, however, eroding its overall global legitimacy. The United States’ overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 eroded its standing in the Middle East, fractured its relationship with Europe, and soured relations with regional rivals Russia and China. 7 This process was deepened when the Security Council-authorized intervention in Libya

4 See Thompson (2009); Bernstein (2004).

5 Mitzen (2013); Rendall (2007).

6 Voeten (2005).

7 Harvey (2004, 64–81, 233–49).

shifted from no-fly zone enforcement to regime change.8 NATO’s 1995 and 1999 bombing campaigns in the former Yugoslavia, ostensibly undertaken for humanitarian purposes rather than regime change, brought U.S.-Russia relations to a nadir from which it never really recovered. What explains this uneven record—why are great powers able to intervene in some crises without provoking significant pushback?

1.1 The argument: geopolitical bargains

This dissertation argues that geopolitical bargains have made great power interventions in particular geographic areas more acceptable than in others, allowing great powers to credibly commit to restraint and avoid costly pushback. Combined with other factors that affect intervention legitimacy—military utility and normative purpose—geopolitical bargains have shaped military intervention consensus and contention across two centuries of great power politics.

Geopolitical bargains are ententes or understandings between the great powers about where each enjoys a geographically exclusive droit de regard. Outlined in formal postwar settlements or informally brokered by the push and pull of great power rivalry, geopolitical bargains transcend unilateral declarations of preponderance by enabling great powers to negotiate and mutually recognize where each other’s spheres lie—a relational geopolitics. When a great power intervenes in its recognized sphere, that intervention is granted a priori acceptability by the bargain. Put differently, they shortcut a great power’s need to communicate escalation control.9 This acceptability helps the intervening power credibly assure its peers the intervention will not intolerably alter the balance of power. 10 Geopolitical bargains thus free great powers to suppress crises and restore regimes without scuttling the overall systemic balance.

8 Kuperman (2013).

9 Carson

10 For legitimacy as acceptability, see Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 173–74). I discuss this further in the next chapter.

Geopolitical bargains coexist and interact with other intervention mechanisms by determining when a great power must concern itself with legitimacy, and when it can focus on military need. When a great power intervenes in its recognized sphere, it can spend fewer resources assuring its peers, freeing it to shape its intervention according to military needs. When it intervenes outside its sphere, it must build legitimacy by other means—formal multilateralism, for example—to assure its peers. Geopolitical bargains also interact with changing intervention norms; directly annexing territory by intervention was illegitimate in the early 19th Century and Cold War eras, for example, regardless of whether it occurred inside or outside a sphere.11

To show the impact of geopolitical bargains on great power intervention, I examine two broad periods of systemic stability: the Concert of Europe (1815-1853); and the “postwar” era (1945- 2015); I divide the latter into the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. These eras of “long peace” were exceptionally stable at the systemic or global level: no great power went directly to war with another in them.12 At the same time, great powers in these eras regularly intervened in vassal states to suppress rebellions and restore (or depose) rulers. The eras were therefore globally stable, but locally violent.13

In each era, geopolitical bargains helped the great powers relationally negotiate the boundaries of acceptable great power intervention, thereby producing their globally stable, locally violent intervention records. During the Concert a de jure geopolitical bargain built into the 1815 Vienna settlement established a sphere of influence system under which each of the four victors of the Napoleonic wars enjoyed an exclusive droit de regard. The great powers could dominate the vassal states in their spheres to the exclusion of other powers, arranging their regimes and militarily intervening in their crises without provoking costly pushback from their peers.

11 This dissertation focuses on the independent impact of geopolitical bargains, rather than these interactive effects.

12 Holsti (1991, 114–74, 243ff).

13 I thank Seva Gunitsky for this wording. The dual nature of these periods is often overlooked by historical and international relations analyses that focus on either part—global stability or local violence—at the expense of the other. For a recent account that challenges the “long peace” narrative, see

In the Cold War, a de facto geopolitical bargain divided the world into tacit spheres based on each superpower’s geographic preponderance and ideological predilection. Although less stable than the Concert’s spheres system, the Cold War bargain freed the superpowers to intervene overtly inside their spheres when they chose to without provoking counterbalancing from the other. This helps explain how the most intense ideological confrontation in modern international relations remained globally stable but locally violent.

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring about a new systemic global geopolitical bargain. Rather, the existing Cold War bargain devolved into a set of informal regional bargains shaped by regional powers’ expectations of the geographic limits of U.S. primacy. While the United States sought multilateral legitimacy for some interventions outside of the Western hemisphere, it overstepped these bargains by enlarging NATO into the post-Soviet space throughout the 1990s and revising the Middle East after 2001. These revisions eroded American primacy, alienating Russia from the rest of Europe and preparing the way for the great power competition of the 2010s.

1.2 Implications of the argument

My argument has implications for four interconnected areas: military intervention, geopolitics, the balance of power, and violence. First, my argument shows that who intervenes where has historically affected intervention dynamics: in the three periods, a great power intervention within the ambit of the geopolitical bargain possessed an a priori acceptability it did not have outside of the bargain. This underlying who and where dynamic interacts with the how (multilaterally, unilaterally) and why (regime change, saving strangers) dynamics emphasized in other intervention studies to produce variation in the intervention record. By complementing rather than eclipsing alternative accounts of intervention variation that focus on either military decision-making or normative purpose, my account aims to draw these literatures into closer dialogue while helping improve overall understanding of the intervention record.

The three periods of great power intervention considered here furthermore shift our view beyond the United States, which is often the focus of intervention research. 14 To be sure, emphasizing the United States’ recent intervention record, as I do in chapter 5, has many merits. In 2015 (the end date of this study), the United States remained the most important global actor. Looking to other periods of great power intervention can help us place recent U.S. interventionism in historical context, however.15 A broader historical purview may be especially important if world politics continues to shift toward multipolarity.

Second, my argument shows that geopolitics can be “relational” in the empirical sense of negotiated, contested, and accepted by groups of actors. Below, I connect the acceptability of the bargains to legitimacy, the sense that something is appropriate or rightful. Research on legitimacy in international relations rarely examines elements of world politics such as geopolitics and spheres of influence that are thought to traditionally fall under the purview of realpolitik or realism.16 Conversely, recent international relations studies of geopolitics tend to focus on the geographic elements of (single states’) grand strategies, rather than contestation and cooperation between great powers over geopolitical claims.17 While Russia’s recent actions in its near abroad have generated interest in its self-conception of the post-Soviet sphere, virtually no sustained empirical studies of spheres of influence have been written since the Cold War. 18 And none exist, to my knowledge, with the comparative historical purview or relational emphasis

14 E.g. Thompson (2009); Kreps (2011); Weitsman (2014); Recchia (2015).

15 Here I follow recent work that has placed humanitarian intervention in historical context. See for example Finnemore (2004); Bass (2009); Simms and Trim (2011); Recchia and Welsh (2013).

16 For this criticism, see Barkin (2010); see also Hast

17 Gray (2015, 84) summarizes this view: “geography – both objective and subjective – explains more about a polity’s national security issues than does any other factor – which is not quite to claim that it is determinative.” For examples of geopolitics applied to grand strategy, see Brzezinski (1997, 2013); Grygiel (2006); Grygiel and Mitchell (2017); Mitchell (2018); Kelly (2016); Black (2016).

18 See Susanna Hast’s (2014) theoretical discussion of spheres of influence, and Ferguson and Hast’s (2018) introduction to Geopolitics 23(2). Writing on the post-Soviet space now abounds; see Toal (2017) and Gunitsky (2018) for recent examples.

presented here.19 In arguing that geopolitics are relational and affect the legitimacy of world political phenomena such as intervention, the present study explores a so-far under examined realm of relational geopolitics.

Third, my study suggests that successful systemic balances of power require careful, intentional great power restraint and management. 20 The balance of power is perhaps the most researched concept in international relations, with scholars divided on the mechanisms that help balances develop, if they develop at all.21 Geopolitical bargains aid balances of power by keeping each great power out of the others’ local hierarchies. To function cleanly, bargains require reciprocity and clarity: great powers have to accept each other’s spheres and have some shared or similar understanding of both where they lie and what the other great powers consider acceptable behaviour inside them.

Historically, however, geopolitical bargains have provided reference points around which great powers have negotiated and contested the limits of acceptability and restraint. Thus while the ideal geopolitical bargain establishes clear, static, and recognized boundaries between the great powers’ exclusive hierarchies, in reality the geopolitical bargaining process “rarely attains the clear-eyed neatness of purpose implied in the term.”22 As my cases show, bargains were often as if ententes that emerged and evolved through negotiation, contestation, and trial and error. When the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, for example—well inside the U.S. sphere— it brought the two superpowers closer to a nuclear confrontation than any other moment in the

19 In the Cold War chapter I consider a number of limited studies of its spheres system: Kaufman (1976); Matheson (1982); Keal (1983).

20 The designed or social nature of the balance of power is consistent with most approaches to the balance of power from Hume to Waltz, but abandoned in the 1980s “neorealist” turn. See Little (2007). For intentionality in world politics, see Mitzen (2013, chapters 1 & 2).

21 See the review in Nexon (2009). A debate about unipolarity is tied to sister debate about U.S. grand strategy, but both focus on unipolarity’s durability rather than great power relations as such; see Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 2016a); Monteiro (2014); cf. Layne (2018). An exception is Buzan (2004)

22 Gunitsky (2017, 6).

Cold War.23 Even the Concert bargain, clearly laid out and connected to the Vienna settlement, involved negotiation and contestation, and was ultimately destabilized by competing de jure claims by France and Russia. These examples suggest that an anarchical world of great power rivals is stable only insofar as each great power is satisfied and the lines separating one sphere from another are clear—a prospect that does not bode well in East Asia, where Chinese influence increasingly clashes with America’s postwar hierarchy.24

Finally, my argument shows that balances of power should not be automatically equated with peace understood as the relative absence of violence.25 For much of the global south, for example, the Cold War was anything but peaceful.26 The geopolitical bargains examined here structured overall patterns of violence by permitting local great power intervention. They suggest that systemic balances may even enable, or be reliant on, opportunities for great powers to prosecute local violence. Less destructive than great power war, this local violence has nevertheless had important and long-lasting effects on world politics, not only for the localities but the great powers themselves.27 The global stability amidst local violence dynamic also means that positive appraisals of the “long peace” in either century not only need the caveat that violence occurred on the periphery, but that the great power peace may have relied on it.

In toto, geopolitical bargains acted as real, though often imperfect, mechanisms of great power restraint, helping the great powers develop consistent expectations about the geopolitical dimension of their military interventions. In both the Concert and Cold War the bargains kept the great powers apart and freed them to safely intervene in their spheres, abetting global stability by enabling local violence. Where the bargains were unclear or undefined, however, other

23 See Lebow and Stein (1994).

24 For pessimistic and optimistic views, see Goh (2013) and Kang (2017).

25 For an analysis of the relationship between systemic stability and interstate war, see Monteiro (2014, esp. 57).

26 See Chamberlin (2018); Westad (2007).

27 It may suffice to point out that local conflicts often escalate into great power war.

mechanisms of great power restraint—collective security, nuclear deterrence, statecraft, or (in the Cuban Missile crisis) luck—were needed to maintain the balance.

1.3 Plan of the dissertation

I lay out the geopolitical bargain argument in four subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, I further develop the problem of great power intervention and the geopolitical bargain as outlined above. I differentiate between de jure and de facto geopolitical bargains and those that structure geopolitics at the systemic versus local level, emphasizing the relational character of geopolitical bargains. I elucidate the concept’s relationship to related key terms—grand bargain, legitimacy, geopolitics, and spheres of influence. I give a mini-case that shows how I understand geopolitical bargains to structure the global violence before explaining my methodology and case section.

In Chapter 3, I ground my geopolitical bargain argument in a comprehensive examination of military intervention in the Concert of Europe, often considered a model for great power relations and one of the few stable multipolar systems.28 In a set of treaties signed in 1814 and 1815, the Concert’s great powers partitioned Europe and set up a collective security mechanism under which they would jointly balance against France to prevent another hegemonic bid for mastery of Europe “pour le Bonheur du Monde”—for the happiness of the world, as they put it at the time.29 After 1815, however, Europe was increasingly wracked by revolutionary movements that threatened to overturn the European balance of power. To suppress these movements, one or more of the Concert powers would have to militarily intervene across sovereign borders. Doing so might provoke counterbalancing from the other powers, however, and potentially plunge Europe into another great power war.

I show that a de jure geopolitical bargain allowed the Concert powers to use force frequently without endangering the overall balance. Existing accounts of Concert stability emphasize its territorial partition or the collective security mechanism.30 These mechanisms coexisted with a

28 Lascurettes (2017).

29 Bourdilliat (1859, 166).

30 See Slantchev (2005); Rendall (2007); Mitzen (2013); Lascurettes (2017).

geopolitical bargain, connected to the Vienna settlement and negotiated by the Powers as the first crises hit to the continent in the 1820s, that designated where each power had an exclusive droit de regard—a right to exercise hierarchical control over a geographical area. This spheres system allowed the great powers to unilaterally deploy military force suppress rebellions with only perfunctory consultation with the others and without provoking costly pushback. When the powers needed to intervene outside their spheres, they assured each other using other mechanisms, such as the collective security mechanism. The Concert’s geopolitical bargain thus powerfully structured the Concert’s intervention dynamics: powers could intervene unilaterally inside their spheres, but had to intervene multilaterally outside them.

In Chapter 4 I examine military intervention in the Cold War. I argue a de facto geopolitical bargain emerged in the years immediately after World War 2 under Stalin’s dictum that “everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.”31 This geopolitical bargain tacitly delineated two spheres of influence based on military preponderance, one comprising the United States’ security alliances in East Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and Western Europe; and the other the Soviet Union’s Warsaw bloc in Eastern Europe. A third zone outside the U.S. and Soviet spheres—the Cold War’s “postcolonial bloodlands”—became the field for a covert superpower competition, restrained only by the superpowers’ prudent aversion to direct confrontation.32

Great power relations during the Cold War were vastly more antagonistic than their Concert equivalents, however, dividing the world into “complete disunity… two words instead of one.”33 Driven by incommensurable visions of human destiny, the United States and Soviet Union vied for “control of the whole world’s future.”34 Their ideological rivalry was played out “in geopolitical terms,” and geopolitical struggles became ideological.35 Each maintained a sphere

31 Quoted in Trachtenberg (1999, 36).

32 Chamberlin (2018, 2–4); Westad (2007).

33 Charles E. Bohlen quoted in Steil (2018, 12).

34 Westad (2017, 8).

35 Black (2016, 178, 2015, 37–38).

according its political and strategic preferences, akin to the Concert system, but also tried to convert other states in the system to its cause.

Despite the intensity of the Cold War rivalry, the de facto bargain and its tacit spheres system helped produce consistent expectations of restraint between the great powers, buttressing existing mechanisms such as nuclear deterrence and outlining the geographical boundaries of acceptable superpower uses of force. Fearful that direct confrontation would lead to escalation and possibly nuclear war, the superpowers restricted overt intervention almost exclusively to the relatively safety of their respective spheres, where they could be assured no counter-intervention from the other would take place. And although institutional fora such as the Security Council fell victim to their competition, the superpowers used regional institutions—the Organization of American States and Warsaw Pact—to legitimize their interventions within their hierarchies, keeping them in line. This account of the Cold War charts a middle course between norms approaches that have emphasized mutual recognition between the superpowers, and instrumental or balance of power accounts that emphasize bipolarity and the effects of the nuclear revolution on superpower restraint.

In Chapter 5, I extend my argument to intervention after the Cold War, a hard case for my argument. Beginning in 1989, U.S. leaders outlined a “new world order” that explicitly repudiated geopolitics and spheres and influence. Indeed, the post-Cold War period featured no systemic geopolitical bargain negotiated between the United States and potential rivals. U.S. policymakers furthermore justified their post-Cold War interventions using a new set of use of force norms drawn from humanitarianism and counter-terrorism. Conventional accounts of post- Cold War intervention therefore focus on the norms, purposes, and legal principles of the period, especially the rise of humanitarian justifications for intervention and the newly energized role of the United Nations Security Council.

The geopolitical bargain argument can nonetheless help explain the intervention dynamics of this “non-geopolitical” period. Drawing on accounts that focus on the perspectives of regional powers, I show that contestation of U.S. interventionism in this period stemmed not simply from its promulgation of new humanitarian and counter-terrorism intervention norms, but also from the perception that the United States overstepped informal post-Cold War geopolitical bargains

in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Importantly, this overextension eroded the legitimacy of U.S. primacy, arguably contributing to increasing assertiveness of Russia, China, and others that has deadlocked Security Council action on Syria.

My concluding chapter summarizes my main findings and further discusses my argument’s overall relevance for the balance of power, paradigmatic debates in discipline, and current concerns about the erosion of the liberal world order. Here, I argue that liberal internationalism has historically been geopolitical—and, as others have noted, the United States does possess a “sphere of influence.” Admitting this does not mean equating United States primacy to Stalinism or other fundamentally illiberal visions of world politics. So long as they are forwarded and defended by temporal powers, however, liberal projects to humanize or bring liberal principles of justice to world politics will necessarily be geopolitically asserted and contested. Conversely, successfully accommodating today’s resurgent powers, particularly China and Russia, may also mean addressing their geopolitical aspirations in new geopolitical bargains.

Chapter 2 Geopolitical Bargains and Military Intervention

This chapter elucidates the theoretical components of my argument in five sections. I begin by outlining the problem of great power intervention. In two subsequent sections, I define geopolitical bargains, outline how they partly solve the problem of great power intervention, and develop a taxonomy used in the cases. A fourth section lays out my methodology, research design, and case selection, and is followed by a conclusion

2.1 The Problem of Great Power Intervention

Military intervention has a paradoxical relationship to system stability. Interventions can be used to annex territory, replace regimes, or launch wider wars.36 More than any other deliberate state action, then, military interventions can revise the systemic status quo. And when powerful states intervene, the results can have system-wide consequences. Indeed, most significant wars of the last three centuries—including the two world wars—began with military interventions either understood at the time as revisionist, or eventually exposed to be.37 For this reason international orders since 1815 have prohibited military intervention by normatively restricting its legitimate use to extreme circumstances, such as self-defence.38

But military intervention is also a useful tool for system maintenance. A great power can adjust the territorial distribution of outlying lands or buffer states to account for changes in demographic, industrial, or political patterns. It can suppress, contain, or prevent crises in bordering states if those crises would threaten the status quo distribution of resources, or challenge the set of norms, rules, and institutions that produce the order from which it benefits.39

36 I define interventions as the deployment of regular forces across borders for the purposes of coercively restoring or altering the political structure in a target state.

37 For a discussion of revision, see Ward (2017, 10–16).

38 Finnemore (2004); Glanville (2013).

39 Ward (2017, 12).

Indeed, great powers’ position at the top of the global hierarchy gives them a vested interest in maintaining the system, and are often the only states capable of doing so.40

A great power planning to intervene outside its territory faces a problem, however: precisely for the same reason great power interventions can maintain a system, they also threaten it. Because they involve the visible deployment of regular troops across borders, any intervention can prima facie appear to other great powers or regional rivals as either status-quo oriented or revisionist. Great power interventions lend themselves to this problem owing to great powers’ possession of a broad spectrum of capabilities.41 Although crises involving smaller powers often start major wars—this is true of the Peloponnesian War through to World War I—great power intervention must intervene for them to become system-level conflicts. An intervening great power thus faces the challenge of assuring its peers its actions are fundamentally restrained so that it can avoid costly pushback, counterbalancing, or war.

One option at a great power’s disposal is to use covert or indirect intervention as opposed to overt intervention to alter the political structure of the target state. Taken broadly, covert interventions occur when an “external power secretly provides military assistance during a war.”42 Importantly, covert interventions are conducted so that the great power’s role “is not intended to be apparent of acknowledged publicly.”43 Instead of visibly deploying regular forces across borders in a way that might provoke its rivals and incur audience costs, great powers use clandestine tools—special forces and other non-public means, such as assassination—to alter the political structure of a target state “without revealing its involvement.”44

40 Waltz (1979, 194–210); Bull ([1977] 2012, 194–222).

41 Definitions of great powers vary, but most agree they must possess exceptional power projection capabilities; see Bull ([1977] 2012, 194–96); Ranke (1983, 49–50); Mearsheimer (2001, 5); Buzan (2004, esp. 58-73); Xuetong (2006); Waltz (2008, 140, 1979, 131); Monteiro (2014, 42–47, 44); Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, 62–72).

42 Carson (2018, 2).

43 Poznansky (2015, 816).

44 Downes and Lilly (2010, 271).

Because of their lower domestic audience cost and opportunities for escalation control, covert operations were the United States’ preferred method of preserving the status quo through counter-revolutionary interference during the Cold War, beginning with operations against communist parties in Italy and France by the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency in 1945.45 Great powers also supported proxy militaries in efforts reduce the risk of direct great power confrontation and low political costs. The Soviet Union intervened on the side of North Korea in the Korean War, for example, and the United States’ direction of Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs operation is perhaps a paradigmatic example. Most often various methods— clandestine and indirect—are employed together.46

Great powers sometimes deem it necessary to deploy significant numbers of regular forces in an overt intervention, however, to achieve their desired ends. Indirect interventions are slow, rely on often unreliable and weak proxies, and in some instances enable extreme “mission creep” wherein a great power deploys its own troops to aid local agents. China had to intervene on behalf of Kim Il-Sung during the Korean War, for example, and U.S. nonmilitary support of a weak South Vietnamese proxy eventually transformed into a costly military deployment in which U.S. marines directly engaged Viet Cong paramilitaries and the North Vietnamese Army. As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, Vietnam’s mission creep had lasting effects on subsequent U.S. intervention strategy as “Vietnam syndrome.” Further, if covert interventions become public they can also have similar audience costs, particularly in liberal democracies, as overt interventions.

For these reasons great powers therefore often resort to overt military intervention—the coercive deployment of regular military forces across borders to alter a target state’s political

45 Westad (2017, 113–14); Carson (2018, esp. chapter 1).

46 For a discussion of covert and indirect interventions, see Carson (2018); Downes and Lilley (2010, 271–73); Saunders (2011, 21–22).

structure.47 Overt interventions come with high costs, however. As Elizabeth Saunders notes, overt interventions “involve an explicit, visible decision to commit forces for potentially costly actions,” whereas covert operations “do not risk extensive military losses or put national prestige on the line to the same degree.”48 Austin Carson summarizes: “An overt intervention ensures wide public knowledge about a major power’s involvement and carries with it official acknowledgment of that role. …. Covertness blunts the provocation an intervention would otherwise represent.”49 Overt military interventions are also “convention breaking” in that they challenge the principle of sovereign nonintervention, a “necessary condition for sovereignty among states” and a central norm in the periods I study here.50

Although great powers are the states most able to launch materially costly overt interventions, the political costs of doing so are higher, ironically, for the same reason: by virtue of their power projection capabilities, great powers play an essential role in maintaining the balance of power and managing crises that might threaten it.51 When a great power intervenes in a crisis it can erode its peers’ positions by annexing valuable territory, turning a previously unaligned state into a vassal, drawing other states into a conflict, and so on—in short, it can unacceptably revise the system. Even if a great power’s relations with its peers are relatively cooperative—as they were during the Concert—the act of military intervention, because of its revisionist potential, heightens the chary aspects of international anarchy. This is true even within stable alliances: as

47 Here I have followed the definitions of Kreps (2011, 15); Saunders (2011, 21); and Recchia (2015, 8): “the cross- border deployment of military forces by a state or group of states without the consent of the local government, involving actual or anticipated combat, aimed at influencing the behavior and/or changing the internal politics of the target state.” See also the discussion in Jackson (2000, 250–51) and Bullen (1979b, 55–59).

48 Saunders (2011, 21–22).

49 Carson (2018, 54).

50 Rosenau (1968, 167); Finnemore (2004, 6–7): “…military intervention, by its nature, involves violation of a foundational principle of international law (sovereignty) and of a central ethical component of international community (self-determination), it almost always prompts extended normative discussions, both within and among states, about what is right and good in international life.”

51 Bull ([1977] 2012, 201–6).

Elizabeth Saunders has shown, the United States’ “rogue state” doctrine and subsequent interventionism deeply damaged its transatlantic relations with traditional allies.52 Put simply, you may worry even when it is a friend loading a gun.

For all these reasons, non-intervening great powers have strong incentives to deter an intervening peer unless or until they are assured of its restraint. As I show in the dissertation’s cases, failures by great powers to credibly assure their rivals of restraint produced counterbalancing, pitched crises, and in one notable instance—Russia’s attempt to extent its hegemony over the Porte—a great power war that ended four decades of systemic stability. A great power intending to intervene thus has strong incentives to credibly assure its peers it will restrain its intervention to an acceptable action, especially if those peers jealously guard their power and status, as great powers historically do.

Great power intervention can therefore be understood as an information or commitment problem: while a great power may intend to maintain the balance by intervening in a crisis, other great powers cannot know this for certain. Intervening powers have historically attempted to overcome this problem by assuring their peers through legitimacy strategies, “appeals to public, recognized norms and rules designed to justify a foreign policy.”53 When combined with resource-intensive behaviour connected to these norms and rules, such as formal multilateralism and coalition-building, legitimacy strategies send “costly signals” or “conspicuous constraints” that, relative to verbal commitments, more credibly demonstrate a great power’s commitment to

52 Saunders (2006). Hence military interventions challenge readings of the international system which show it is not necessarily competitive and in some instances based on “friendship” or “security communities” (e.g. Wendt 1999; Adler and Barnett 1998).

53 Goddard (2015, 107); cf. Bexel (2014, 293); Reus-Smit (2007, 159–60). This is true across every intervention I cover, even where justifications would appear to be wasted words, i.e., the Soviet Union contrived an elaborate doctrine of intervention based on a distinctly Soviet interpretation of sovereign self-determination and nonintervention for its 1956 intervention in Hungary and 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia; these are covered in chapter 4.

restraint.54 Scholars argue that costly signals are more credible than verbal signals because states can renege on the latter relatively cheaply.55

The Concert powers met through a formal congress system—established in Article VI of the Quadruple Alliance treaty—where they could bind powers who might otherwise intervene unilaterally to collective great power consensuses.56 In the contemporary era, the chief means by which intervening powers send costly signals is by building multilateral coalitions and securing Security Council authorization.57 In both, securing international consensus and multilateral coalitions are publicly costly, even for a great power.58 As Alex Thompson notes, powerful states “rarely need” international organizations like the United Nations “to achieve specific objectives. On the contrary, since turning to an international institution complicates policymaking and entails some loss of autonomy, we might expect the powerful to avoid such entanglements, especially in the pursuit of important national interests.”59 Thus one way to understand intervention legitimacy is as a credible commitment to restraint. By spending time and resources seeking international approval, or building a bulky multilateral coalition whose costs outweigh military utility, an intervening power sends costly signals that may convince others its credibly commitment to restraint is credible and thereby make its intervention acceptable—legitimate—to its peers.60

54 Thompson (2009); Carson (2018, 58).

55 Kang (2017, 17); see also Fearon (1997). Costly commitments may also interact with rhetoric; see Krebs and Jackson (2007).

56 Rendall (2007); Mitzen (2013, 102–41).

57 For discussions of each, see Weitsman (2014) and Thompson (2009), respectively.

58 The coordination costs of war coalitions increase as they expand in size, creating diminishing returns in terms of military advantage. See Weitsman (2014, esp. 14-47, 54, 161-163); Alvarez (2000); Olson and Zeckhauser (1966).

59 Thompson (2009, 2).

60 For critiques of the genuineness of this restraint, see Harvey (2004); Vilmer (2007).

2.2 Geopolitical bargains

My argument is that geopolitical bargains circumvent the assurance signaling process by outlining where specific actors possess an a priori acceptable droit de regard beyond their sovereign borders. Great powers have historically asserted spheres of influence over which they claim exclusive rights of hegemony or dominion and noninterference from other powers. When these assertions are recognized by other great powers, they become geopolitical bargains. A geopolitical bargain is thus different than a unilaterally-declared sphere of influence: it requires mutual recognition, negotiation, accommodation, and acceptance, even if reluctant, by the great powers of a system. The acceptability of the geopolitical bargain stems from this relational, rather than unilateral, characteristic.61

The term geopolitical bargain draws on the related concept of “grand bargain.” Grand bargains are “implicit or explicit agreements about the mutually acceptable terms on which peaceful relations can be conducted.”62 Under a grand bargain, one great power agrees to give up something of significant strategic value in exchange for a similar commitment from a peer. The reciprocal exchange clarifies the goals and intentions of the relevant parties for the purposes of their predictable co-existence. When they are negotiated between great powers, grand bargains form reciprocal constraints on their use power through “understandings about recognition and status, mutual rights and responsibilities, mutual spheres of influence, terms of exchange, and conditions of restraint.”63 The core of the grand bargain concept is the reciprocal, two-way understanding between states—hence “bargain.” The relational character of grand bargains differentiate them from one-sided grand strategies such as containment, rollback, etc.64

61 This is similar to the distinction made by Colin Dueck (2006, 87) between “an effective spheres-of-influence arrangement—as opposed to a sphere of influence strategy.” The former is “an international outcome, rather than a unilateral decision on the part of one country; all interested parties have to agree on its essentials for it to work.”

62 Goh (2016, 60); see also the associated term “hegemonic bargain” in Ikenberry (2011, 207–8).

63 Goh (2016, 60).

64 Goh (2016); Ikenberry (2011, 207).

Like grand bargains, geopolitical bargains are relational. But as the name implies, they concern reciprocal geographical or spatial understandings, rather than simply strategic ones. Indeed, “geopolitics” is different from realpolitik, grand strategy, realism, or power politics because it is fundamentally about geography and space, rather than simply power.65 A geopolitical bargain is an understanding or entente between states about the spatial partition of geographical areas between them. Very simply, in a geopolitical bargain each party accepts the rights, duties, and privileges asserted by the others over certain areas. In the bargains I examine here, great powers mutually recognized each other’s dominions or droits de regard over geographical areas, including the right of intervention.

My relational treatment of the term “geopolitical” departs from its usual use. In its initial conception, ‘geopolitics’ was used in the sense of the scientific study of the relationship between the physical environment and statecraft, or “the science of the conditioning of political processes by the earth.”66 Today, critical geographers argue that classical geopolitical concepts are environmentally determinist, and present geopolitics as neutral science when it is really an imperialist or statist discourse,67 while a “neoclassical” geopolitics has attempted to revive

65 Kelly (2016, 2–3, 25, 29); Toal (2017, 28–33, 31). Geopolitics can obviously be part of a grand strategy, and contemporary strategic thought often incorporates geographical elements (e.g. C. S. Gray 2015; Mitchell 2018). For realism’s gradual replacement of geography with abstract models, see Grygiel (2006, 8–20). As Deudney (2000, 78– 79, 2007, 18–19, 76–81) has shown, geopolitical thought has paid more attention than realism to material and technological change, regime type, and domestic politics, and the two should not be conflated. International relations scholars often use the term “geopolitics” as shorthand for realpolitik, or as synonymous with “realist views of international strategic rivalry.”

66 “The science of the conditioning of political processes by the earth” is the definition given in 1928 by the editors of Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (quoted in Tuathail 1996, 46). In the interwar period, this study became closely associated with Nazi irredentism.

67 Key works here are Tuathail (1996), Dalby and Tuathail (1998), and Agnew (2003). Critical thinking about geopolitics was also revived in France; see the helpful review in Defarges (2009). Existing constructivist studies of geopolitics focus on its discursive properties fall in this vein: see Aalto (2003, 44) and Guzzini (2012, 9).

classical geopolitical concepts such as shatterbelts, or incorporates geographical and material variables into strategic analyses.68

Geopolitical bargains sit in between these approaches, underlining the “constructed” nature of geopolitics but retaining its meaning as “the practice of states controlling and competing for territory.”69 The history of geopolitical bargains shows that policymakers interpret physical spaces, make geopolitical assertions, and recognize (or dispute) the spatial and geographical claims of others in a dialectical, negotiated, and relational process that fundamental blurs the distinction between “materiality” and “ideas.” The Monroe Doctrine, for example, was a geopolitical claim. But the content of the claim, exclusive Europe nonintervention in the Western hemisphere, was intelligible only because the Western hemisphere, separated from Europe by an ocean and sharing a unique history as the “New World,” was considered by Americans and Europeans as a coherent geopolitical space.70 After the 2008 Georgia intervention, former Soviet Premier Gorbachev criticized the United States for “declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its ‘national interest’…. It is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history.”71 Gorbachev’s statements here show how geography, cultural and political proximity, and contestation are intertwined. It matters that the Caucasus regions sits on the southern border of Russia, and that Russian leaders have historically viewed their frontiers as security liabilities. 72 If Georgia were located in Central America, the Russian disposition toward U.S. claims would likely be very different. But geography is not destiny: while Russian strategic thought cannot be disentangled from its geopolitical position in Eurasia, “Russia” itself (as the Soviet Union or

68 Key works here include Deudney (2000); Henrikson (2002); Gray (2015); Grygiel (2006); Grygiel and Mitchell (2017); Mitchell (2018); Starr (2013); Porter (2015); Cohen (2015); Fettweis (2015); Kelly (2016).; Black (2016).

69 Flint (2006, 13).

70 Sexon (2011).

71 Quoted in Toal (2017, 27).

72 Although often maligned, Tim Marshall’s (2015, 11–37) analysis captures this well; see also Toal (2017); Gunitsky and Tsygankov (2018).

Russian Federation) is a socially constructed polity, as is the territorially sovereign state it constitutes.73

A second component of the geopolitical bargain concept that requires further discussions is “zone of preponderance” or (more commonly) “sphere of influence.” Despite its ubiquity in popular analyses of great power politics, virtually no international relations scholars since E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau have mounted an empirical study of spheres of influence, and theoretical treatments of them remain sparse.74 In the small academic literature that deals with them, spheres of influence are defined in roughly one of two ways: as a place on a “hierarchy continuum” between empire and anarchy;75 or as the exclusive “geospatial” political claims made by great powers, best understood as having developed across changing historical contexts.76

Here, I treat spheres as historically-contextual spatial claims made by the powerful to rule over particular areas of the globe, exclusive of other powers. This relational definition draws on the brief but suggestive treatments by English School scholars and classical realists, and tracks closely to the definition given in the 1920 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, wherein sphere of influence “refers to two powers which agree not to interfere in certain territories which are

73 See Branch (2013); Elden (2013).

74 See Hast (2014, 78–82); Bull ([1977] 2012, 212–18).

75 Lake (2009a, 54) defines sphere as a “salient historical relationship” in which “a dominant state possesses the authority only to limit a subordinate’s cooperation with third parties” and in which “the subordinate need not cooperate actively with its dominant state” but is “prohibited from entering into alliances or other interactions with others.” Many definitions of spheres of influence up until the end of the Cold War fall under this heading, including Rutherford (1926), Steel (1971), Kaufman (1976), Keal (1983, 3–10, 15–16), Bogdan and Preda (1988, 1–14), and more recently in political geography, e.g. Abbot et al (2000, 406–7) and Agnew (2005, 438, 441). For an overview of various definitions in this family, see Hast (2014, 37–41).

76 Hast (2014, vii) summarizes this approach: “Ever since the most distant lands were discovered and international relations became global in scale, the challenge of humanity has been to organise the political map of the world. … Spheres of influence are part and parcel of this world of states and their hierarchical relations. Sphere of influence is an idea which takes a stance on the very core question of [IR]: how is the world divided politically?” See also Bull ([1977] 2012, 212–18), Dedijer (1973), Benton (2010, 10), Darwin (2013, 8, 86, 194), and Deudney (n.d.).

declared by a contract to belong to either one of the parties.”77 Mark Trachtenberg describes this logic:

….the basic concept is quite familiar from everyday life. Two boys are fighting in a schoolyard: the natural solution is to pull them apart. Or a husband and wife are always quarrelling: an obvious answer is for them to get divorced and lead separate lives.78

What is important in the context of my geopolitical bargain argument is that historic spheres-of- influence claims were made in the context of other claims. Their exclusivity, even if unilaterally asserted, required recognition from other states with the power to abrogate them.79 Without this relational quality—without acceptance of one power’s sphere by others with the capability to interfere in it—geopolitical bargains would not have assurance effects. As we will see this is a problem for de facto bargains because the boundaries and acceptability of a power’s sphere is not always clear to its rivals, and vice-versa.

Last, geopolitical bargains establish an acceptability closely linked to legitimacy: one great power’s exclusive droit de regard is accepted by its peers as legitimate.80 Here I treat acceptability as one way an action can be legitimized: an action is legitimate when two or more actors deem it acceptable, and therefore appropriate, within a given set of circumstances that order political life. In my cases, that set of circumstances was not defined by ideal or just orders but by stability between the great powers. Existing in a world of rivals where bids to remake the world in the image of justice had wrought tremendous destruction, the great powers in both the

77 Quoted in Bogdan and Preda (1988, 4) see Bull ([1977] 2012, 212–18); Carr (1945). A focus on the recognition of exclusivity can also be found in Bogdan and Preda (1988, 8) and Kaufman (1976, 10).

78 Trachtenberg (1999, 15). Trachtenberg (1999, 15).

79 I therefore resist attempts to wed “sphere of influence” too closely to an ahistorical dominant-subordinate concept or, in an attempt to capture the term’s historical variability, engage in taxonomical proliferation. My approach thus lies between Hast (2014, 4–6) and Lake (2009a, 52–55); for a taxonomy, see Bull ([1977] 2012, 212–18)

80 Here I follow Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 173), who define legitimacy as the “set of beliefs about the propriety, acceptability, or naturalness of an action, and actor/role, or a political order.”

Concert of Europe and Cold War viewed actions that threatened the balance as inappropriate and thus illegitimate; actions that preserved it were acceptable and thus legitimate.81

This treatment differs from existing approaches in two ways. First, it considers legitimacy only in the sociological or empirical sense of what actors “out there” hold to be legitimate.82 Stalin viewed the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which I discuss below, as an acceptable agreement with a rival concerning the Soviet Union’s legitimate (to him) security concerns and geopolitical aspirations. The Nonaggression Pact is viewed as illegitimate today: signed by two totalitarian regimes, its consequences involved the liquidation of whole peoples. But it was viewed as legitimate by the relevant parties at the time, and the spheres system it set up was seen as an appropriate way of conducting international relations.

Second, I “lower the bar” from treatments that define legitimacy as an internalized sense of rightfulness or appropriateness; on this view, actors consider outcomes or choices as legitimate because they consciously or unconsciously view that action as appropriate.83 My treatment emphasizes acceptability as a basis for legitimacy—I am less concerned about whether a given order embodies a higher principle of justice, or is merely acceptable to the actors within it. As Terry Pinkard puts it, “in its most general sense [justice] involves an abstract conception of the proper, good ordering among people in a collective endeavour, whether that order be interpreted as conforming to a cosmic order that itself constitutes a set of ethical principles or a sense of playing by a set of rules that are themselves fair.”84

81 For a similar treatment of “legitimacy” see Kissinger (1957) and the treatment in Clark (2005, 103–4). A different way to put this is that what was appropriate was avoid summa mala rather than achieve a summum bonum.

82 This differs from political theory approaches which seek to define legitimacy on the basis of a priori principles— what “should” be legitimate. See Bernstein (2011, 19).

83 Suchman (1995, 574), quoted in Hurd (2008, 30): legitimacy is “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.” Cf. Hurd (1999, 387): “When an actor believes a rule is legitimate, compliance is no longer motivated by the simple fear of retribution, or by a calculation of self-interest, but instead by an internal sense of moral obligation: control is legitimate to the extent that it is approved or regarded as ‘right.’”

84 Pinkard (2017, 3).

Because relations among the great powers in my cases are characterized not by belonging or community but by rivalry, competition, and (sometimes reluctant) coexistence, defining legitimacy as acceptability allows me to avoid reducing their interactions to mere coercion. Norms of appropriateness govern rivalries and ideological competition, too.85 In this narrower sense, then, legitimacy means “international agreement about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy… acceptance of the framework of international order by all major powers, or at least to the extent that no state… expresses its dissatisfaction in a revolutionary foreign policy.”86 An order, or geospatial arrangement, is minimally legitimate if the relevant actors accept things as they are, rather than things as they wish them to be. As Brooks and Wohlforth summarize,

…the legitimacy of an international political order is not simply a matter of its constitutionality or justness, but rather hinges on whether its constituent members see it as acceptable or better than any possible alternatives—the way things must be. Legitimacy is thus not necessary about normative approval. One may hate war but still think it was the most acceptable response to Slobodan Milosevic’s actions in Kosovo, despise the United States but think its leadership is natural under the circumstances and all that can be expected today, and decry the inequities of the current order but see no other way to organize things. […] To be a legitimate hegemon, therefore, is to have one’s power generally accepted, and even welcomed; to see one’s actions at least unopposed and at best actively supported.87

Defining legitimacy as acceptability thereby allows me to bring the concept within the ambit of traditional power political phenomena such as spheres of influence. In all of my cases the great powers preferred the existing order—the equilibrium—to its destruction, even if this equilibrium did not represent their ideal order. They thus subordinated their desires to remake the order in the image of a higher sense of justice to the preservation of the order—not fiat justitia, et pereat mundus, but fiat justitia, nisi pereat mundus. Actions aimed at preserving stable great power

85 Barkin (2010).

86 Kissinger (1957, 1).

87 Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 173–74).

relations were thus viewed as acceptable or legitimate, in contradistinction to the alternative. The Concert of Europe’s geopolitical bargain, for example, was viewed by the Concert powers as “better than any possible alternatives” because it preserved the European equilibrium. That equilibrium was viewed as legitimate, and actions to preserve it as appropriate. In 1830, for example, Lord Palmerston refrained from lending British aid to Polish revolutionaries despite believing in the justice of their cause. He acknowledged in private correspondence that Russia was within its rights to put the revolution down: the Vienna settlement established Congress Poland within Russia’s sphere. To Palmerston, the higher justice of the Vienna settlement overruled his sympathies for the revolutionaries’ justice: the preservation of the European equilibrium had to come first.

Cold War great power relations are a tougher case for legitimacy understood as rightfulness— either side saw its ideology as just and the other’s as unjust or even “evil.”88 Ultimately the superpowers disagreed fundamentally about the proper domestic order. They did come to accept one another’s spheres of influence, however, and this understanding governed relations between them by drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable actions. As I show in Chapter 4, U.S. leaders sympathized with the aims of Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956, for example. But they accepted that Hungary lay in the Soviet sphere and signaled to the Soviets, through public speeches and concrete actions, their fundamentally noninterventionist stance. Soviet encroachments into the Western Hemisphere, particular via Fidel Castro’s Cuban regime, were likewise understood as unacceptable and therefore inappropriate—illegitimate—violations by the Soviet Union of the United States’ “backyard”—its historical sphere of influence.

2.3 Geopolitical bargains: a taxonomy

The geopolitical bargains I have described thus far are historically established in one of two ways: de jure, ‘by right,’ or de facto, ‘by fact’ (Table 1). The major cases corresponding to these in the dissertation are the Concert of Europe (de jure) and the Cold War (de facto). Geopolitical bargains can also be systemic or local (Table 2). While the Concert and Cold War geopolitical

88 See Westad (2017, 19–42).

bargains examined here are systemic, as noted the post-Cold War geopolitical landscape has no clear systemic geopolitical bargain: it is instead best understood as a set of local geopolitical bargains connected to U.S. primacy. Each bargain can be understood as having two interrelated components, one geographical and one behavioural. Great powers may agree on the geographical boundaries of a bargain and on what constitutes acceptable behaviour in its particular zones or areas, or disagree on one or the other. The geographical boundaries of the Korean geopolitical bargain are relatively clear, for example, but what constitutes unacceptable behaviour by any of the parties involved, especially China or the United States, is not.

De jure geopolitical bargains are laid out in or connected to international treaties signed by the relevant negotiating parties. Because they are connected to public law, the primary tools states use to negotiate these bargains are legal and diplomatic. The 19th and early 20th Century spheres- of-influence agreements that partitioned much of the colonized or soon-to-be colonized world are classic examples of de jure bargains. The General Act of the 1885 Berlin Conference, for example, established a geopolitical bargain among Europe’s great powers that delineated their areas of preponderance in Africa.89 The League of Nations Article 21 affirmed the Monroe Doctrine, and to an extent Article 54 of United Nations continued this trend by affirming “regional arrangements” such as the OAS.90 As I show in Chapter 3, the Concert order rested on a European de jure bargain connected to and legitimized by the set of treaties that ended the Napoleonic wars, collectively referred to as the Vienna settlement. In the 20th Century, the best- known de jure bargain is probably the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression pact, which I discuss briefly later in this chapter.

89 See Schraeder (1995).

90 Kaufman (1976, 179); Hast (2014, 43); Carr (1945, 45): “The history of the League of Nations, beginning with the insertion in the Covenant of the original Monroe Doctrine reservations, bears witness to the persistence of attempts to escape from a theoretical and ineffective universalism into a practical and workable regionalism.” Kaufman and Hast both erroneously attribute this to the League of Nations “Charter” Article 54, instead of 21. Article 54 of the 1945 UN Charter concerns regional arrangements. Kaufman (1976, 179); Hast (2014, 43). Kaufman and Hast both erroneously attribute this to the League of Nations “Charter” Article 54, instead of 21. Article 54 of the 1945 UN Charter concerns regional arrangements.

By contrast, de facto geopolitical bargains establish zones of preponderance not through treaty negotiations, but by the fact of their observance.91 De facto bargains generally emerge through the gradual acceptance by one power of another’s predominance over a certain area, and vice- versa. The Monroe Doctrine, asserted as a unilateral policy by the United States in 1826, eventually became a de facto geopolitical bargain when European powers stopped intervening in the Western Hemisphere and included U.S. regional preponderance in their global designs.92 As I show in chapter 4, the Cold War geopolitical bargain emerged de facto after the United States and Soviet Union were unable to a reach a de jure settlement in 1945-46.93 The current division of the Korean peninsula into South and North—in the American and Chinese spheres of influence, respectively—is also a de facto geopolitical bargain, albeit at the local level.

Table 1: a taxonomy of geopolitical bargains

Established by Legitimated and negotiated by

De jure Power preponderances reflected in Postwar settlement, international international treaties public law, diplomatic discourse

De facto Power preponderances reflected in Reciprocal signaling, iterated tacit understandings observance, military posturing

The main difference between de jure and de facto geopolitical bargains lies in how they are accepted and negotiated by the relevant parties. This has consequences for their stability and adaptability. In de jure bargains, territorial partitions, zones of preponderance, and their

91 This resembles Kaufman’s (1976, 9–10) distinction between the United States’ de jure Cold War sphere and the Soviet Union’s de facto sphere, except that I consider these relationally de facto. See also the discussion in Bull ([1977] 2012, 212–18) and Hast (2014, 120–22). By focussing on geopolitical arrangements rather than spheres, my distinctions hinge on understandings between the dominant state about their spheres rather than the internal dynamics of the spheres themselves.

92 See Hast (2014, 41–44); Sexon (2011).

93 Trachtenberg (1999); Mark (1979, 1981).

corresponding rights and duties are outlined in internationally-recognized treaties. This connects the legitimacy of the bargains to public international law, giving them a clarity lacking in de facto arrangements and providing the relevant parties with a common frame or object of reference—the territorial settlement, for example—for negotiating with one another. The 1815 Vienna settlement is an example: it was the common reference point for the great powers in every crisis in the period, even when (or especially when) they disagreed over particular cases, as they did when crises in Spain and Naples occurred in the 1820s. When Britain intervened in Portugal later in the century, it did so explicitly under the authority granted to it by the 1815 Vienna Final Act and the Britain-Portugal defence treaties contained therein. Russia explicitly intervened in Congress Poland—itself a creation of the Act—under the same authority, and although Britain and France sympathized with the Polish rebels, the legitimacy of the Settlement restrained their actions. When the Allies jointly negotiated a solution to the Belgian crisis in the 1830s, they referred constantly to Vienna and sought to work within its geopolitical aims.94

De jure bargains can also be out of step with power predominance, however, or leave dissatisfied powers with few tools to address their satisfaction. In the Concert period, the Vienna settlement granted Austria rightful authority over Italy, for example. But Austria possessed no fleet capable of blocking the dissatisfied French from interfering in Italian crises under the guise of its Catholic authority. Likewise, Russia’s geographical position at the Eastern edge of the European continent gave it an unmatched ability to project power against the Ottoman Empire. As I show in Chapter 3, this did not give Russia a clear right to do so, however. Because the Vienna settlement was the common reference point for all geopolitical crises involving the Concert powers, any solution to these crises would have to be negotiated within its framework. Revising the formal aspects of the Settlement would have entailed massive risks, however: it was hard won by after nine months of tough negotiations by an unprecedented gathering of Europe’s leaders following an unprecedented set of wars against Napoleonic France. As such, the

94 I discuss these cases in detail in Chapter 3.

settlement’s strengths—clarity and high revision costs—was eventually a weakness— inflexibility and inadaptability.95

Less stable and more amenable to change, de facto bargains pose problems for intervening powers. De facto bargains require that each party understand the limits of acceptability through power predominance alone, rather than law. This gives them few tools to negotiate the bargains or credibly ensure mutual understandings outside of military signaling. International relations research attests well to the problem of leaders’ misperceptions, particularly of opponents’ military capabilities and signaling, however.96 In the context of a geopolitical bargain, this problem means one power cannot be certain its rivals understand and/or accept the boundaries of its spheres, since it can never be sure its understanding of the meaning of its military power (or the geographical placement of its military power) and the rights and privileges it asserts within its ambit is understood by its rival in the same way.

De facto bargains thus face two problems: ambiguity about geographical boundaries, and ambiguity about acceptable behaviour within those boundaries. For this reason, leaders in de facto situations sometimes try to reach “gentlemen’s agreements” with each other behind closed doors or through tacit signaling to reduce ambiguity, particularly in high-stakes situations, although these have limited ability to credibly signal intentions.97 The ongoing Korean nuclear crisis is a localized example of this problem: the Korean peninsula remains separated along the 38th parallel and either side is supported by a great power in a clear example of a local geopolitical political bargain. Like the Cold War superpowers, North Korea has furthermore been able to credibly commit defending its territorial integrity through costly and conspicuous military signaling.98 While the geographical boundary of the Korean bargain is relatively clear,

95 See Gulick (1955); Jarrett (2013) and my account in Chapter 3.

96 See Jervis (2017).

97 John F. Kennedy attempted to reach such an understanding on a number of issues with Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s; Boris Yeltsin sought one concerning NATO expansion with Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. See Trachtenberg (2012, 154–82) for JFK-Khrushchev; and Chapter 5 for the Yeltsin-Clinton correspondence.

98 Kang (2017, 60–71).

Pyongyang’s understanding of acceptable versus unacceptable behaviour is opaque, and lacking ways to credibly signal commitment to an entente, it is difficult for either side to assure the other.

The Cold War geopolitical bargain—initially more of an entente—showcased all the problems of a de facto bargain. The period’s spheres system resulted from the superpowers’ immediate postwar preponderances: the Soviet Union consolidated a sphere in Eurasia and into Eastern Europe, while the United States set up security alliances in Western Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Although the brute fact of these military preponderances and their geographical layout was clear to either side, how they should be interpreted and the boundaries of acceptable superpower interference within them was not. The Cuban Missile crisis, which I examine further in chapter 4, showed that the Soviet Union would risk unsettling the bargain if a state inside the U.S. sphere “went commie.” The Soviet Union saw the placement of missiles on Cuba as securing a new equality in the geopolitical balance of forces. Convinced that Cuba would be imminently invaded, Khrushchev wanted to protect a new status quo—communism in the Caribbean—that correlated to America’s strategic position; Washington possessed missiles in Turkey and occupied West Berlin, well inside the Soviet sphere.99

Finally, geopolitical bargains can also be systemic or local in scope. Because I am interested in the problem of great power intervention, this study focusses on the systemic geopolitical bargains of the Concert and Cold War eras. Systemic geopolitical bargains are often the product of major wars and their postwar settlements. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea can be understood as system-wide, de jure geopolitical bargain concerning sovereign rights over open waters, though limited in jurisdictional scope to ocean rights.100

The geopolitics of the last two centuries also feature many regional or local agreements about zones of preponderance, however. The Berlin Conference General Act and the Allied Occupation of Germany were both local in scope. Some straddle the de jure-de facto divide; the gradual

99 Lebow and Stein (1994); Mikoyan (2012, 89–99).

100 UNCLOS has not, to my knowledge, been understood this way. Although the United States has not ratified the full treaty it is effectively a compliant nonparty. For a discussion of UNCLOS in the context of East Asia, see Houlden and Hong (2018).

partition of China by European powers during the 19th Century involved many specific treaties, but no overall settlement. The 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement likewise established de jure a demarcation line along the 38th parallel between North and South, but the overall partition of the Korean Peninsula into American and Chinese spheres is de facto.

Table 2: examples of geopolitical bargains by jurisdiction

Systemic Local

De jure Vienna Settlement; 1885 Berlin Conference; League of Nations “regional Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact; arrangements”; Allied occupation of Germany/Berlin; UNCLOS Allied occupation of Austria/Vienna; Antarctic Treaty System

De facto Cold War spheres system; Korean peninsula partition; Monroe Doctrine (late 19th Century); Post-Cold War U.S. alliance structures; Post-Cold War U.S. primacy Russian occupation of Crimea

In chapter 5, I look at the post-Cold War period’s geopolitical bargain, and argue it is better examined as a series of regional bargains leftover from the Cold War and reflective of the United States’ newfound global primacy. This gives the post-Cold War era a dual character. Like the others examined here, it is globally stable and locally violent. It is globally stable not because a geopolitical bargain was struck between the United States and its peers, however, but because the United States has no global peers—just regional rivals. At the same time, the United States has pushed the boundaries of local bargains, upsetting local actors and alarming regional rivals. In Europe, the United States and Russia established an informal de facto geopolitical bargain in Eastern Europe under which NATO would not expand past its 1990 borders—or, at least, Russian policymakers claim so.101 When NATO expanded into the former Soviet space, Russian

101 For a compelling case NATO officials made a “no enlargement” promise, see Shifrinson (2016). For a compelling case NATO officials made a “no enlargement” promise, see Shifrinson (2016).

policymakers understood this as “the creation of a hostile sphere of influence encroaching the very borders of Russia.”102 U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East before 2003 also constituted an informal or tacit geopolitical bargain based on its status-quo maintenance of the existing balance of power. When the United States pursued regime change in 2003, it overstepped the bargain. Debates about unipolarity’s stability or peacefulness which do not take into account this global-local distinction miss this duality, and as a result tend to construe the post-Cold War period as either uniformly peaceful or violent.103

2.3.1 Geopolitical bargains in miniature: the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, perhaps the most infamous agreement of the 20th Century, showcases in miniature how the various elements of a geopolitical bargain come together to stabilize great power relations and enable local violence. 104 As Ian Kershaw summarizes, “it was the most cynical deal imaginable”—but “made eminent sense, however, to both parties.”105 In the run up to World War 2, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were not just ideological rivals but strategic antagonists. As early as Mein Kampf, Hitler had argued the Soviet Union would need to be eliminated if National Socialism were to succeed in Europe.106 Stalin likewise considered Nazi Germany another capitalist regime that would eventually need to be overthrown if the International Proletariat were to succeed in Europe.107 Fearing an inevitable German attack, Stalin had tasked foreign minister Litvinov, and his replacement Molotov, with forming a military alliance with France and Britain. But Stalin also suspected the Western

102 Toal (2017, 27). Toal (2017, 27).

103 My analysis thus dovetails with Monteiro’s argument that unipolarity (2014) is stable but violent. I emphasize the geopolitical distinction between systemic stability and local violence, however, and do not attribute the latter to the structural condition of unipolarity as such.

104 In miniature because the Pact arguably freed Hitler to wage a larger systemic war.

105 Kershaw (2015, 341).

106 Roberts (2006, 32).

107 Kotkin (2017, 582–83); Roberts (2006, 36, 42).

Powers were not serious about fighting Hitler, and might instead be trying to provoke a Nazi- Soviet war from which they would benefit.108 Neither Western power was willing to enter meaningful triple alliance with Moscow or guarantee it a free hand for maneuver against Hitler in Romania and Poland.109 Conversely, Hitler had offered Stalin virtually all the Soviet Union’s requests in Eastern Europe, which the latter could receive without having bear any costs of an “inevitable intercapitalist war” between Berlin and the Western powers.110

Stalin took Hitler’s deal, ending the triple alliance negotiations on August 21, 1939 and signing the nonaggression pact on August 23.111 The news, in Churchill’s words, broke “on the world like an explosion.”112 Publicly, the Pact committed the two parties to mutual nonaggression, and the Soviet Union guaranteed it would remain neutral in any coming wars between Nazi Germany and others. The Pact’s secret protocol, however, divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, freeing both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to intervene in their near abroads without fearing invasion or counterbalancing from the other.113 Apart from receiving Soviet war materiel, Germany could now continue its aggressive irredentism, begun in 1938, without facing

108 Roberts (2006, 5, 31); Kissinger (1994, 344–49); Kotkin (2017, 612–41).

109 Roberts (2006, 31); Kotkin (2017, 639). Henry Kissinger (1994, 343) suggests that Stalin therefore pursued a strategy “which would have been quite clear to Richelieu, Metternich, Palmerston, or Bismarck” but was not clear to the Allies: “make certain that the Soviet Union was always the last major power to commit itself, thereby achieving the freedom of action for a bazaar in which either Soviet cooperation or Soviet neutrality would be offered to the highest bidder.”

110 Kotkin (2017, 637); see also Kissinger (1994, 336–49); Roberts (2006, 30–55).

111 For a detailed account of the negotiations leading up to the pact, see Resis (2000); Roberts (1989, 1–156; 1992).

112 The about face prompted his famous comment, made once the Soviets invaded Poland, that Russia is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national self-interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south-eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.” Quoted in Roberts (2006, 30, 38); see also Resis (1981b, 422).

113 Weinberg (1989, 176–80); for the text of the Secret Protocol and other related agreements, see the appendices in Roberts (1989, 263–69).

a two-front war.114 The Soviet Union for its part could pacify Poland and set up a ring of buffer states along the Curzon line, regaining the territories it lost in World War 1. In September 1939 both powers invaded and divided Poland, and Stalin consolidated the sphere outlined in the secret protocol’s first clause by pushing “mutual assistance” pacts on the Baltic States, Romania, and Finland.115

The pact shows how a negotiated geopolitical bargain between even ideologically opposed enemies can make local intervention acceptable. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both sought security from each other, and saw an agreement on Eastern spheres of influence as a path toward that security. Indeed, precisely because both states sought to establish a spheres system in Eastern Europe as protection against one another, their dyadic stability was contingent on their ability to mutually agree on these spheres in the bargain and then consolidate them via military intervention—Germany could “seal the Eastern front” while the Soviet Union “bought precious time to consolidate its defences.”116 The Pact was thus an example of relational geopolitics, negotiated as a bargain and outlined de jure in a treaty, that allowed both to credibly assure the other that military interventions, so long as respectful of the bargain, were mutually acceptable. The Pact’s jurisdiction was regional and not systemic, and Berlin encountered difficulties making similar arrangements with Britain and France.117 Within the Berlin-Moscow relationship, however, great power cooperation geopolitically structured and enabled local violence.

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact also reminds us that geopolitical cooperation can enable intervention aimed at dark or disturbing ends. While the geopolitical bargains of the following chapters are generally associated with positive periods of peace (a view my narrative may amend), bargains are neutral about the kinds of order they stabilize and the aims of the violence they permit. In the case of the Nonaggression Pact, the order was totalitarian and the violence literally genocidal.

114 Black (2015, 28).

115 Resis (1981b, 420–24); Kissinger (1994, 350–57); Roberts (1989, 196–170; 2006, 33–60); Black (2015, 29–31).

116 Kershaw (2015, 341).

117 For an account that focusses on British appeasement, see Goddard (2015).

2.4 Methodology and research design

To recap, my argument holds that, ceteris paribus, a great power intervening in its zone of preponderance can forgo the costly signaling needed to credibly assure its peers, and therefore will expend fewer resources legitimizing its intervention than it would if it intervened outside of that zone. Great powers adjusting their assurance strategies by spending more resources securing legitimacy when they intervene outside of their spheres, or which face higher levels of costly contestation when they do not, constitutes evidence in support of my theory.

International legitimacy is difficult to show directly.118 Great power intervention behaviour—the coalitions they build, arguments they make, and resources they allocate to assuring allies—is an observable implication of my theory. Particularly when they involve material and political costs that cannot be explained by considerations of military utility, they indicate attempts by great powers to assure their peers. Balancing behaviour, sanctions, and other costly efforts to deter or punish an intervention are likewise observable implications of the failure to assure. I focus on variations in these behavioral patterns because they are good indicators that an intervener is concerned about acceptability, that an intervention is generally accepted or at least seen as permissible or not completely out of bounds, and that it thus has minimal legitimacy in the sense of acceptability within the geopolitical bargain of the era—or not.119 Because the number of interventions in each period is low (<15), I take a case study, rather than statistical approach, to examining this variation in each time period.120

Procedurally, in each chapter I first construct a picture, or “map,” a given era’s geopolitical bargain. Apart from historical materials that establish consensus about what states or areas are in which great powers’ spheres, I use formal security assurances as proxies indicating a dominant- subordinate relationships. This technique follows the treatment of security hierarchies pioneered

118 Hurd (2008, 2).

119 I thank Steven Bernstein for this wording.

120 On neopositivist methods, see King et al. (1994); George and Bennett (2005).

by David Lake, and employed by David Kang and Ji-Young Lee, among others.121 As noted, geopolitical bargains are negotiated and not always clear to the participants. By mapping the general sense of the geopolitical bargain by using evidence of military preponderances and their understandings by all parties independent of military interventions, however, I aim to heuristically avoid, insofar as possible, the problem of circularity wherein interventions determine the boundaries of the spheres, and vice-versa.

After mapping the general bargain, I compare a period’s intervention record with my argument’s expectations. I limit my analysis, with some minor exceptions, to overt military interventions undertaken by the great powers in each period. “Great power” is an essentially contested in international relations, and scholars generally identify them in one of two ways: one the basis of power projection capabilities122; or status designation.123 My focus here on systemic geopolitical bargains makes this task somewhat simpler: only the most powerful states constructed and contested systemic geopolitical bargains, and in each period it is for the most part clear which powers these are. Thus while “great-power status was traditionally conferred on states that could use force most handily,” this ability was reflected in self-selecting club memberships that distinguished great powers from states unable to make systemic geopolitical decisions.124

121 Lake (2009a, 2009b); Kang (2012, 2017); Lee (2016). Lake (2009a, 2009b); Kang (2012, 2017); Lee (2016).

122 See for example Mearsheimer (2001, 5); Xuetong (2006); Monteiro (2014, 42–47, 44): a great power must not be surpassed in its “capability to defend itself from aggression” and “must possess the ability to engage unaided in sustained politico-military operations in at least one other relevant region of the globe beyond its own on a level similar to the most powerful state in the system.”

123 Bull ([1977] 2012, 194–96) defines great powers by their attributes: first, they are “comparable in status”—they belong to “a club with a rule of membership”; second, they are “all in the front rank in terms of military strength”; and third, they “are recognized by other to have, and conceived by their own leader and people to have, certain special right and duties.” See Buzan (2004, esp. 58-73); Cui and Buzan (2016, 188–89); Mitzen (2013, 87–90); Zala (2017).

124 Waltz (2008, 140, 1979, 131).

In the Concert period, I count Austria, Britain, Russia, Prussia, and France as the five great powers—“les Grandes Puissances”—because they forged the Concert geopolitical bargain.125 In the Cold War, I eliminate France, China, Japan, and Britain from my list of “great powers,” focusing instead on superpower relations. It is clear in hindsight that Great Britain was not a superpower after World War 2, as William T.R. Fox, who coined the term “superpower,” originally thought but later corrected.126 While France and China were important players in the Cold War, their effects were largely limited to regions and they had no direct say in the overall systemic balance. Last, in the post-Cold War era I follow Buzan and Brooks and Wohlforth in focusing my efforts on the only remaining great power, the United States.127

In each intervention I attempt to disaggregate the mechanisms producing the intervention behaviour—the bargain, military utility, multilateral norms, or some combination thereof—in light of the qualitative evidence available. I pay specific attention to nonconforming cases. This approach allows me to roughly disentangle the independent effect of geopolitical bargains on great power legitimacy strategies where they plausibly occur, and to show where other effects— the affective support generated by 9/11, for example128—plausibly overrule or make them irrelevant.

125 This also reflects the consensus about the period; see Chapter 3, sections 1.3.1 and 2.1.2-4. For the history of the “great power” designation, see Keene (2013).

126 Fox (1944, 1980, 417): “As it turned out, when Hitler and Tojo had been run to earth and the smoke of battle had cleared away, it became obvious that only two powers were according each other first-ranking status. Light years separated those two from all the rest, Britain included.”

127 See Buzan (2004, 69–70); Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, 62–72, esp. 70, 2016b, 15): great powers lack the superpower’s “‘broad-spectrum capabilities exercised across the whole of the international system.’ … The very notion of an “X” term for the great powers means that the specific number does not alter the system’s basic properties. The rise of, say, India to great power status could increase the X term, and the decline of an existing great power could decrease it—without altering the fundamental nature of the system. To do that, the number of superpowers has to change.”

128 E.g. Hall and Ross (2015).

To capture the effects of the geopolitical bargain on a particular intervention, I differentiate costly assurance and legitimacy strategies from perfunctory ones, and costly contestation from perfunctory contestation, using commonsense understandings of these terms with special sensitivity to the actors’ historical understandings of them. The United States did not contest the Soviet Union’s 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia, for example—U.S. policymakers in fact did the opposite, signaling to the Soviets through various means that they would not counter- intervene. The United States engaged in costly contestation when the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, however, suspending, among other things, important grain exports—and the Carter administration understood these actions as such. Conversely, the Soviet Union voted for Security Council resolutions condemning American interventions in the Dominican Republic and Grenada, but took no other steps available to it; I count this as perfunctory contestation. I map this costly-perfunctory variation on to each period’s geopolitical bargain, examining where the variation conforms to my argument (i.e. costly legitimation or contestation in interventions outside the spheres), and select nonconforming interventions for further review.

Across the interventions I also look for evidence the actors themselves operated under the assumption a geopolitical bargain structured the intervention strategies. In each intervention narrative, I ask: do the actors responsible for conducting the interventions understand or operate as if a geopolitical bargain exists, and what is it? Did they change their intervention planning to accommodate it? And what was the response from rival great powers in terms of meaningful contestation—sanctions, threats of violence, or political and diplomatic censures? To answer these questions, I have made extensive use of primary documents where available. These documents allows the researcher to better assess the thinking and justifications of the actors responsible for conducting the interventions without the mediation of other scholars’ arguments or agendas. Because of their accessibility, my use of primary materials in the Concert and Cold War periods is much more extensive than it is for the post-Cold War period.

2.4.1 Alternative arguments and interactive effects

As noted in the introduction, the argument I present here is intended to complement, rather than rule out, existing explanations of military intervention. A great power’s assurance strategy interacts with other considerations such as the proposed purpose of the intervention, the crisis it

intends to solve, the beliefs and propensities of the decision-makers, and so on. Much of this is historically-bounded and specific to each case, and therefore resists systematization. One of my aims, however, is to show when the mechanisms emphasized by these alternative arguments drive intervention dynamics, and when they take a backseat to or shaped by geopolitical ones. My theory therefore does not make unicausal claims about intervention behavior or legitimacy across time. A truly synthetic account of military intervention would closely examine how geopolitics, intervention purposes, and great power behaviours interact. This dissertation more modestly introduces geopolitical bargains as a new intervention “variable” and shows its independent effects on intervention dynamics across time. This more limited aim has advantages: it not only helps explain gaps left in the record by approaches that do not consider geopolitical variables, but also helps explain the relative importance of different mechanisms by suggesting when considerations such as military instrumentality are more likely to affect a Great Power’s intervention.

Existing explanations of the intervention record focus on the domestic sources of changing intervention dynamics, or the historically contextual norms that govern intervention purpose. According to the first explanation, great powers intervene with large coalitions in order to maximize military utility and defray costs—the “coalition matches the mission”—or to appease utility-concerned domestic constituencies.129 According to the second, great powers seek large multilateral coalitions and Security Council approval because of the norms that govern intervention appropriateness. The individuals responsible for intervening see (genuinely or instrumentally) these actions as appropriate—the way things are done.130

Geopolitical bargains interact with the changing purpose of intervention in two ways: by freeing intervening powers to arrange their missions according to military utility when they intervene inside their spheres, and by requiring they generate additional legitimacy when they intervene outside of them. Geopolitical bargains shortcut the costly signaling process needed for credible commitment. Put simply, when a great power intervenes in its sphere, it can spend fewer

129 Kreps (2011); Recchia (2015).

130 Finnemore (2004).

resources assuring its peers. Because it is less worried about assuring its peers, a great power intervening in its sphere can refocus away from costly signaling toward conducting its intervention according to its military needs, either by building a cost-defraying coalition or going alone, and satisfying relevant domestic constituencies. Geopolitical bargains thus permit great powers a wider latitude to construct interventions inside their spheres as they see militarily fit building a cost-defraying coalitions, grouping with key allies, or intervening alone.

When a great power intervenes outside of its sphere, it no longer enjoys this legitimacy and must get it from somewhere else to avoid legitimacy costs and pushback. It may therefore divert resources toward costly signaling by building large (but inefficient) intervention coalitions, consulting extensively with other powers to assure them, or seeking formal authorization in institutional settings like the Security Council.131 These factors interact with intervention purpose and the kinds of crises that can prompt legitimate intervention. In both the Concert of Europe and postwar period interventions to fully annex territory were illegitimate, regardless of whether they occurred inside or outside spheres. As we will see in chapter 5, interventions undertaken for humanitarian purposes or regime change were contested on the basis of purpose, and not simply where they occurred. Nonetheless, where they occurred appears to have mattered: regime change in the Western hemisphere, a continuation of the United States’ neo-Monroeist Cold War policies, were less contested than those that took place in the Middle East. This geopolitical distinction also generally maps on to the United States’ efforts at the United Nations, where it expended more energy and resources legitimizing interventions outside of its sphere.

2.4.2 Case selection

Three reasons motivate my specific choices of the Concert, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods versus other eras that feature geopolitical bargains, such as the Bismarck System or 18th Century Europe. First, most overt great power interventions during these periods were status- quo-oriented and designed to preserve the existing balance rather than destroy it. In the Concert

131 Thompson (2009). Of course, great powers may poorly plan their interventions or fail in their efforts to generate legitimacy—as the United States infamously did in 2003. In these cases what is important is that great powers show evidence of trying to do these things, or a compelling explanation exists for why they did not.

period the great powers intervened in Italy, Poland, and Portugal to restore monarchies deposed by revolutionary movements. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States intervened to remove revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, regimes in their respective spheres. After the Cold War, the United States intervened to restore the balance of power when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and deposed rulers it saw as threatening the status quo—such as Manuel Noriega in Panama and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As I will show in chapter 5, the end of the Cold War blurred the line between revisionist and status-quo interventions not only because of changes in purpose, but also because of geopolitics—interventions in some areas, such as Kosovo and Iraq, were contested because others perceived them as revisionist. Nevertheless, because the purposes of intervention within each of these time periods remain relatively static, and their systems otherwise stable, I am able to show the independent effects of the geopolitical bargain on intervention legitimacy by focusing how variation in intervention behaviour correlates with a given geopolitical bargain.

Second, the stability of these periods means that their geopolitical bargains can be partly separated from their interventions and established a priori on the basis of hierarchical security links between great powers and their subordinates. As mentioned, this separation is imperfect and largely heuristic; the independence between geopolitical bargains and military interventions should not be overstated. Military interventions are tools great powers can use to unilaterally assert or expand their spheres. The reactions of other great powers signal whether these revisions are accepted or not. As such, great power understandings (mutual or not) of geopolitical bargains are often clearest just before a during a given a military intervention. Moreover, in cases where either the geographical or behavioural aspects of a geopolitical bargain is unclear, interventions dynamics (inclusive of contestation) may reveal to the relevant great powers what is acceptable/unacceptable, and where. Early crises and interventions in the Cold War, for example, show that the two superpowers were feeling out the geographical boundaries and acceptable limits of interference in each other’s spheres. The empirical record thus suggests that geopolitical bargains evolve through time and military interventions themselves can play a constitutive effect.

This evolving, negotiated characteristic presents a major methodological difficulty: a research design that describes the boundaries of its geopolitical bargains solely on the basis of intervention dynamics would risk making a circular argument (as I will show in chapter 4,

existing accounts of the Cold War spheres system often operate this way). The Concert and Cold War periods have two virtues that help reduce the problem of circularity. They both feature postwar settlements that resulted in de jure or de facto spheres systems, allowing me to describe their general geographical contours independently of the subsequent intervention records. Their systemic distributions of power were also relatively stable in terms of territory and geopolitics. Great power interventions in these periods, although they helped clarify the contours of the acceptable great power behaviour, did not significantly revise the geographical component of the bargains. Nonetheless, the bargain in each period was not set in stone, and great powers sought to revise it in key moments—such as Russia’s attempts to extend a sphere over the Ottoman Empire during the Concert period, or the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear weapons on Cuba during the Caribbean crisis.

Other periods do not lend themselves as well to the bargain-intervention separation. In the years between the Concert of Europe and the Cold War, for example, the great powers almost constantly intervened to revise Europe, North America, Africa, and the Far East, despite at the same time negotiating de jure geopolitical bargains, such as the 1885 Berlin Conference’s final act.132 The great powers were also in motion before the Concert stasis: predatory balance-of- power policies and territorial consolidation around emerging sovereign states resulted in almost constant territorial revision, partition, and at least one famous instance of system-wide preventative war.133

The post-Cold War period presents particular challenges from this perspective, being neither at rest nor in motion per se. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its sphere between 1989 and 1991 produced no concrete postwar settlement or systemic geopolitical bargain that might delineate areas of preponderance between the United States and its closest peers, the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China. The United States also sought to geopolitical bargains in several regions, but in ways that did not destabilize the system. This blurs the line between status-quo

132 For an account that focusses on Europe, see Taylor (1954); for a global view, see Buzan and Lawson (2013); Osterhammel (2014).

133 See Benton (2010); Blanning (2007); see also Schroeder (1994b).

and revisionist interventions, and makes outlining the geopolitical bargains themselves difficult. In my post-Cold War chapter I therefore rely on consensuses in the scholarship, and historical data, that show tacit or informal regional geopolitical bargains that formed the point of reference for subsequent U.S. intervention.

Third, each period varies in its “hard case/easy case” characteristics, allowing me to both show the plausibility and limitations of my argument across time—in effect, its scope conditions. In the Concert period, for example, the geopolitical bargain was strongly and explicitly connected with intervention purpose and great power assurance, making it ideal for demonstrating the plausibility of my argument. The Cold War, by contrast, is normally understood as a period of “ideological bipolarity” in which the competing blocs’ foreign policies were driven by necessity and occupied by material power maximization—realism or realpolitik par excellence.134 While the geographical contours of this confrontation are well understood, they have not been normally connected to assurance or dependable expectations; Cold War interventions are only rarely presented in a context of legitimacy. When they are, discussions of how they interact with geopolitics tend to be brief, leaving room for further examination.135 This makes the Cold War an “easy” case in which to show how geopolitics and military intervention are connected, and a “hard” but potentially interesting case in which to show that these are in turn connected to acceptability.

According to scholars and its leading policymakers, the post-Cold War period is by contrast supposed to feature no true “spheres of influence” or geopolitical ordering principles. Scholars of intervention therefore often focus either exclusively on the effects of post-Cold War norms on the dynamics of U.S. interventions, or look at how these norms have given rise to, or constrained, interventions more generally. This has made intervention after the Cold War an “easy” case to examine the impact of (e.g.) humanitarian and liberal norms on intervention purpose, but a “hard” case for geopolitics. By extending my analysis as the Cold War I show

134 Finnemore (2004, 125).

135 Windsor (1984); Bull ([1977] 2012, 216–17); Keal (1983, 45–61, 116–58); Vincent (1974, 208, 323–24); R.H. Jackson (2000, 254–59); and Hast (2014, 120–22).

how geopolitical concerns continue to shape intervention assurance and contestation even in a period ostensibly devoid of geopolitics.

2.4.3 Athens and Melos

Military interventions represent a unique problem for system stability: because great powers can use interventions to annex territory, replace regimes, or launch wider wars, they can rapidly revise the status quo. An intervening power thus faces the problem of signaling non-revisionist intentions to its peers so that its actions do not lead to escalation and counterbalancing. As Austin Carson notes, intervening powers “have powerful and overlapping reasons to view large- scale escalation” as counter-productive.136 By assigning exclusivity over certain areas to specific powers, geopolitical bargains allow powers to more easily signal non-revisionism when they intervene in those areas. When they intervene outside of their areas of preponderance, great powers seeking acceptability must resort to other methods of generating legitimacy. Geopolitical bargains thus interact with other tools that signal non-revisionism and imbue legitimacy, such as procedural multilateralism, to produce the intervention variation described above.

Because I examine great power intervention, I do not include interventions undertaken by regional or major powers such as France’s interventions in Mali or Côte d’Ivoire, India’s intervention in the East-West Pakistan War, Britain’s invention in the Falkland Islands, or Vietnam’s intervention in Democratic Kampuchea. These interventions are interesting in their own right, and featured both legitimacy strategies and contestation. Because they occurred outside the centre of great power competition and contestation, they fall outside the scope of my study.

This is the place to make an important observation, and caveat. Examining the Melian dialogue, Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey note that “what Athens and Sparta were depended crucially on an ongoing set of relations with their peripheries. …. What is true of Athens and Sparta is generally true of modern great powers; they were embedded in and dependent upon imperial

136 Carson (2018, 46).

relations of diverse kind.”137 Following Stanley Hoffman, they distinguish between an “Athenian” perspective and a “Melian” one; the former views international security through the concerns and prejudices of the strong, while the Melian perspective “necessarily stands on the other side of this divide, with the weak against the strong, with the many against the few.”138

This dissertation is a thoroughly Athenian one—it is an inquiry into the actions of the strong from the perspective of the few. Standing at the “pinnacle of world power,” the great powers justified the two-dozen or so interventions examined over the next pages in the name of humanity, the meaning of the secret of history, and the happiness of the world. These claims can seem chary given their actions manifestly preserved the order in which they, owing to their great power, had the most to lose.139 And with their great power, “a temptation to injustice for any nation,” they did great violence.140 This study and others also suggest that great powers’ leaders were moved by justice, however claimed and conceived.141 In this endeavor I have deployed as best I can an “imaginative understanding” of the perspective strong—an empathy in the precise sense of understanding their positions to elucidate my argument.142 Retelling the story here from the point of the view of the “weak and the many” might allow us to better adjudicate the ultimate effects of their claims of justice. But such an inquiry would be different than this one.

137 Barkawi and Laffey (2006, 346); Hoffman (1977, 58–59).

138 Barkawi and Laffey (2006, 333, 351).

139 Waltz (1979, 195); Carr ([1940] 2016, 99): “the pursuit of security by satisfied powers has often been the motive of flagrant examples of power politics.”

140 Niebuhr ([1944] 2011, 185); see also Niebuhr ([1932] 2013, 84, [1952] 2008, 149): while “the “the selfishness of nations is proverbial,” “nations have always been constitutionally self-righteous.”

141 Westad (2007, 397, 404); Niebuhr ([1952] 2008, esp. 130-150).

142 Carr ([1961] 2001, 18–19); “I say ‘imaginative understanding’, not ‘sympathy’, lest sympathy should be supposed to imply agreement…. History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.”

2.5 Conclusion

Military interventions represent a unique problem for system stability: because great powers can use interventions to annex territory, replace regimes, or launch wider wars, they can rapidly revise the status quo. An intervening power thus faces the problem of credibly signaling restraint to its peers, avoiding costly escalation and counterbalancing. As Austin Carson notes, intervening powers “have powerful and overlapping reasons to view large-scale escalation” as counter-productive.143 By arranging exclusivity over certain areas to specific powers, geopolitical bargains allow powers to more easily signal non-revisionism when they intervene in those areas. When they intervene outside of their areas of preponderance, great powers seeking acceptability must resort to other methods of generating legitimacy. Geopolitical bargains thus interact with other tools that signal non-revisionism and imbue legitimacy, such as procedural multilateralism, to produce the intervention variation described above.

Perhaps owing to the sense that global power is shifting, many recent studies of great power politics examine power transitions or hegemonic shifts, with an eye to the rise of China and its prospects for great power confrontation.144 Whether today’s resurgent powers possess “great power” status or will seek it using revisionist means is a contentious issue.145 Comparatively fewer recent studies of great power politics have examined the conditions of longer-term great power entente, and in particular the sub-structural elements that may contribute to overall systemic stability.146 This is perhaps for good reason: the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact did not stop Hitler from determining, in July 1940, that the Soviet Union “must be finished off” before it

143 Carson (2018, 46).

144 The list here is large; for recent book-length studies, see Allison (2017); Ward (2017); Schake (2017); Edelstein (2017); Shifrinson (2018); Renshon (2017).

145 See for example Larson and Shevchenko (2010); Wolf (2014); Renshon (2017).

146 So far no “Stability of a Multipolar World” or its equivalent has emerged, but see an early attempt in Friedberg (1993).

colluded with Britain.147 Geopolitical bargains themselves cannot weather the assaults of powerful, unchecked revolutionary states like Nazi Germany and Revolutionary France when they set out to remake international order.148

The cases that follow this chapter show that geopolitical bargains nonetheless played an important role in fostering long-term great power restraint across polarities and ideological dispositions by enabling local violence. The Concert period, although not perfectly multipolar, operated “as if” it was multipolar. Joined by their desire to prevent another hegemonic war, the great powers used both the geopolitical bargain and collective security mechanism to cooperate on security issues, suppressing crises and avoiding another Napoleonic episode.149

The Cold War shows that de facto geopolitical bargains can help regulate relations between even diametrically opposed, globally revisionist states: the strategic glacis between the Soviet Union and United States did not rest on any fundamental agreement about world order. The Cold War was bipolar, but also featured both an intense ideological competition of unprecedented intensity and geographic scale and a nuclear arms race that greatly restrained the powers military options vis-à-vis one another. This combination of power political stasis and ideological competition produced a paradoxical set of incentives: each superpower sought to revise the balance of power in its favour and competed for the “hearts and minds” of the world, but faced high potential costs because of the danger of superpower confrontation and rise of sovereign nonintervention norms.150 The Cold War bargain structured this situation by enabling the powers to overtly intervene in their spheres, but restraining them from doing so elsewhere.

Finally, in the post-Cold War period an unprecedented structural distribution of “unipolarity” created a diffuse geopolitical landscape of regional bargains underwritten by U.S. primacy and

147 Roberts (2006, 57–60); Mastny (1996, 16). See also Kissinger (1994, 356–68); Zubok and Pleshakov (1996, 78– 80).

148 Ward (2017, 20–21); Goddard (2018); Kissinger (1957, 1–3).

149 Schroeder (1989, 1992).

150 Macfarlane (2002, 33–45). Macfarlane (2002, 33–45).

heavily mediated by liberal international norms. Despite its power preponderance, the United States still engaged in costly signaling, investing resources and time into legitimizing its interventions and sometimes failing at these efforts. But U.S. legitimacy in this period was affected not just by what it sought to do but also where it intervened. The United States overstepped tacit geopolitical bargains in Kosovo and Iraq, for example, by pursuing revisionist aims outside of its sphere.

Since 1848, norms of self-determination, decolonization, nationalism, and sovereign equality have gradually eroded great powers’ international hierarchies and their ability to negotiate de jure geopolitical bargains. Although the Concert of Europe has attracted renewed interest as a model of great power relations, its hierarchical arrangements are likely too counter-normative to hold any promise for a stable great power future.151 And apart from Cold War nostalgia, it is unlikely anyone will suggest the wobbly U.S.-Soviet strategic glacis as a new model for great power relations.

The illegitimacy of geopolitics does not free the world from their existence, however. The reluctance of policymakers to talk in these terms (as opposed to analysts) has created a gulf between how world politics is practiced and how it is spoken about. I sketch this problem in more detail in the conclusion. For now it is enough to that current political impasses between today’s powers—over the purpose of intervention, for example—is exacerbated not only by the lack of any clear geopolitical bargains governing their relations, but also by the absence of any mutual recognition that a geopolitical solution may be needed.152

151 See Mitzen (2013, 2015); Muller and Rauch (2018); Fahrmeir (2017); Lascurettes (2017); but see Nexon (2007, 267).

152 For Chinese and Russian opposition to American interpretations of intervention, see Garwood-Gowers (2016); Averre and Davies (2015), and Chapter 5 in this dissertation.

Chapter 3 The Concert of Europe

“In great danger, we can always put our trust in the guardian spirit that has reliably saved Europe from being dominated by any one-sided or violent tendency, has met pressure from the one side with pressure from the other and has, in the union of the whole, happily saved freedom and individuality.” —Leopold von Ranke153

“Events which cannot be avoided, must be directed.” —Klemenz von Metternich154

After they defeated Napoleon in the Wars of the Sixth and Seventh coalitions, the victorious “Grandes Puissances”—Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Britain—entered a period of unprecedented peace on the European continent, “the most orderly and enviable of modern international relations.”155 No major wars broke out between Europe’s great powers during the Concert and none of its conflicts were as destructive as the wars of adjacent periods.156 In the words of A.J.P.

153 Quoted in Schulin (1988, 14).

154 Quoted in Kissinger (1957, 135).

155 Carr (1945, 6).

156 The Great Powers of the Concert, by scholarly consensus and according to the understandings of the period, were Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France. John Mearsheimer (2001, 351–58) counts four “great power vs. great power” and eight “great-power vs. minor power” wars in the period spanning 1815-1902, which he defines as “balanced multipolarity.” The four wars of the former category are the Crimean War (1853), the War of Italian Unification (1859), the Austro-Prussian War (1866), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870).

Taylor, the Concert “was astonishingly stable in international affairs, if compared not only with the twentieth-century chaos, but with the centuries that preceded it.”157

The French Revolution and its Napoleonic sequel cast a specter across Europe, however.158 “The ideas which Europe had hailed as salutary and liberating to mankind,” Leopold von Ranke wrote, had been “suddenly transformed before its eyes into the horror of devastation.”159 In the years after Napoleon’s defeat, popular sovereignty movements inspired by the revolution frequently threatened the territorial equilibrium. Because the continent was susceptible to revolutions that might reignite system-wide war, the Powers needed ways to militarily suppress rebellions without upsetting the balance or alarming their peers. Put simply, the Concert powers wanted a systemically stable Europe that could also absorb local violence.

To this end, the great powers of the period created an unprecedented alliance, culminating in the 1815 Quadruple Alliance Treaty, which committed them to mutual consultation at periodic congresses and coordinated action if France once again threatened the balance. This collective security mechanism was underpinned by a territorial arrangement carefully brokered at the nine- month Congress of Vienna. Together with the 1814-1815 alliance treaties, the Final Act of the Congress laid the groundwork for European peace using both old and new methods: a territorial distribution that satisfied all parties and a collective security Alliance mechanism through which could assure each other of restraint and jointly resolve disputes.160 As the Allied powers stated in Article VI the 1815 Quadruple Alliance treaty:

To assure and facilitate the execution of the present treaty, and to consolidate the close connections that today unite the Four Sovereigns for the happiness of the world, the High Contracting Parties have agreed to renew their Meetings as fixed periods, under either the immediate auspices of the Sovereigns themselves, or by their respective ministers, for the

157 Taylor (1954, xxii).

158 Borrowing from Marx (1848, 8).

159 Ranke (1983, 49).

160 Lascurettes (2017, 4–7); Mitzen (2013, 18–29, 64–100).

purpose of consulting upon their common interests, and for consideration of the measures that at each of those periods shall be judged the most salutary for the repose and prosperity of Nations, and for the maintenance of the Peace of Europe.161

Despite their efforts to escape the predatory great power politics of the ancien régime, the problem of great power intervention remained: one of the Allies could use a crisis as pretext to revise the territorial settlement by annexing territory, installing puppet regimes, and shifting borders. The Vienna settlement, the source of European peace, thus ironically placed the great powers in a crisis management straightjacket. To intervene military on the continent, a great power had only two costly options available to it: invoke Article VI and begin a lengthy consultation process that would restrict its degrees of freedom, potentially invite foreign militaries close to its borders, and bind its intervention to competitive Concert power politics; or intervene unilaterally and risk provoking the other powers into costly political pushback, counterbalancing, or war. How could a Concert power intervene in a crisis while assuring its peers that intervention would not revise the Vienna settlement—particular when that crisis occurred on its doorstep?

I argue a systemic de jure geopolitical bargain helped the great powers signal restorative or non- revisionist intentions when they used military force near their borders, freeing them to intervene. Outlined in the 1815 Vienna settlement treaties, the Concert’s bargain established a spheres of influence arrangement under which each of the Four allied powers held a droit de regard over a sphere connected to its historical allegiances, territorial borders, and power preponderance. These droits de regard granted each dominant power a relatively free hand to interfere in its subordinate’s domestic politics—a kind of hierarchical regime management based on exclusive diplomatic influence.162 It also granted that Power the freedom to militarily intervene in its sphere without needing to assure the other Powers through a costly consultation or multilateral

161 Bourdilliat (1859, 166). I have based this translation on Hertslet (1875, 1:375). See also the 1814 Treaty of Chaumont, the 1814 First Treaty of Paris (Bourdilliat 1859, 5–6, 11, 13, 19; Hertslet 1875, 1:3, 18), and the 1818 Aix-la-Chappelle British Memorandum, which openly discusses the issue of global rule (Webster 1919, 187–93).

162 Bullen (1979b).

coalition-building process, ceteris paribus. When the great powers needed to intervene outside of their spheres, they had to use the Concert’s other assurance mechanisms, such as the Article VI collective security mechanism, to assure their peers and generate the legitimacy needed to act.

The Powers were able to achieve dependable expectations around the bargain in large part because it was de jure—written out in treaties signed by not only the dominant and subordinate states but between the great powers themselves. By ensconcing their hierarchies in public international law, the Concert powers established a central legal reference point—the Vienna settlement or “traités de 1815”— around which interpretations about the boundaries of acceptable great power action could be relationally negotiated and converge.163

This system was not foolproof. In the early crises of the period, the Powers disputed how much Allied coordination was needed for an intervening power to credibly signal restraint. After this rocky start, the Powers established relatively congruous understandings and expectations about the bargain, coordinating their efforts through the Alliance mechanism when needed and assuring each other through diplomatic correspondence when not. The period was thus marked by an almost unprecedented systemic stability that nonetheless featured significant levels of local violence—systemically stable, locally violent. In Sheldon Anderson’s words, “War for the great powers in the nineteenth century was the rule, not the exception.”164

The Concert bargain was also inflexible. Because it was linked to the Vienna settlement, changing the bargain meant challenging the treaties of 1815 and risking system-wide war. The costs of altering the bargain were therefore high—revision to the Settlement would require great power consensus, a consensus that was hard-won in the initial Congress negotiations. Thus while the Powers deferred to “les Traités de 1814 et 1815” and stuck to the bargain’s fundamentals most of the time—certain powers had dominion over certain areas—this inflexibility eventually created a gap between de facto changes and the de jure status-quo. France, dissatisfied by the

163 This de jure characteristic differs sharply from the Cold War’s bargain, where no de jure agreement between the superpowers unambiguously established the systemic legitimacy of their competing hierarchical arrangements.

Anderson (2007, 304)

Vienna settlement, invaded Spain and interfered in Italy and the Ottoman Empire in search of a sphere of influence. French interference in the latter prompted Russia, the closest greater, to extend its hegemony over the Porte. Unable to rely on the Concert’s other mechanisms to solve the crisis, the Western allies aligned against Russia in 1853, precipitating the Crimean War.165

In toto, the Concert’s de jure geopolitical bargain helped “transform” European politics from the predatory balance-of-power politics of the 18th Century to a Concert of powers by enabling great power intervention while preventing great power war. It also did this at the cost of flexibility: the bargain could not adapt to the pressures put on it by French dissatisfaction and Russian revisionism into the second half of the 19th Century. After the Crimean War, great power politics returned to predation. In the 1860s Austria went to war over its sphere twice, losing its hegemonies over Italy to revolutionaries and the German Confederation to Prussia. French dissatisfaction culminated in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, which united the northern German principalities into the German Empire, completing Austria’s decline and irrevocably changing the European balance of power.166 As Jürgen Osterhammel summarizes, “In the second half of the nineteenth century, [Vienna] was dismantled piece by piece. …

After the Crimean War an opportunity was lost for a timely renewal of the Congress System. It was no longer possible to speak of a ‘concert of powers,’ and into the normative vacuum stepped Machiavellian realists (the term Realpolitik was coined in 1853) who risked international tensions or even war to impose their plans for new and larger nation- states. ... They achieved their objectives amid the ruins of the Vienna peace.167

*165 Schroeder (1972).

166 For a brief summary see Lascurettes (2017, 14–17).

167 Osterhammel (2014, 397–98).

My approach explains the mixed Concert intervention record, improving on previous accounts that focus on the congress mechanism or the balance of power. 168 A pure balance of power approach raises the question of why the Concert’s interventions did not provoke costly counterbalancing from the other powers until the 1850s.169 Scholars who have focused on the institutional side of the Concert argue the Alliance mechanism played a key role here. Although the Concert powers did use congresses to assure each other in some interventions, they also intervened unilaterally many times without upsetting the balance. These interventions are overlooked by existing studies.170 Introducing the geopolitical argument and more systematically examining the Concert’s intervention record—the first such attempt, to my knowledge—helps fill in these gaps.

I proceed in five sections. First, I outline the Concert geopolitical bargain and describe its effects on intervention legitimacy. Existing accounts of the Concert order focus on one of two mechanisms: its balance of power, or its collective security system. My account complements these two by showing how the geopolitical bargain—essentially an extension of the territorial distribution across borders—undergirded both the balance of power and collective security mechanisms, freeing the great powers to intervene in crises. In a second section, I survey the Concert era’s thirteen interventions, tracing the causal pathways between the bargain and the great powers’ intervention behaviour. Here I show how, despite a rough start, the great powers of the period used the geopolitical bargain to signal intervention restraint to one another. In the third

168 For representative examples of the institutional approach see Rendall (2007) and Mitzen (2013); for the balance of power, Kagan (1997a) and Slantchev (2005).

169 Kagan (1997a) argues they did but examines only the Greek interventions.

170 Mitzen’s (2013) impressive recent effort focuses entirely on the crises in the Ottoman Empire and pays significant attention to only one continental crisis, Austria’s intervention in Italy. Kagan (1997a) only addresses the interventions in the Ottoman Empire. Slantchev (2005) outlines the territorial settlement’s role in the balance, but does not examine the intervention record. Rendall’s (2000, 2002, 2006, 2007) various insightful efforts have focused only particular cases. As Kagan (1997b, 5n12) noted, “a complete test of the influence of the European Concert on great power cooperation should include all the other local conflicts in which they were involved, notably Belgium, the Iberian peninsula, and Central Europe.” See also Rendall (2000, 86–87).

section, I examine nonconforming cases, and show how they are the result of Russian and French “spoiler” behaviour of Russia and France. I conclude in a fourth section.

3.1 Existing accounts of the Concert spheres

Because it was the longest stable period of multipolar politics in the modern era, the Concert of Europe has long attracted scholars’ attention as a model for great power relations.171 Existing international relations accounts fall roughly into two groups. The first emphasizes its balance of power, conceived as an unintentional mechanistic outcome of the 1815 territorial settlement, while the second emphasizes 1815’s “transformation” of European politics through norms, institutions, and intentional cooperation.172 This breakdown is mirrored in historical analyses of

171 Recent studies of the concert have focused on amalgams to today’s emerging multipolarity. See Mitzen (2013, 18–19, 213); Lascurettes (2017).

172 For short reviews, see Mitzen (2013, 21–28) and Jarrett. For the first approach, see Kagan (1997a), Rendall (2000, 2002, 2006, 2007), Slantchev (2005), and to a lesser extent Mearsheimer (1994, 35–36, 2001, 288, 350–53). See also the debate instigated by Schroeder (1992, 1994c), the responses to him (Kraehe 1992; Elman, Elman, and Schroeder 1995, 182–93), and Schroeder’s rejoinders (Schroeder 1994a; Elman, Elman, and Schroeder 1995, 193– 95). For institutional approaches, see Jervis (1982, 362–68, 1985, 1992); Richardson (1999); Lindley (2003, 2007, 55–85); Ikenberry (2009, 80–116); for a focus on norms, see book-length treatments by Chapman (1998) and Mitzen (2013); these are complemented by articles and book chapters by Elrond (1976); Langhorne (1986); Holsti (1991, 114–74, 1992); Osiander (1994, 166–248); Finnemore (2004, 108–24); Simpson (2004, 91–131); Clark (2005, 85– 108, 2011, 73–97); Kupchan (2010, 188–201); Glanville (2013, 72–85); Mitzen (2015); Lascurettes (2017).

the Concert.173 Analyses of the Concert’s military interventions, usually secondary to analyses of its order, focus on the explanatory power of one of these two mechanisms.174

Although the Concert spheres system is often mentioned in these accounts, none have taken it as an object of analysis or systematically explained its connection to patterns of military intervention. The existing remarks are pregnant, but scattered and unsystematic. The Concert’s spheres system thus remains an oft-mentioned sideshow.175 The historian Paul Schroeder, for example, has argued the Concert system was based on “spheres of influence” and Continental “sub-hegemonies” that established “intermediary bodies” and buffer states separating the “great powers, making it more difficult for them to fight” but also linking them “by giving them something in common to manage.”176 Drawing this argument out further in a norms-focused treatment, Charles Kupchan notes the Concert powers recognized each other’s “particularly salient interests in specific areas,” and “special prerogatives in areas to which they attached historical importance.” While each Power did “not have a free hand” in its sphere, the spheres

173 For the balance of power, see Gulick (1955, c.f. 1965, 667), Kraehe (1983, 1992), Sked (1979a, 2008). Kissinger (1957, 1994), although often considered a realist, has a more complicated view of the Concert. See Kissinger (1957, 1–3, 172–74, 316ff, 1994, 77, 78, 2014, 59–82); and the review in Clark (2005, 103–4). Kissinger’s approach echoes Dupuis (1909, 63–64, 111–12). The key book-length works emphasizing the transformation are Schroeder (1962, 1972, 1994b, esp. 515-636, 2004); others, though sometimes disagreeing with Schroeder or moderating his claims, are Jarrett (2013) in English; Sédouy (2003, 2009) and Lentz (2013) in French; and Schulz (2009) in German. The emphasis on broader 19th Century transformation has been taken up by Winks and Neuberger (e.g. 2005, 14); Buzan and Lawson (2015); Osterhammel (2014).

174 For example Mitzen (2013, 2015) and Rendall (2000) focus on interventions that followed collective security efforts.

175 Hence the term is ubiquitous, but everywhere goes unexplained: see Schroeder (1986, 12, 17–20, 1989, 143, 147, 1992, 688–90, 693, 702, 1994b, 92, 116, 214, 229, 275, 463, 724, 775); Chapman (1998, 42, 70, 79, 81); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 65–67, 217–219, 236, 248, 256–257, 272–274, 285, 300); Slantchev (2005, 566, 571, 575, 578, 585, 591, 600, 608); Sked (2008, 59–60, 90, 100–105); Kupchan (2010, 182, 192–93); Mitzen (2013, 106, 110–11, 118, 122, 140, 145, 148–49, 167–68, 173, 182, 201); and Jarrett (2013, 87–88, 134, 156, 201, 243, 285). An exception here is Bullen (1979b), who I treat below.

176 Schroeder (1986, 17).

system granted it a “droit de regard” in its sphere and “other members tended to defer to its preferences.” Thus the “designation of spheres of influence [at Vienna] preempted disputes that might have otherwise jeopardized group cohesion… [helping] manage and contain crises in the periphery by effectively apportioning regional responsibilities among Concert members.”177

Balance of power approaches have also noted the spheres: Ennio Kraehe, although critical of Schroder’s transformation theses and sharp distinction between “equilibrium” and “balance of power,” agrees with Schroeder that the Concert order rested on Russo-British dual hegemony while Prussia, Austria, and France possessed regional sub-hegemonies—“although,” he notes, “I would prefer the term ‘spheres of influence’ to hegemony/sub-hegemony to describe the outcome of the outcome of the Vienna Settlement.”178 Branislav Slantchev follows this line, noting that that “the Vienna territorial settlement… delineated spheres of influence such that any significant changes would impinge directly on the interests of enough powers to allow them to counter any such revisionism”; and more generally, “One way to ensure stability is to allow each great power to maintain its own sphere of influence without (or with minimal) interference from the others.”179 These accounts connect the spheres to the territorial distribution, the balance, and the buffer state system, but do not go the distance by connecting them explicitly to military intervention.

The most detailed argument about the Concert’s spheres system and military intervention has come from historian Roger Bullen. Even then, the treatment is brief—a few pages in an article on Anglo-French disputes over Iberia. Bullen argues that intervention in the Concert period “reflected the fact that at the Congress of Vienna the victorious allies had divided Europe into informal spheres of influence; each great power was responsible for its own sphere.” While the great powers’ “normal means of exerting influence and, if necessary, control were diplomatic,” crises in spheres would often require military intervention. Otherwise, the great powers

177 Kupchan (2010, 185, 192–93).

178 Kraehe (1992, 709).

179 Slantchev (2005, 566, 578).

intervened in their respective spheres and generally recognized this right in others.180 Alan Sked has summarized Bullen’s approach as such: “peace…depended on the powers recognizing one another’s spheres of influence and refraining from challenging the predominant power in each.”181 Sked suggests that spheres of influence were “where the Powers clashed, not where they cooperated.” In the Belgian, Greek, and Spanish crises, “it was often not clear which power was the appropriate one to render aid and so spheres of influence became areas of Europe where the Powers clashed and war became possible.”182

3.2 The Concert bargain

My account deepens these pregnant remarks, particularly those of Bullen and Sked, by systematizing the role played by the spheres system in securing peace between the great powers while freeing them to intervene in local crises. The Vienna settlement established a tiered spheres-of-influence system that formally encompassed Continental Europe and tacitly extended across the rest of the globe. This geopolitical bargain helped legitimize and delegitimize great power military intervention through a process of great power deferral and assurance: the Power in whose sphere a crisis occurred could claim a leading, but not absolute, authority to intervene in that crisis—an almost free hand.183

The Concert’s geopolitical bargain was tied to the Congress of Vienna, an unprecedented nine- month meeting of all of Europe’s powers, and a number of adjoining treaties signed in 1814 and 1815, collectively referred to as the “Vienna Settlement” (“les traités de 1814 et 1815” in historical parlance). The Settlement radically revised the geopolitical landscape of continental Europe by restoring regimes, moving borders, partitioning some states, and combining others. Despite the intensity of the negotiations—at times the great powers threatened war against one another—the central task of the Congress was clear: to create a system of buffer states, spheres

180 Bullen (1979b, 57–58).

181 Sked (2008, 100).

182 Sked (2008, 60, 102).

183 Bull ([1977] 2012, 214).

of influence, and geopolitical boundaries that would prevent another hegemonic bid on the continent while satisfying the war’s major participants.184As Paul Schroeder has put it, the Congress aimed to establish “une juste équilibre par une sage répartition des forces”: a proper equilibrium [achieved] by a wise redistribution of forces.185

Concretely, this meant setting up a cordon sanitaire of buffer states around Russia and France, restoring Austrian influence in Italy, reconstructing a post-Bonapartist Spain, and strengthening the German Confederation so that Central Europe would be less vulnerable to hegemonic

184 Webster (1919, 75); Albrecht-Carrié (1973, 18); Holsti (1991, 115, 124, 169); Zamoyski (2007, 558–63); Jarrett (2013, 85–86, 94, 103); Simms (2013, 179–83); Mitchell (2018, 231–36). The measures of power at the time were principally population and territory (Holsti 1991, 123, 151, 154–55; Slantchev 2005, 582, 585). The Congress featured a ‘Statistical Committee’ tasked with calculating the populations of the territories under scrutiny at Vienna; its results, putatively objective, were politicized and disputed but remained a frame of reference in the territorial settlement (Webster 1919, 105–10; Nicolson 1946, 146–47; Slantchev 2005, 585; Jarrett 2013, 116–17, 126, 130– 31). 19th Century analysts of the Concert were also aware of the power disparities among the Great Power Concert members; see for example Holbraad (1970, 88–89) for Leopold von Ranke’s perspective.

185 Schroeder (1992, 697, 1989, 143); see also Sédouy (2003, 281, 2009, 13–16) and Lentz (2013, 35–48); see also, in the 1814 Chaumont and “First” Paris Peace treaties: “juste équilibre des puissances” [just equilibrium of powers]; “de fonder son repos sur un juste répartition de force entre les États qui la composent” [to found Europe’s repose on a just redistribution of force among the states that comprise it]; “une paix solide, fondée sur une juste répartition de force entre les puissances” [a solid peace, founded on a just redistribution of force among the powers] (Bourdilliat 1859, 5, 13, 19; c.f. Hertslet 1875, 1:2, 35). In the French documents of the period, “juste” means just in the senses of proper, correct, exact, equitable, balanced, well-adjusted, fair, and/or legitimate, rather than simply legal or rightful; “équilibre” is figuratively applied to politics from its definition as the “État des corps maintenus en repos sous l'influence de plusieurs forces qui se contre-balancent exactement” [State of bodies maintained in repose under the influence of many forces that counter-balance each other exactly]; “force” means the same as the English equivalent—i.e., capabilities or strength rooted in physical, corporal power. For a discussion of the term “juste équilibre” see Schroeder (1989) and Pallain (1881, 445). All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. I have consulted the 1798 and 1832 editions of the Dictionnaire de L'Académie française, available online at the University of Chicago’s ARTFL project: http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/.

predation, as had happened under Napoleon, among other concerns.186 As Brendan Simms notes, the Vienna settlement amounted to a “geopolitical revolution in Europe.”187

The Vienna settlement also put into place the basic parameters of Concert intervention: the Concert powers interpreted the spheres system to mean a Power could unilaterally intervene in its own sphere to suppress a crisis while avoiding the costly assurance games of collective security. When a Power wanted to intervene outside of its sphere, it had to assure its peers through the collective security mechanism—or face counterbalancing.

Two caveats warrant discussion. First, as noted above, great power consensus over the parameters of the bargain was not automatic. While the geopolitical layout of Europe was clear, the Vienna settlement and bargain had to be interpreted—and these interpretations needed to be mutually compatible or relational for the bargain to affect intervention legitimacy. As I show in the case discussions below, convergence around the bargain emerged during the first crises the Concert faced, in the 1820s. Although the Powers did not disagree on the geographical specifics of the bargain from 1815 forward—who possessed dominion where—they disagreed about how dominion should interact with the Alliance’s collective security commitments. Russia in particular argued that while a dominant power could take the initiative in responding to crises within its sphere, it should still coordinate with the Allies before intervening. Others, such as Britain, argued for a more restricted unilateralism and freer hand in the spheres.188

186 Metternich and Castlereagh’s main goal at Vienna was the construction of an “independent European centre” that could act as a bulwark against France and Russia. See Kraehe (1983, 5–6). For an account of the territorial issues (and others on the Congress itinerary—such as river navigation and Jewish citizenship) see Jelavich (1964, 38–43); Chapman (1998, 40–57); Jarrett (2013, 84–149); Mitchell (2018, 227–55). That the Congress leaders’ central concern was territory can be easily gleaned from their terminology: “territorial distribution,” “European settlement,” “territorial system of Europe,” “European system thus regulated,” “system of administering Europe,” “common interest,” “order,” “settlement of differences,” “rights of states,” etc. See Webster (1919, 168–93).

187 Simms (2013, 182).

188 See the Neapolitan and Spanish intervention cases below in particular.

The British view prevailed, aided by great power worries Russia would use multilateral Allied intervention to aggrandize its power or occupy territory. But part of the Russian request remained throughout the period in the form of correspondence between the great powers in which they laid out their justifications and assured one another. In particular these correspondences are framed in legal terms—framed, as Metternich puts it, by the letter and the spirit of the Treaties of 1815.189 This shows that de jure geopolitical bargains are relationally negotiated with reference to their founding documents and primary through legal or diplomatic reasoning, as opposed to by force, as noted in chapter 2. And although these diplomatic assurances did not amount to costly consultation on the scale of formal congresses or multilateralism, they do show consensus about the bargain was not automatic, and required repeated negotiation and communication to have a stabilizing effect.

Second, while the bargain’s de jure status lent the bargain wide legitimacy it also made it inflexible, as noted above. Because the bargain and its spheres were an outcome of a public treaty signed by all of Europe’s sovereigns, they were recognized by the great powers and acquiesced to by the lesser signatories of the Vienna treaties. This meant the fates of the geopolitical bargain, territorial settlement, and European peace were bound together in the minds of the Congress diplomats and had to be backed by the Powers’ moral authority and coercive capabilities.190

Altering the territorial distribution meant altering the Vienna settlement, and therefore required the consensus of all the great powers. This was often a virtue: because the Vienna settlement was so hard won, and changing it a risky affair, the great powers acted cautiously, mutually ensuring they each deferred to the Vienna status-quo when acting in crises. Where the Concert bargain was vague or disputed, this inflexibility proved to be a vice. The Settlement left France stripped

189 See for example Metternich to Apponyi, 4 January 1847 (items #1593-1595 in Metternich 1880a, 7:359-368).

190 For this aspect of the Settlement, see Mitzen (2013, 64–101). The concert diplomats did not use the term “sphere of influence” themselves, preferring a wide-ranging set of terms such as “possession,” “interet,” “protecteur,” “domaine,” and so on. Here I have preferred “dominion” among these terms to describe the dominant-subordinate relationships captures by the spheres system and bargain.

of a sphere and dissatisfied. It also left the geopolitical status of the Ottoman Empire ambiguous, giving Russia a space into which it could slowly expand—a problem I outline in the Greek crisis cases below. Unable to accommodate these changes within the Vienna framework, French réssentiment and Russian expansionism eventually destroyed the Concert.

3.2.1 Mapping the spheres

Because the Vienna settlement explicitly laid out a territorial distribution and renewed existing security relationships between the great powers and their vassal states, the geographical contours of the Concert’s geopolitical bargain is fairly straightforward.191 The Settlement established a tiered hierarchy in which different polities played different roles in the equilibrium, with the great powers enjoying special rights and privileges over vassal and buffer states below.192 After 1815, only Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria enjoyed the full benefits of great power status, including the possession of spheres. Referred to as the “grandes puissances,” great power was a new term at the time.193 At the Congress this new status was manifested in a “Committee of Four” that made all of the Settlement’s ultimate decisions.194 Mark Jarrett summarizes:

191 I thus follow Bullen (1979b) in focusing on the Vienna Settlement and its adjoining treaties as the “source code” of the Concert’s bargain.

192 As Gruner (2002, 172–73) has noted, the concert system was not based on “equal power” but composed of “states differing in size, power political potentials, financial and economic resources, cultural impact, manpower, geographic position, and influence at a regional or European level, thus constituting a stable system of great powers, secondary powers… and intermediary bodies, all being bound together by a common European culture, common traditions, and their European historical experience.” See also Gruner (1992, 726–28); Bullen (1979b), Schroeder (1986, 1992); and Kraehe (1992).

193 See Mitzen (2013, 87–90). According to Webster (1919, 80), the self-selection of the Four Allied powers (and later Five) as the arbiters of European peace marked the “first expression of the idea of the great powers, with rights as such, distinct from any derived from treaties..” The Concert diplomats kept to this general nomenclature: Castlereagh uses the term “Great Powers,” “Powers of the first rank,” and “leading Powers”; Humboldt “Puissances Grandes” (Webster 1919, Appendices I, IV).

194 For a detailed account of the structure of the Congress, see Lentz (2013, 93–105). On great power self-selection, see Webster (1919, 61–74); Nicolson (1946, 137–39); Albrecht-Carrié (1973, 12); Schroeder (1972, 404–5); Holsti

In effect, the great powers would debate and resolve all issues amongst themselves and then hand down their verdicts to the rest of Europe…. With overwhelming military power at their disposal, the five great powers formed a pentarchy capable of imposing their will on the entire Continent whenever they could reach their own consensus.195

The Four were not equal or multipolar in any conventional sense. Russia and Britain were far more powerful than the other powers. Tsar Alexander I’s Russia in particular occupied East and Central Europe after narrowly expulsing Napoleon’s invasion, mirroring Stalin’s position in 1945.196 France, rehabilitated in 1818, had been stripped of its sphere and was a defeated power; Austria, although led by its virtuosic chancellor Klemenz von Metternich, the “Prime Minister of Europe,” was the weakest of the lot.197 But by forming a “Directory of Europe” and granting each other rights and duties, in particular spheres of influence, the Concert operated as if it were multipolar.198 Each power’s sphere corresponded to this as if multipolarity and was determined

(1991, 125–35); Chapman (1998, 36); Finnemore (2004, 95); Sédouy (2009, 86–93); Lentz (2013, 59–76); and Mitzen (2013, 85–96).

195 Jarrett (2013, 180, 197).

196 As we will see in the next chapter, Stalin was not unaware of this fact. Russia occupied Poland and Saxony, which Bartlett (1996, 11) considers to be “as decisive as anything that was to be enjoyed by Stalin in 1945.” This allowed Tsar Alexander I, who was supreme commander of the allied forces at the Battle of Leipzig and led the occupation of Paris at the end of the War of the Sixth Coalition, to leverage Russia’s “hard power” on the Saxony- Poland issue (Jarrett 2013, 72, 98–99, 156–57; see also Gulick 1955, 193, 1965, 648; Schroeder 1994b, 524).

197 Kissinger (1957, 11); see also Mitchell (2018, 227–55). The period under question is sometimes called the “Age of Metternich” and the Concert itself the “Metternich system” (Albrecht-Carrié 1962, 18, 1968, 10; Sked 1979c, 1989, 8–41; Glanville 2013, 73).

198 This is my own term, but describes the approach taken by Gruner (1992, 2002). The observation that the Concert’s great powers varied widely in power was first made by Schroeder (1972, 403–6, 1992, 686–90) and now appears to hold a scholarly consensus in both political science and history: see for example Richardson (1999, 53); W.S. Anderson (2002, 7–14); Finnemore (2004, 90–93, 163–68); Slantchev (2005, 573, 586); Kupchan (2010, 191); Alexander (2012, 6–7, 51–52); and Jarrett (2013, 88–89).

by geographic proximity, power preponderance, historical ties, and strategic interest. These preponderances were then legitimized in the Vienna settlement treaties.199

Below the great powers, a second tier of “secondary powers” included Sweden, Spain, Denmark, the United Netherlands, and Portugal. With the exception of Portugal, which had a set of defence treaties with Britain, these middle powers did not fall formally in any great power’s sphere. This was especially the case in Spain, where Britain, which maintained control of the seas, struggled to circumvent France’s attempts to re-establish influence, as I explore in the Spanish case below. Some of these states were reconstituted or constituted at Vienna to hem in future French expansionism by acting as independent buffers that could not threaten the balance on their own but were strong enough to deter French action. As will be explored in the Belgian case below, the United Netherlands—created in 1814 by the Allies—was such a buffer. This tier also included special carve-outs such as Switzerland, whose neutrality was affirmed in the Vienna Settlement, but which acted as a buffer state between the Central powers and was generally thought to fall under, along with the rest of the German Confederation, joint Prussian-Austrian protection.200 Because of their important strategic purpose—essential for the equilibrium, but appetizing conquests for the same reasons—disputes over these secondary powers risked great power conflict in ways that disputes over the next tier did not.201 The creation of buffer states is a common part of geopolitical bargains: the Cold War bargain, for example, established Austria as a neutral buffer state.202

199 Bullen (1979b, 57–59). The Vienna Spheres system thus did not formally include nonstrategic links such as shared ethnicity or religion. Russia’s informal or nonrecognized sphere in the Ottoman Empire did include these factors, however, and I discuss them below in the section on the Eastern Question.

200 On the German Confederation as a buffer between France and Russia (but also because nominally independent and under the tutelage of two powers, restraining Austrian and Prussian influence), see Kraehe (1983); Gruner (1992, 729–31); Schroeder (1994b, 538–48); Lentz (2013, 141–58).

201 Schroeder (1986, 17–25).

202 On buffer states, see Schroeder (1984).

A third tier included nominally-sovereign states that fell in the spheres of the Four, sometimes described in the documents as natural “possessions,” “political domains,” or as under “suzerainties” or “tutelages”; these were under the de jure influence of great powers, and included the Russian portion of Poland (“Congress Poland”) and Finland, Austria’s possessions of Galicia and in Italy, Prussian influence over its portions of Saxony, Poznań, Thorn and Swedish Pomerania; joint Prussian-Austrian influence over the German Confederation; and joint Prussia-Russian-Austrian influence over Kraków. Like the second tier, these polities were placed under the domains of powers for geographic and strategic reasons—Austrian influence in Italy meant keeping French influence out—while also compensating them on the basis of desert.

A final tier, possessed in 1815 mostly by Britain, Russia, and later France, included sub- sovereign imperial possessions off the Continent, deliberately “fenced off” from the Vienna Settlement. As we will see below, the exclusion of the Ottoman Empire from the Settlement— either as ranking power or as part of a sphere—led to a dangerous ambiguity over Russia’s claims to some of its territories, contributing to the Crimean War. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire includes two of Sked’s conflictual sphere of influence “states,” Greece and Turkey.203

In summary, the Concert geopolitical bargain assigned each of the Four authority over a hierarchy of territories in exclusion to the others, beginning with semi-sovereign “possessions” and suzerainties and, in the cases of Britain, France, and Russia, extending to global imperial territories. The Concert geopolitical bargain thus had two mutually reinforcing components: a ladder of territorial possessions extending from each Power downward, and a horizontal system of spheres among the Four across the top. The Concert system was thus neither a system of formally equal but materially unequal states, nor composed of independent hierarchical dyads. The hierarchies extended downward and relied on the great powers’ horizontal recognition of one another, and this recognition depended in part on each Power’s possession of a vertical hierarchy. Buzan and Lawson have termed this a “dual authority” that “tied together great

203 Schroeder (1986, 12–17, 1992, 689–90, 1994b, 575). Holsti (1991, 129, 136, 166); Anderson (2002, 14–15); Clark (2005, 104–5); Slantchev (2005, 575); Ikenberry (2009, 112–13); Jarrett (2013, 45–50, 201).

powers horizontally, while constructing a vertical point of demarcation between them and other states.” 204

A primary function of the geopolitical bargain was to make acceptable or legitimize a great power’s action in its own sphere. In normal times this meant the appropriate great power was responsible for its vassal, and could interfere in its domestic politics through ordinary diplomatic means. Metternich, for example, was often engaged in the supervision of reform in Austria’s Italian vassal states.205 When a crisis occurred in a Power’s sphere, it was acceptable for that Power to intervene under its own banner. Horizontally, legitimacy took the form of assurance: the possessing Power could dictate the response to a crisis, including unilateral intervention, without risking war with the others. The strength of sphere of influence legitimacy is such that even when intervention strategies were contested among the Five, they still deferred to the possessing Power—as was the case in Austria’s intervention in Naples. When a crisis occurred in no one’s sphere, pre-existing disputes over intervention norms between the Powers were exacerbated. This was the case in Spain and the various interventions in the Ottoman Empire; the latter ultimately broke the Concert system by leading to the Crimean War.

3.2.2 Intervention purpose during the Concert

The term intervention as distinct from war found its first systematic use in the Concert order: statesmen of the time applied the word to instances of “the use of force by one state against the internal affairs of another.” Interventions were not preceded by declarations of war and were generally characterized as “acts of assistance in support of beleaguered, friendly governments” rather than acts of “aggression against another state.”206 The use of the term intervention coincided with the final removal of non-territorial sources of political authority, such as feudal privilege, from the European continent such that political authority “was now defined entirely by

204 Buzan and Lawson (2015, 179). This “dual nature” is noted, though not developed as I do here, in English School accounts. See Watson (2007, 98); Clark (2011, 73–97); Simpson (2004, 93, 102–10).

205 See for example Reinerman (1988).

206 Bullen (1979b, 54–55); see also Sked (2008, 100–101); Finnemore (2004, 117–18) and Glanville (2013, 74–76).

its boundaries.”207 This made military intervention particularly useful as an instrument of policy: an offending regime could be replaced, and order restored, without endangering the territorial entity that housed it—essential for an equilibrium based on territorially bounded polities.208

The problem of great power military intervention manifested itself in this period as the ambiguity about whether a given intervention would respect the 1815 territorial distribution, or revise it. Interventions could not threaten the Vienna settlement as a “cardinal rule.”209 The most commonly accepted kind of intervention was restorative: great powers intervened to suppress rebellions they saw as threatening the Settlement and reinstalled (or, in some cases, freed) the deposed sovereign. The Concert’s statesmen feared that the combination of revolutionary Jacobinism, popular sovereignty, and nationalism would reignite violence on the continent and plunge Europe into a period akin to the Napoleonic era—which they had so recently, after unprecedented diplomatic efforts spanning two decades, finally put to bed.210 As Alan Sked notes, legitimate interventions “were based on the 1815 treaties and the international order established by them… The assumption was that international order and domestic tranquility went hand in hand. Revolution caused war and war caused revolution.”211

207 Branch (2013, 135–38).

208 Finnemore (2004, 118).

209 Finnemore (2004, 120); see also Holsti (1991, 151).

210 The primary statesmen at the Congress came of age during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. With the exceptions of Talleyrand and Hardenberg (b. 1754 and 1750, respectively), almost all the chief representatives at Vienna were born around 1770—the same year as Beethoven and Hegel—or in the decade after: Humboldt in 1767; Bernstorff, 1769; Castlereagh, 1769; Wellington, 1769; Czartoryski, 1770; Metternich, 1773; Capodistrias, 1776; Alexander I, 1777; Nesselrode, 1780. The chief representatives at the Congress of Verona born at the same time and not present at Vienna are Montmorency, born in 1767; Chateaubriand, 1768; Canning, 1770; and Villèle, 1773. The violence of the revolution and Napoleon’s conquests had a profound impact on this generation, tempering their dispositions toward liberal reforms. On the Enlightenment educations, personalities, Napoleonic experiences of the statesmen, see Jarrett (2013, 72–84); for an account that discusses the liberal thought of the period and does much to revise the thesis that the Congress was “reactionary,” see Vick (2014, 6–8, 233–77).

211 Sked (2008, 100–101).

Otherwise, great power bias in favour of the Settlement and its territorial status-quo meant that the great powers were as a rule strongly noninterventionist. Interventions also had to be a last resort, reflecting the high value placed by the Vienna system’s statesmen on diplomatic solutions to crises. Militarized interventions signaled a failure of diplomacy—if an intervention was required, it meant that both the responsible great power and the vassal sovereign had lost control of a given political crisis. Interventions in the early 19th Century were expensive, and like those of today, had uncertain outcomes and often required lengthy occupations.212 Thierry Lentz summarizes:

The Congress had de jure created a distinction between aggrandizement by conquest, judged null and void, and those obtained by treaties. Unilateral modifications of the international order were no longer tolerated: this did not make the annexations and rectifications of territories always legitimate, but, at least, it now made them in accordance with a juridical norm admitted by all.213

3.2.3 Assurance strategies

Because a Power might use an intervention to expand its territory or increase its influence, the Concert powers had to assure the others of their anti-revolutionary, non-revisionist intentions. Consultation and moral support signaled a given intervention’s counter-revolutionary, restorative intent—its great power restraint.214 To this end a major assurance strategy employed by the

212 Bullen (1979b, 58–59).

213 Lentz (2013, 254): “Le congrès avait crée de jure une distinction entre les agrandissements par conquête, jugés nuls et non avenus, et ceux obtenus par des traités. Les modifications unilatérales de l’ordre international n’étaient plus tolérées: cela ne rendait pas les annexions et rectifications de territoires toujours légitimes, mais, au moins, elles se faisaient désormais en accord avec une norme juridique admise par tous.”

214 Finnemore (2004, 115–24); Holsti (1991, 139–56). These norms were primarily articulated in correspondences between the Concert statesmen after the January 1820 Spanish revolt, including the 5 May 1820 state paper. They later appeared in the documents and protocols of the Troppau, Laibach, and Verona Congresses, which were aimed at dealing with revolutionary crises on the Continent. Hence intervention norms in the period are sometimes referred to as the “Troppau-Laibach system” (Slantchev 2005, 599).

Concert powers was to seek moral support, “l’appui moral,” from the other Allies. This support was generally expressed in a joint statement or protocol either emanating from a ministerial Congress, ambassadorial conference, or exchange of official dispatches indicating as much.

Only the support of the Concert powers was needed because only they could legitimately intervene in other states, reflecting the disparity of coercive capability between the Five and Europe’s other states. As Roger Bullen has outlined, intervention legitimacy was “grounded in the right which belonged to the powers” and the “assumption” that the European peace depended on the pacific character—“maintenance of order”—within its states:

…there was a manifest determination amongst the great powers to establish the principle that intervention by force in the internal affairs of another state was legitimate and legal act. It derived its legitimacy from the assumption shared by all the powers that they were the self-appointed guardians of the peace of Europe. If it was the obligation of the great power to maintain the peace, it was argued that they had the right to see that it was not disturbed by others…. in a very real sense intervention was the price which the powers paid for their great power status.215

The Concert powers occasionally disagreed on the level of formal support needed to assure each other. As I will show in the first set of cases below—Austria’s intervention in Italy and France’s intervention in Spain—the Powers were initially divided on whether Article VI of the 1815 Quadruple Alliance treaty should be formally invoked every time a crises occurred. 216 The Eastern statesmen, and especially Metternich, tended to overreact to crises and view them as Jacobin extensions of the French revolution.217 Conversely, British and to an extent, French

215 Bullen (1979b, 55, 59).

216 The principle of Great Power consultation was established at Chaumont and re-affirmed in subsequent treaties, including Article VI of the Quadruple Alliance. See Holsti (1991, 129, 166–67); Jarrett (2013, 166).

217 See for example the 31 March 1820 letter from Prince Hardenberg of Prussia to Castlereagh (1848, Vol. XII: 224): “The events happening in Spain may bring great dangers to the repose of Europe. The example of army creating a revolution is infinitely sinister.” [Les évènemens arrivés en Espagne peuvent amener de grands dangers pour le repos de L’Europe. L’exemple d’une armée faisant une revolution est infiniment funeste]. As Kissinger

statesmen downplayed the threat posed by revolutions to the Settlement and favoured individual expressions of Allied support to publicly coordinated joint action.218

Ultimately, however, the Powers agreed on the fundamentals concerning intervention purpose and the requirement that every power be assured none would take advantage of a crisis to revise the Settlement. In their disagreements over the Spanish and Neapolitan revolts, for example, the Concert statesmen repeatedly restate the purposes of the Concert and draw attention to their mutual agreement about Concert principles.219 Summarizing the various disputes about intervention in the 1820-1850 period, Bullen notes that “never was a debate about the abstract principle of intervention and non-intervention between the great powers.”220 Rather, the disputes had initially been in reality “about the nature and the purpose of the five-power alliance”—in other words, about the role of the Article VI joint Congress system as opposed to the Concert order. 221 In toto, legitimate interventions on the Continent had a narrow scope: they had to

(1957, 249) notes, the Eastern powers “considered social unrest as the primary threat and attempted to deal with it as an international problem.”

218 Webster (1919, 189ff); Vincent (1974, 70–73); Kissinger (1994, 83ff); Clark (2005, 94); and Bew (2011). Later in the Concert period, this disagreement widened into the second disagreement, sometimes characterized as “ideological”: Britain and France began to intervene in support of Constitutionalist regimes, rather than against them, provoking diplomatic protestations from the Eastern Courts, and vice versa. See Riasanovsky (1959, 243–45); Lincoln (1978, 144–46, 226–28); Bullen (1979b, 54–58).

219 See for example the statements of Metternich in his correspondence with the Prime Minister of France Richelieu, and those in the exchanges between Nesselrode, Hardenberg, and Castlereagh in the latter’s Memoirs (Metternich and Richelieu 1958, 105; Castlereagh 1848, 223, 286, 290 respectively); and Metternich on intervention in Bertier de Sauvigny (1962, 73–74).

220 Bullen (1979b, 56). Cf. Finnemore (2004, 119–20): “the Powers argued hard about intervention rules precisely because they could no longer legitimately exercise other military options. They could no longer simply conquer and annex these places, nor could they shuffle these territories to friendly clients or allies. The great powers agreed, above all, that the Vienna treaties had to be respected.”

221 Bullen (1979b, 56).

respond to revolutions that threatened the equilibrium, and they could not threaten the equilibrium. Above all this meant interventions had to respect and uphold, and be framed as doing so, the “traités de 1815.”222

3.3 Intervention in the Concert

In this section I examine at twelve interventions, organizing them on the basis of whether they took place inside or outside a great power’s sphere. The interventions span three periods. Three occurred in the early 1820s, when a wave of revolts hit Southern Europe (Naples, Portugal, Spain); five occurred as a result of the 1830s revolutions, best known for resulting in the July Monarchy (Congress Poland, Belgium, and three in Central Italy); two occurred on the eve of the 1848 revolutions (Portugal, Kraków); and one during them (Italy). Two of the Ottoman Empire interventions occurred during the war for Greek Independence (late 1820s) and another in 1840 during the Turkey-Egypt war. Eight of the intervention cases occurred in spheres recognized by the Vienna system: one in Naples, two in Poland, three in Portugal, and the three in Central Italy. Five interventions—Belgium, Spain, Lebanon, and the two in Greece—occurred outside of any acknowledged sphere. Six interventions involved collective Allied action, either diplomatic (Naples, Spain) or military (Belgium, Lebanon, and twice in Greece); five were unilateral and not collective (Poland, Portugal, and three in Central Italy); and three involved multilateral, non- Allied collective action (Kraków and twice in Portugal).

By and large these intervention conform to my expectations. When the Powers intervened outside their spheres, they invested more time and energy assuring their peers through formal consultation and multilateral coalition-building. When they intervened inside their spheres, they sought only perfunctory assurances from their peers and intervened alone. I discuss two exceptions to my expectations—the Austrian intervention in Naples and the French intervention in Spain—in section 4 of this chapter.

222 Holsti (1991, 151); Black (2010, 153); Gruner (2002, 172–73).

3.3.1 Collective intervention in a de jure sphere: Austria in Naples, 1821

The first major intervention under Concert auspices occurred in July 1820 when Jacobin Carbonari successfully captured Naples, forcing the Neapolitan King, Ferdinand IV, to accede to a popular constitution pioneered in a revolt in Spain earlier that year. Although the Kingdom appeared “tranquil” in the aftermath of the bloodless revolution, it soon became clear that the King feared for his life. Worrying that the revolution would threaten Austria’s other Italian holdings, Metternich resolved to end the rebellion by force and reinstate Ferdinand, a Bourbon king placed on the throne of the “Two Sicilies” in the Vienna Settlement.223

The Naples intervention brought about serious diplomatic conflict between the great powers over how the intervention should be conducted—by Austria, or by an Austrian-led coalition under a European banner. Despite this rough start, it also shows the Concert’s nascent geopolitical bargain roaring to life: after convincing Tsar Alexander I each great power should be able to intervene in its sphere unimpeded, Metternich was able to launch a unilateral Austrian intervention to suppress to rebellion in Naples. Because it is an outlier case, I spend more time on this intervention than others.

Naples lay firmly in Austria’s post-1815 sphere of influence. This was clear to all the parties involved: Austrian influence over Italy was established in the Vienna Settlement, building on the 1813 Treaty of Toeplitz, signed by the Eastern powers, and the 1814 First Treaty of Paris, signed by all Five. In the Settlement, Lombardy and Venetia were placed under direct Austrian rule. Austrian influence over the boot was sufficient that, according to Bertier de Sauvigny (1962, 186), even the two most ostensibly autonomous Italian polities—Naples and Piedmont- Sardinia—had only “a façade of independence.”224 Although these treaties reflected Austria’s

223 My account here draws on Webster (1925, 259–345); Schenk (1947, 144–56); Kissinger (1957, 247–85); Schroeder (1962, 23–163, 1994b, 606–14); Bertier de Sauvigny (1986, 334–51); Sédouy (2009, 99–125); Mitzen (2013, 106–23); and Jarrett (2013, 231–85). For Metternich’s thoughts on Italian self-government in his own words, see Bertier de Sauvigny (1962, 188–93).

224 See also Schroeder (1962, 9): “the only state of note under direct Austrian influence was the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.”

historical ties to myriad Italian thrones through the Hapbsurg bloodline, they were most importantly grounded in Italy’s physical geographic proximity to Austria, its consequent interlocking interests, and the designs of the Vienna settlement: French influence in the Mediterranean was hemmed by expelling it from Italy while Austria (which had lost the Holy Roman Empire and much of its influence over the German Confederation that replaced it to Prussia) was compensated with an increased Italian sphere.225

Most importantly, however, Austria’s hegemony over Italy was legally confirmed during the Settlement and widely understood as its “natural” position. As Norman Rich notes, “the most conspicuous feature of the arrangement for Italy [at Vienna] was the role assigned to Austria as chief defender of the Italian states against France.”226 Metternich himself summarized Austrian dominion over Italy best in a July 26, 1820 letter about the Neapolitan revolt addressed to Count Rechberg:

By his political and personal ties, by his blood relations with many of Italy’s royal families, and by the geographic situation of his own States, His Majesty the Emperor is particularly interested in these unfortunate events. The political order, established in 1815 under the guarantee of all the European Powers, has made Austria the natural guardian and protector of public order in Italy.227

225 Austria signed an additional secret 1815 treaty with Ferdinand, who promised not to change Naples’ domestic institutions without Austrian consent, giving Austria an additional basis for legal intervention. See Kissinger (1957, 251); Bertier de Sauvigny (1962, 187–186); Schroeder (1962, 9, 41–42); Laven (1997, 5–6); Chapman (1998, 42, 44–49); Slantchev (2005, 589); Sédouy (2009, 100); Jarrett (2013, 65, 236–37); Mitzen (2013, 110–11). For the organization of Italy at Vienna, see Lentz (2013, 174–89) and Jarrett (2013, 133–36).

226 Rich (1992, 19).

227 Metternich (item #478 in 1880a, 3:408, an alternate english translation can be found 1880b, 3:434): “Par ses relations politiques et personnelles, par sa proche parenté avec plusieurs familles princières d’Italie, par la situation géographique de ses propres États, Sa Majesté l’Empereur est intéressé d’une manière toute particulière dans ces tristes événements. L’ordre politique, institué en 1815 sous la garantie de toutes les puissances européennes, a fait de l’Autriche la gardienne et la protectrice naturelle de l’ordre public en Italie.” Italics mine. See also his 17 July 1820 letter to Count Esterhazy, the Austrian ambassador to London, in Sédouy (2009, 103).

Despite this acknowledged hegemony, Metternich’s plan to unilaterally reinstate Ferdinand as absolute monarch with Austrian troops created dissent amongst the Concert powers. Britain, Austria, and France wanted a unilateral Austrian intervention with perfunctory great power consultation and assurance. Tsar Alexander I wanted a fully European, if Austrian-led, response to the crisis unanimously and publicly endorsed by all the Allies. According to Britain, the revolt in Naples should be treated by the Concert as an issue in Austria’s sphere of influence, and not as a European crisis. Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh’s 5 May 1820 State Paper laid out Britain’s noninterventionist interpretation of the 1815 treaties: the Quadruple Alliance was not a “Union for the government of the World, or for the Superintendence of the Internal Affairs of other States.”228 The Alliance’s primary purpose—especially Article VI—was to convene in the event of a revisionist, revolutionary France, or threat to Europe of a similar scale.229 The revolt in Naples was an Austrian issue, and it was enough for Concert unanimity that Metternich transparently discuss his plans with the other Concert powers. Because Italy already lay in Austria’s sphere, there was little risk of Austria upsetting the Vienna Settlement by acting unilaterally. There was if other powers intervened, or used Naples to generate abstract intervention principles that would apply to any case regardless of its geopolitical circumstances.230 Put simply, for Britain it was enough that Italy lay in Austria’s sphere of influence. The geopolitical bargain acted as an assurance mechanism against any fears Austria might use Naples as a pretense to revise the Vienna settlement, and unilateral Austrian intervention would assure against the same by other powers.

228 Quoted from Appendix A, Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy (A. W. Ward and Gooch 1923, 2:627; the whole state paper is 622-632). See Webster (1925, 235–42); Jarrett (2013, 229–31); and Mitzen (2013, 107–10) for the state paper in context.

229 As Castlereagh (1848, Vol. XII: 256) explained to King George IV before the paper’s circulation, one of its purposes was to “recall the attention of the Allied Cabinets to the true and correct principles of the Alliance, and to the necessity of not generalizing them so as to render the concert an embarrassment.”

230 Webster (1925, 2:259-284); Schroeder (1962, 46–47, 51–56); Vincent (1974, 73–83); Bew (2011, 120–22); Jarrett (2013, 236–45).

France, stripped of its influence in Italy (to Austria’s gain) in the Vienna Settlement, towed the British noninterventionist line after an initial period of probing. France was concerned that Austria could use the crisis in Naples to further entrench its preponderance over the Italian peninsula while allowing Britain to consolidate hegemony in the Mediterranean.231 An August 1820 memorandum suggested that France, too, shared interests in Naples through the dynastical ties of Italy’s Bourbon crowns. While Austria could have simply intervened unilaterally, as Bertier de Sauvigny summarizes, it would need to “legitimize, so to speak, the use she would make of her forces and remove in advance, from the malevolence of all countries, all pretext of distorting her views. She had to wish to join to physical force the moral force given by a declaration of the Five.”232 Metternich and Castlereagh rejected France’s argument that pre- Vienna dynastical claims gave it special influence in Italy overtures, but called for a great powers conference. The French dropped their position, probably motivated by their desire to have Austria (under Allied supervision) install a moderate French-style Charte in Naples instead of abolishing its constitution altogether.233

Russia echoed France’s initial position, but with much greater consequences. Tsar Alexander I understood the Neapolitan crisis in European terms and thus was “not disposed to give Austria carte blanche at Naples.”234 Under the influence of Count Capodistrias, Alexander pressed hard for the first post-Vienna Congress, to be attended by all the great power diplomats, where the issue could be discussed and united Alliance front presented to the Neapolitan revolutionaries.235

231 Schroeder (1962, 48, 53); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:330-331); Bridge (1979, 41); Sédouy (2009, 104).

232 Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:331): “légitimer pour ainsi dire l'emploi qu'elle ferait de ses forces et d'enlever d'avance aux malveillants de tous les pays tout prétexte de dénaturer ses vues. A la force physique elle devait souhaiter joindre la force morale que lui donnerait une déclaration des Cinq.”

233 Schroeder (1962, 46–48, 57–58, 1994b, 609–10); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:319-335, 347–55); Sédouy (2009, 103–6). See also Jarrett (2013, 266, 270–71, 278), who attributes France’s noninterventionist policy in part to the general confusion of its foreign office.

234 Schroeder (1962, 47).

235 Grimsted (1969, 251) Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:341-343); Schroeder (1994b, 609–10); Jarrett (2013, 240, 245–47).

Capodistrias in particular wanted to use the opportunity to develop a protocol of general principles that would commit the Alliance to future intervention.236

Because of the importance of Naples to Austria’s sphere and Metternich’s counter-revolutionary system, Metternich saw the issue as “one of Austrian state interests” which “must decide everything.”237 As noted, Austria was the weakest of the Five Concert powers: it ruled over a vast and mountainous polyglot empire surrounded by rivals: France to the west, Prussia to the north, and Russia to the East, and the Ottoman Empire to the south. But as the “central” power on the continent, its geopolitical coherence as great power—its territorial integrity, buffer states, and sphere of influence—was arguably the most important geographic piece of the Settlement.238

To this extent Austria was inclined to the British position, which was to treat the matter within the Austrian sphere. But Metternich also sought the support of the rest of the Alliance; he feared that acting without their moral support (l’appui moral) would endanger the Austrian intervention, the Alliance, or both. This was especially acute in the case of Russia; while Metternich did not feel he needed French support, without Russian support the Alliance could be endangered, and a Franco-Russian stand against unilateral Austrian intervention might endanger it.239 Metternich’s suspicion here would prove true three decades later: Russia was alienated from the Concert and the Crimean War was the result.

In hopes of attaining the “moral support and a free hand for Austria from the other powers,” Metternich agreed to hold a Cabinet conference at Troppau under the auspices of the Quadruple Alliance’s Article VI conference provision.240 Scaled down from the initial proposal for an

236 For an account of Capodistrias’ various attempts at creating a generalized European intervention system at Troppau—all of them rebuffed by Metternich—see Jarrett (2013, 245, 252–56, 260).

237 Schroeder (1962, 41–43). Metternich would open the first plenary session of Troppau with nonintervention arguments mirroring those of Castlereagh (Kissinger 1957, 260).

238 For this argument see the new treatment by Mitchell (2018, 227–55).

239 Schroder (1962, 49).

240 Schroeder (1962, 47); Seton-Watson (1967, 177); Sédouy (2009, 103–5).

minister’s congress, the Eastern powers attended Troppau in full while Britain and France sent only neutral observers. Two competing interpretations of the Neapolitan revolt thus emerged: Britain and France advocated a quiet, unilateral Austrian intervention, while the Eastern powers pressed for a full-dress Congress.241

Metternich’s deft handling of the Powers’ machinations at Troppau and Laibach is well covered, and to revisit it in detail is outside the scope of this chapter. The consensus is that Metternich was able to use the conference setting to greatly moderate the influence of Russia and Prussia on the intervention outcome.242 When Metternich convinced Alexander to abandon his earlier liberalism and adopt a counter-revolutionary stance, he shifted the Eastern powers’ position on the Neapolitan constitution away from pan-European idealism and closer to Metternich’s preference for an Austrian-led absolutist restoration. In achieving this, the Tsar reaffirmed his commitment to preserving the geopolitical bargain, effectively eliminating any possibility that Russia might use its position to lessen Austrian influence in Italy or elsewhere.243 In a concession to Capodistrias, the Austrian army dispatched by Metternich formally marched under the banner of the allied powers, as announced in the Troppau protocol.244 Although the intervention was therefore technically carried out on behalf of “the sanctity of all existing rights,” Metternich had outmaneuvered Capodistrias’ other attempts to shift control of the response away from Austria and the intervention was effectively unilateral. In February 1821, 60,000 Austrian troops crossed the Po River, and by March the revolutionaries surrendered.245

241 Kissinger (1957, 247–59); Schroeder (1962, 43–59); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:339-357); Chapman (1998, 66–67); Mitzen (2013, 103–15); Jarrett (2013, 223–47).

242 Schroeder (1962, 237).

243 See for example Jarrett (2013, 281).

244 Webster (1925, 295).

245 Schroeder (1962, 114). Metternich’s machinations included inviting all the Italian states, under Austrian influence, to the conference at Laibach, where Capodistrias hoped to negotiate only with the Neapolitan King, and another episode that can only be called Papal intrigue (Schroeder 1962, 92–97, 107–8; Jarrett 2013, 262–70; Sédouy 2009, 111–19).

Some commentators identify the Neapolitan crisis as the first breaking point in the Congress system.246 Although the objections of Britain and France weakened the formal Congress element of the Concert—there would be only one more full-dress congress, at Verona—it did not fundamentally alter the Vienna settlement or the Concert order247 It in fact further constituted the geopolitical bargain by clarifying the rules of the game: great powers could henceforth intervene in their spheres without needing to convene a Congress or operate under formal Allied legitimacy. The moral support of the other powers would be enough. The Settlement’s geopolitical bargain had framed the crises as a primarily Austrian prerogative, legitimizing Austrian intervention in the eyes of the other Powers, and prevented the territorial settlement from being revised. Dissent between the Western and Eastern powers remained confined to whether Austrian intervention should proceed with the “moral support” of the Concert, as in the Western view, or on behalf of the Concert, a position advocated most forcefully by Capodistrias and other members of the Eastern retinue.248

3.3.2 Semi-collective intervention in no one’s sphere I: France in Spain, 1823

I have focused on Naples at some length because it set the stage for the Concert’s subsequent intervention dynamics. Before the 1821 intervention in Naples, however, a revolution took place in Spain. Capturing Madrid in March 1820, the Spanish revolutionaries sought to reinstate a constitution drafted in 1812, under Napoleonic rule. The 1812 constitution established was the most radically liberal constitution of the time and called for a single elected assembly, called a cortéz, to represent the whole Spanish empire. The Neapolitans discussed above had in fact

246 E.g. Gulick (1955, 294–95).

247 Sked (2008, 76) and Bridge (1979, 45) argue that the “fundamental community of interests between Britain and Austria had not been affected at all.”

248 Webster (1925, 289); Schroeder (1962, 63–64); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:367-370); Jarrett (2013, 250).

modeled their revolution on the 1820 Spanish one; the constitution to which Ferdinand swore his oath was the 1812 Spanish constitution transposed to a Neapolitan setting.249

Unlike Naples, Spain did not clearly lie in any Power’s sphere. Both Britain and France had interests in the Spanish government, but neither had any special jurisdiction to interfere. Britain had de facto influence over the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula because of its predominant maritime presence and strong links with Portugal, which was in the British sphere; the British had a fleet stationed in the Tagus, the major Iberian river that separates Spain and Portugal, and a slew of treaties dating to the 14th Century established a strong Anglo-Portuguese alliance.250 Allied forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington had furthermore defeated Napoleon’s Iberian armies in 1814, clearing a path for a restoration of the Iberian crowns and giving Britain (especially Wellington) a kind of expertise in the region. The British were also concerned about the state of Spain’s colonies in America, which were in rebellion; Britain had trading relationships with many of them, and Castlereagh feared that France might use the opportunity to place Bourbons on their thrones.251

This did not amount a de jure sphere of influence, however. Britain held predominance on the seas and could be rightfully concerned about Portugal, but geopolitical jurisdiction over the New World, and Europe’s imperial conquests of the Continent more generally, had been left off the Vienna agenda. The French invention in Spain therefore demonstrates what happens when a Power intervenes outside its sphere but in an area of little strategic interest to its Peers: very little. In this regard, the French invasion mirrors Russia’s 2008 intervention in South Ossetia. The other great powers attempted to stop France and restrain its invasion by binding it to an

249 My account here draws on Temperley (1925, 53–99); Webster (1925, 226–56); Schroeder (1962, 195–236); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:593-807); Nichols (1971); Bullen (1979b); Chapman (1998, 79–81); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 58–60, 66–72); Larroche (2013); Sédouy (2009, 127–50); Yamada (2009); Jarrett (2013, 223–31, 309–43); Mitzen (2013, 106–10).

250 These are detailed in the next intervention case, section 3.3.

251 Webster (1925, 232–35); Hayes (1975, 134); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 66–68); Sédouy (2009, 100–101).

Allied force. They also threatened to punish it. In the end, however, no great power stood to gain from punishing France or blocking the intervention.

After 1815, a newly re-Bourbonized post-Napoleonic France sought to “regain Spain as a natural sphere of influence.”252 Its Bourbon family ties and long shared land border gave it a natural strategic interest in controlling the Spanish part of the Iberian Peninsula. As Roger Bullen has noted, one of the main French objections at Vienna was its perception that the Settlement “sought to relegate France to the status of a second-class power by surrounding her with strong and hostile states and excluding her from her natural and traditional areas of influence”— including Spain.253 To some extent Spain was treated as a fully independent power by its inclusion in the Vienna Congress’ Committee of Six, though it was not invited to the 1818 Aix- la-Chappelle congress and unequivocally was not a great power.254

Tsar Alexander I sought to draw the 1820 revolt under the umbrella of the Alliance’s Article VI, as he would a few months later with Naples. In April 1820 he sent a circular to the Allied ministers proposing the Powers meet to discuss a response to Spain. Prussian Chancellor Hardenberg supported this option.255 Metternich worried that the absence of a clear sphere over Spain meant Alexander could use the Alliance mechanism to march Russian troops across the continent under the banner of collective legitimacy, possibly integrating Spain into the Russia sphere or provoking war with France. Given Russia’s military strength, an Allied response to revolt would threaten the equilibrium.256

252 Schroeder (1962, 236, 1994b, 627).

253 Bullen (1979a, 124). See also Webster (1925, 229–30); Sédouy (2009, 129); Jarrett (2013, 313); and

254 As noted above, however, only the Committee of Four held real power.

255 Webster (1925, 228–29); Schroeder (1962, 27–29, 1994b, 607–8); Yamada (2009, 346); Jarrett (2013, 228). Bridge and Bullen (2005, 68) sardonically remark that the Russians sought to do so “although they had, of course, no direct interests in the question.”

256 Metternich suspected as much; see Schroeder (1962, 28–29); Nichols (1971, 29).

Castlereagh agreed with Metternich and circulating the 5 May 1820 state paper. Castlereagh’s view was that the Spanish revolt, owing to Spain’s unique geographic isolation and its inhabitants’ dislike of foreign occupation, was not “menacing to the safety of other states” sufficiently to justify an intervention.257 The Spanish issue was, in other words, not in anyone’s sphere nor did it qualify under the Article VI for an Allied congress and joint response. As Bridge and Bullen note, although Castlereagh “fully admitted the right of any state to interfere in the internal affairs of another state if its own interests were threatened, he rejected utterly the view that such intervention was a matter for the Alliance.”258 John Bew summarized Britain’s “strategic objection” to a joint great power intervention: “it might jeopardize the equilibrium established at Vienna, which ensured that no one power was dominant on the Continent.”259

The State Paper worked for a time, convincing the other Powers to withdraw support for a congress—except Russia, which “found herself entirely isolated” and thus unable to proceed.260 The possibility that Russian might lead the intervention and revise the Settlement was too great. In 1822, however, the Spanish crisis had worsened after a coup attempt failed to restore Ferdinand VII. In July, the revolutionary Exaltados expelled the moderates from government.261 This prompted Alexander to double-down on his demand for a Russia-led Allied response to the Spanish crisis. He proposed a European army be formed that could intervene if the revolution became worse, either to reinstate Ferdinand or protect France.262

257 Quoted from Appendix A, Vol. 2 of the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy (A. W. Ward and Gooch 1923, 626–27). See Webster (1925, 234–42), Jarrett (2013, 229–31), and Schroeder (1962, 27–28) for the state paper in context.

258 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 44).

259 Bew (2011, 129).

260 Webster (1925, 242); Schroeder (1962, 26–27, 1994b, 607–8); Mitzen (2013, 107); Jarrett (2013, 228).

261 Schroeder (1962, 195–96); Nichols (1971, 29); Jarrett (2013, 309–13).

262 Webster (1925, 472–74); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:596); Schroeder (1962, 202–3); Jarrett (2013, 314–16). Sédouy (2009, 135) notes that in reality the “Allied army” would be Russian troops.

France, too, agreed the issue be taken up at a congress, but did not want a European army, or any army apart from a French one, to step foot on its soil. Any Allied intervention by land would need to cross France to enter Spain. France sought Allied consensus so that, should France need to act in self-defence against Spain, it would have approval for an intervention. Allied consensus would furthermore assure that Britain would not block the intervention in an effort to protect Portugal. In toto, the French wanted what Metternich had achieved in Naples: the legitimacy of multilateral Allied “moral support” (l’appui moral) without the baggage of multilateralism; unilateral control over the actual response without the cost of counterbalancing.263 Despite disagreements among various French statesmen, French statesmen consistently stipulated that Paris would absolutely not tolerate “a single foreign soldier on French soil.”264 As the instructions to the French delegation at the congress in Verona put it, the passage of foreign armies

…on our territory would raise the indignation of all of France, we will not suffer it; but we will accept the moral support of a treaty that, by the promise that you would come to our aid if we asked, would prevent England from trying to take sides, on the Peninsula, for the revolutionaries and against us.265

The Allied powers had agreed the Naples crisis should be contained by an Austrian intervention, here they agreed France should not intervene. Austria and Prussia wanted to lend only “moral support” to the “healthy part of Spain” and in hopes this would prevent French action; Britain

263 The French foreign minister at Verona, Montmorency, put the Spanish issue in explicitly analogous terms but was rebuked by the other powers. As Nichols (1971, 42–43) puts it, Montmorency “confided to [Metternich] that he wished France to act toward Spain as Austria had done toward Naples; i.e., France desired the moral support of Europe just as Austria had obtained it at Laibach.”

264 Schroeder (1962, 214); Nichols (1971, 32, 35, 45). The situation in France vis-à-vis Spanish intervention was more complex than space allows; see Schroeder (1962, 197–209, 1994b, 624–25); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:613- 620); Nichols (1971, 31–39, 107–11); Sédouy (2003, 127–28); Jarrett (2013, 313–14, 320, 333–34).

265 Quoted from Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:616): “…sur notre territoire soulèverait l’indignation de la France entière, nous ne le souffrirons pas; mais nous accepterons l’appui moral d’un traité qui, par la promesse que vous feriez de venir à notre secours si nous le réclamions, empêcherait l’Angleterre d’essayer de prendre parti, dans la Péninsule, pour les révolutionnaires et contre nous.” See also Nichols (1971, 72–74) and Bridge (1979, 49).

was more strongly opposed to any great power interference.266 Between 1820 and 1822 Castlereagh had been replaced as Foreign Secretary by George Canning, who took a harder noninterventionist line than the 5 May 1820 Paper. Canning in particular feared that French intervention in Spain would drag Britain into a continental war. If France won, its control of Spain would threaten Portugal. If it lost, the defeat might spark a revolution in Paris and thus draw the Allies back into a war against France itself.267

Through 1822, the French had done little to allay these concerns: troops on the Spanish border, initially placed there to protect France against the yellow fever as a cordon sanitaire, were growing in number and had been renamed a corps d’observation—of revolutionary activity. In Paris, unilateralists pressed the Crown to increase its prestige by intervening in Spain. Metternich feared that unless a congress was held a unilateral French intervention might occur or Russia might pivot away from the Alliance system. Metternich therefore argued that the matter be taken up at an already-scheduled congress in Florence, now moved to Verona with a prelude in Vienna.268 At Verona he could employ his diplomatic skills to restrain France and Russia, hopefully without alienating Britain, by “making France’s dispute with Spain a matter of alliance discussion and control.”269

Verona did not produce Allied unanimity on Spain. Metternich secured an Allied statement announcing they would “apply joint moral and diplomatic pressure” to end the revolutionary regime, but would not intervene unless the Spanish royal family or territorial France was directly

266 Temperley (1925, 54); Nichols (1971, 61, 135, 320–21).

267 Yamada (2009, 351–52).

268 The Congress was initially planned at Laibach to discuss the ongoing presence of Austrian forces in Naples and Piedmont, a remnant of Metternich’s binding the Allies to the Naples issue. See Nichols (1971, 42–43); see also Schroeder (1994b, 622–23); Sédouy (2009, 129–30); Jarrett (2013, 316). Schroeder (1962, 204) notes that Metternich “would have himself liked nothing better than to leave the Spanish question strictly alone,” but “felt it wise to give in to Alexander” because France supported a Congress and Metternich would be given the chance to tame Alexander in person.

269 Temperley (1925, 63–65); Schroeder (1962, 213, 199, 210, 1994b, 624); Nichols (1971, 29–33); Bullen (1979b, 63); Sédouy (2009, 129); Jarrett (2013, 313).

attacked. This gave France the support it wanted from its Continental allies, but without a free hand to intervene.270 France’s lead delegate to Verona, Montmorency, resigned as foreign minister in December 1822 and was replaced by François-René de Chateaubriand, now best remembered as a Romance-era writer. Chateaubriand despised the Vienna Settlement and saw French unilateralism in Spain as a means to extend French influence. Writing to French Prime Minister Jean-Baptiste de Villèle with an “open heart,” Chateaubriand described Verona as such:

Everything we do here pleases no one. France has a forced hand; Russia finds that we do not go far enough; Austria has moved only to avoid breaking with Russia; Prussia fears the slightest movement; and England has declared that she is opposed to everything.271

As Simms notes, French diplomats began to treat Spain as a “vehicle to escape the constraints of the Vienna settlement.”272 Whereas the pro-alliance Montmorency preferred that “France, while preserving her independence of action, should cloak her policy in the guise of the alliance,” Chateaubriand wanted the Spanish crisis to be “solved by France alone.”273 Using the overthrow of the Royalist Urgel regency as a pretext, Chateaubriand delayed sending its part of the Allied statement to Madrid until January 1823. The Eastern Powers had already done so, as agreed at Verona, on 27 November 1822. The unilateral French delay had the effect of “separating her action from that of the Allies.”274

270 Schroeder (1994b, 625, 1962, 223–24); Nichols (1971, 125–27); Yamada (2009, 350–51).

271 Chateaubriand to Villèle, 28 November 1822 (Item #269 in Villèle 1889, 3:247-248): “Tout ce qu’on fait ici ne plaît à personne. La France a la main forcée; la Russie trouve que l’on ne vas pas assez loin; l’Autriche n’a marché que pour ne pas rompre avec la Russie; La Prusse craint le moindre mouvement; et L’Angleterre déclare qu’elle s’oppose à tout.” See also Nichols (1971, 125).

272 Simms (2013, 189). For an overview of French resistance to Vienna, see Bullen (1979a, esp. 124-125).

273 Webster (1925, 2:475); Schroeder (1962, 209); c.f. also Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:753-755); Nichols (1971, 72–73, 110–11, 133–36, 286–316); Bridge (1979, 51).

274 Schroeder (1962, 229, 223); see also Temperley (1925, 69–72); Nichols (1971, 120–27); Yamada (2009, 355– 56); Jarrett (2013, 338–39); Sédouy (2009, 138–41, 145–49) paints a more conciliatory picture of Chateaubriand.

When it became clear that Chateaubriand was planning an imminent and very unilateral military intervention in Spain, Metternich attempted to convince France to supply only materials (l’appui matériel) to the rebels; to have its troops act only a reserve for the Royalists; to have it submit its troops to Allied oversight; to have it install Ferdinand of Naples as regent. Despite Metternich’s threats at each stage that the Allies would withdraw support, these strategies failed to restrain France.275 From the French perspective, it was unlikely Prussia and Austria would offer much in the way of material support, and Chateaubriand had secured a commitment from the Tsar to step in if the British declared war on France.276

Canning, too, tried several strategies: he deferred recognizing the independence of Spain’s former colonies and pressed for concessions from Spain in order to try and broker a Franco- Spanish peace. He also proposed that the Allies discuss the issue at a renewed ambassadorial conference in Paris. Metternich and Prussian diplomat Christian Bernstorff declined this offer, unconvinced that Alexander I would rescind his commitment to back France against Britain. Alexander also declined the invitation. France had secured the moral support of the Eastern allies in the area it needed it most: checking the British check on French action in Spain.277 The final obstacle to French action on Spain was removed by a 31 March 1823 dispatch in which Canning outlined the conditions of British nonintervention: Britain would only intervene if France attacked Portugal, attempted to reclaim French overseas colonies, or established a permanent military occupation of Spain. Put simply, France should expect British counter-intervention if it encroached on Britain’s sphere of influence; if it did not, Britain would not interfere, provided France was the only Allied actor involved. As Larroche notes, Britain had “ni les moyens ni l’intérêt”—neither the means nor the interest—to engage in a conflict with a France backed by

275 Schroeder (1962, 230–34); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:664-740, 1986, 373–76).

276 Temperley (1925, 75–77); Jarrett (2013, 338).

277 Yamada (2009, 357–59). Yamada (2009, 361) uses Canning’s request for an Allied discussion to convincingly challenge the thesis of Temperley (1923, 113), repeated by Nichols (1971, 15, 315), that Canning, a “strict isolationist,” had “no confidence” in the Alliance and used the Spanish issue to “destroy” the congress system.

Russia and supported by the Allies.278 Its hand now free, France sent 60,000 troops across the border in April of 1823 and by August had reinstated Ferdinand VII on the Spanish throne.279

The Spanish and Naples cases taken in toto show that despite the de jure status of the bargain, geopolitical rivalries and concerns still added a degree of tension to great power interactions. The Concert powers recognized that military interventions would be needed to put down crises on the continent. The Article VI mechanism, because it could become a point of disagreement between one power (e.g. Britain) and the others, or give multilateral cover to revisionist agendas (e.g. Russian), was not a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, the great powers defaulted to the geopolitical bargain baked into the Settlement: the power with preexisting strategic and political interests in the target state had a prerogative over whether to intervene and how. Spain and Naples set a pattern that continued for the next thirty years: great powers could intervene in their spheres with only perfunctory consultation with and assurance from their peers.

3.3.3 Unilateral interventions in a de jure sphere: Britain in Portugal, 1826, 1834 & 1847

Britain intervened in Portugal three times during the Concert period—in 1826, 1834, and 1847. Although Britain first cooperated and the competed with France for influence over the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, Britain’s droit de regard over Portuguese affairs was recognized by its peers in all three interventions, and it faced only mild diplomatic protest from the Eastern Allies.280 Owing to the close geographical and political links between Portugal and Spain,

278 Larroche (2013, 40).

279 Nichols (1971, 312–15); Bullen (1979b, 64–65); Schroeder (1994b, 626–27); Yamada (2009, 359); Jarrett (2013, 340–41); Larroche (2013). As part of a public campaign against France, Canning published parts of Castlereagh’s 5 May 1820 State Paper in the press, marking the first time this statement went public.

280 Perhaps owing to its strategic remoteness, Portugal has received very little attention in the Concert literature. My account here is primarily indebted to the treatments by Bullen (1974b, 1974a, 1977, 1979b, 1979a); I have also used Temperley (1923, 78–83, 1925, 189–210, 365–89); Webster (1925, 247–56, 1951, 1:386-410); Livermore (1966, 258–89); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1042-1065); Vincent (1974, 88–95); Bourne (1982); Hayes (1975, 145–54); Rich (1992, 62–68); Schroeder (1994b, 664–65, 720–26); Sked (2008, 78–81);

however, the Portuguese crises embroiled Britain in France’s bid to extend a recognized sphere over Spain. In the end Britain ended up appeasing France by diplomatically including it in the management of Iberian affairs, but restraining its military presence by using British and Spanish troops in its actual interventions. The Portugal interventions thus show how the Concert geopolitical bargain structured one relationship—Britain and Portugal—so that few assurances were needed for intervention, but left another—France and Spain—ambiguous and therefore destabilizing.

British hegemony over Portugal was established in a series of mutual defense treaties going back to 1373 and 1386, and renewed in the 1400s and 1642 after Portugal revolted against Spanish rule. On 23 June 1661 a new defensive treaty connected to the Anglo-Portuguese union of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza legally defined Britain as the “protector” of Portugal, a status reaffirmed in 1703 and 1815, at Vienna.281 Articles 15 to 17 of the 1661 treaty established the fundamentals of the British-Portugal sphere of influence relationship. Britain agreed to protect Portugal; grant it assistance it in the event it was attacked; and assist Lisbon if it were besieged or blockaded. Britain furthermore agreed to defend Portugal’s colonies, mediate disputes with its enemies, and recover property stolen by the Dutch. In 1703 this defensive pact, to be “exactly and faithfully observed,” was “approved, confirmed, and ratified” again and extended to include British protection of Portugal against attacks from France and Spain. Britain furthermore agreed in the 1703 treaty to wage war on France if peace efforts between them, mediated by England, should fail. Britain and Portugal renewed these “ancient treaties” at Vienna, on 22 January 1815. The 1815 renewal at Vienna connected Britain and Portugal’s special relationship to European public law and the postwar settlement.282 As Webster puts it, because the British guarantee would “be brought automatically into operation by the armed invasion of another Power,” recognition of the relationship had to be “secured from the other

281 Temperley (1925, 193–94).

282 The texts of the 1661, 1703 and 1815 treaties are in Hertslet (1875, Appendix: 1984-1988, 2057).

great powers of the Alliance. This was not a hard task, since all Europe recognized Britain’s special interests in Portugal.”283

The 1826 intervention was preceded by a long period of growing instability in Portugal, British attempts to mediate that instability, and Allied deference to Britain’s sphere. The interventions revolve King John IV’s two sons, Dom Pedro and Dom Miguel, and their competing claims to power. During the Napoleonic wars, John and his family fled to Brazil under British cover, and London-backed regency ruled Portugal in his stead. When revolutionaries overthrew the regency in 1820, they demanded John return from Brazil and accede to a version of the infamous Spanish constitution of 1812.284 John made Dom Pedro regent of Brazil, returned to Portugal, and acceded to the constitution. At this point Portuguese loyalists appealed to the Concert powers for support against the rebels but Lord Castlereagh, still the foreign secretary, rebuked these appeals and warned John that Britain would not intervene. In deference to Britain’s sphere, Metternich relayed the same message to loyalists seeking support from the Eastern courts.285

In May 1823, an absolutist faction aided covertly by France and led by John’s second son, Dom Miguel, forced John to renounce the new constitution. British foreign secretary Canning dispatched a squadron to the Tagus River that could protect the King’s person and increased the number of marines in Britain’s Portuguese fleet, but refrained from intervening. London interpreted Britain’s treaties with Portugal as defensive but noninterventionist: although Portugal could call on Britain to defend it against outside attack, Britain would not intervene to change Portugal’s internal political institutions. Facing another insurrection in 1824, King John sought

283 Webster (1925, 2:247).

284 Livermore (1966, 260–63).

285 Temperley (1925, 190–95); Webster (1925, 2:247-256); Bullen (1979b, 65–66); Jarrett (2013, 243). Indeed, Castlereagh had previously urged John to return to Portugal or send Dom Pedro, his first-born son, to rule in his stead (Livermore 1966, 259–60).

refuge aboard the HMS Windsor Castle. Miguel ended his attempted coup d’état and went into exile in Vienna, temporarily stabilizing the situation.286

John died in 1826 and Pedro succeeded him. Pedro abdicated the Portuguese throne and continued ruling Brazil, leaving Portugal to his seven-year-old daughter, Dona Maria. According to the constitution, his sister, Isabella, would rule as regent until Miguel turned 25, whereupon he would take the regency. Finally, when Maria came of age, she would marry Miguel.287 Throughout the continental Allies deferred to Britain’s sphere, noting their concerns about the Portuguese issue spilling outside that sphere into Spain.288

In August 1826 the crisis did entangle Spain: army deserters in Spain began organizing cross- border raids into Portugal. London and Lisbon suspected that Madrid was behind the raids and intended to indirectly disrupt the line of succession as part of a covert intervention strategy.289 Paris recognized that Spanish-Portuguese hostilities might draw it into conflict with Britain, and so attempted to restrain Spain. France’s ambassador in Madrid, a staunch royalist, instead encouraged Spain to take action against constitutional Portugal.290

As the crisis grew beyond Britain’s sphere, Metternich enjoined the Allies to hold an ambassadorial meeting in Paris so a joint response could be sought. Metternich was strongly rebuked by Russia and Britain. It also became clear that the Miguelists responsible for the raids

286 Temperley (1923, 79, 1925, 196–201); Livermore (1966, 265–68); Nichols (1971, 118); Bullen (1979b, 66–67). Britain imposed other limitations on Portugal: during the 1822 Spanish crisis, Portugal attempted to create a military alliance with Constitutional Spain that might implicate it in an attack against France. Flexing British dominion over Portugal, Castlereagh and Canning assured Portugal that Britain would defend Portugal’s territorial integrity only if Portugal did not act aggressively, barring it from allying with another state that bound it to attack a third.

287 Livermore (1966, 268–69).

288 Bullen (1979b, 66).

289 Temperley (1925, 373, 378).

290 Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1044).

were being supported by King Ferdinand of Spain.291 In late 1826 the Portuguese appealed once again to Britain under the auspices of their 1815 treaty rights. Canning, noting on 9 December 1826 that the “causus foederis” of the defence pact had been met, dispatched a fleet with 4,000 Troops to the Tagus, explaining to Polignac that “treaties are sacred things” and the intervention was “not war with Spain. It is simply the defence of Portugal.”292 As Vincent surmises, Canning defended the intervention “not on grounds of interest, but on those of duty”; this duty was “upheld as a European imperative and not as a British expedient.”293 Canning defended the intervention to the House of Commons on 12 December as such:

Let us fly to the aid of Portugal by whomsoever attacked; because it is our duty to do so; and let us cease an interference where that duty ends. We go to Portugal, not to rule, not to dictate, not to prescribe constitutions—but to defend and preserve the independence of an ally. We go to plant the standard of England on the well-known heights of Lisbon. Where that standard is planted, foreign dominion shall not come!294

Canning justified the unilateral intervention as “European” because it was aimed not at the conquest of Iberia, but to protect Portugal’s territorial integrity and by extension the territorial integrity of the whole Vienna system: “intervention to uphold the principle of nonintervention.”295 The intervention forced Madrid to crack down on the raiders, effectively ending the rebellion.296

291 Temperley (1925, 373–77); Bullen (1979b, 67); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1052).

292 Temperley (1925, 383, see also 384-385).

293 Vincent (1974, 88).

294 Quoted in Temperley (1923, 82, 1925, 380). My italics.

295 Vincent (1974, 88–89).

296 Temperley (1923, 82, 1925, 379–89); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1049-1052); Bullen (1979b, 67–68); Schroeder (1994b, 720–21).

After the 1826 intervention, Metternich, although unhappy with the pro-revolutionary outcome, admitted that the intervention was justified under international law.297 The French response to the intervention, written by Prime Minister Villèle and read by France’s foreign minister Maxence de Damas on 19 December 1826 in the Chamber of Peers, was confined to noting Britain’s right under public international law to assure Portugal’s protection, drawing allusions to France’s own (aspirational) obligations toward Spain.298

The two other British interventions in Portugal followed the same pattern. In 1827 a cortés stacked with absolutists declared Pedro’s constitution invalid and acclaimed Miguel the rightful heir to the Portuguese throne. In 1831, Pedro abdicated his title as Emperor of Brazil and sailed to Europe with the intention of challenging Miguel on behalf of his daughter. Portugal became embroiled in a civil war between the two brothers. British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston followed in Castlereagh and Canning’s footsteps by officially pursuing a policy of interventionist “nonintervention.” Thus although Britain would not intervene in Portuguese affairs, it was also up to Britain, and no other power (apart from Portugal), to decide on them. In particular, Palmerston sought to restrain French influence in Iberia, growing through its proxy, Spain.299 Palmerston and British Prime Minister Grey also badly wanted Miguel gone from Portuguese affairs.300

Palmerston soon had the opportunity to remove Miguel by force without fundamentally changing British noninterventionism or risking French counterbalancing. The 1830 “July” revolution in France ended the Bourbon restoration and Paris now sought to transform the Anglo-French entente into a defensive alliance. The July government saw cooperation with Britain as the key to regaining its sphere of influence.301 Palmerston initially rebuffed these efforts, though he allowed

297 Temperley (1925, 386).

298 Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1053-1054); Schroeder (1994b, 725–26).

299 Brown (2010, 158–59).

300 Webster (1951, 1:370-384); Livermore (1966, 271–76); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1059); Bullen (1979b, 68– 69); Bourne (1982, 387–97).

301 Bullen (1977, 363–65).

a French vessel to seize two Miguelist ships. After King Ferdinand of Spain died in September 1833, however, his younger brother Don Carlos sought support from Miguel to dethrone Isabella, Ferdinand’s daughter. Isabella thus has a keen interest in supporting Pedro’s efforts against Miguel.302

Both Palmerston and Grey agreed that Spanish troops and British marines should be deployed to wipe out the Miguelists and Carlists in one swoop.303 To this end Palmerston arranged the “Quadruple Alliance” treaty of April 1834.304 Under it, Spanish land forces and the British fleet would intervene against Miguel and Carlos, safeguarding Maria and Isabella’s crowns.305 The Alliance paved the way for military action: by July 1834 the Anglo-Spanish intervention had destroyed Miguel and Carlos’ forces in Portugal. The reaction of the Eastern Allies was muted.306

Britain’s final intervention came after protests against Maria, now Queen, broke out in 1846 in Oporto. The radicals this time included a coalition of rural traditionalists, Miguelists, and “Septemberists” who supported the 1822 constitution acceded to by John (which, as noted above, was in turn based on the radical 1812 Spanish constitution). All stood against the Pedro-Maria charter. By April 1847, the military wing of the Septemberists had come dangerously close to marching on Lisbon. Lord Palmerston, made Foreign Secretary again in a July 1846 election,

302 Livermore (1966, 273–77); Schroeder (1994b, 722–23).

303 Webster (1951, 1:384-385); Bourne (1982, 398–99).

304 Vincent (1974, 94) argues the Quadruple Alliance, because it reaffirmed nonintervention (“veiled intervention”), was Palmerston and Grey’s way of securing an intervention with a noninterventionist cabinet.

305 Talleyrand, the French diplomat, initially wanted the treaty to recognize Spain as part of France’s sphere; Palmerston refused to acknowledge a French right to intervene in Spain, but achieved French acquiescence to the treaty nonetheless by including France as a contracting party. In what Bullen describes as a “vaguely worded clause,” France could intervene in Spain if its assistance was requested by all three remaining parties to the treaty. Talleyrand and Palmerston agreed that “no such French assistance should be asked for,” and in the event it was, France would refuse. See Bullen (1979b, 69).

306 Webster (1951, 1:386-399); Bullen (1977, 367–72, 1979b, 69–70); Bourne (1982, 402–6); Schroeder (1994b, 721–26).

recommended that Maria seek compromise with the reformists by granting them amnesty.307 With liberal Prime Minister John Russell’s backing, Palmerston made it clear that Maria should not expect a foreign military intervention to solve the issue, but that any Spanish interference would be blocked by Britain.308 As Canning had in 1824, Palmerston sent ships to the Tagus in case the Queen’s person needed protection, but went no further.309

Meanwhile, France and Britain had been embroiled in decade-long dispute over “one of the most stupefying inconsequential affairs in European history” but which nonetheless resulted in “open hostility between the two powers”: France’s desire to arrange the marriages for the Spanish queen and her sister.310 Palmerston understood French strategy here as part of its desire to consolidate a sphere of influence in Spain by placing a Bourbon there. He was right: under foreign minister Francois Guizot, France wanted great power recognition of its hegemony over Spain. In an example that will be mirrored by Russia’s approach to the Ottoman Empire, discussed below, the two powers saw France’s sphere differently. Palmerston saw France as de facto and illegitimately exerting its influence over Spain, whereas Guizot saw French hegemony there as legitimate and simply needing de jure recognition.311

The Vienna settlement, which had stripped France of a sphere, was silent on this issue. The geopolitical bargain’s assurance mechanisms therefore could not help, and French designs on Spain were creeping into its relations with Britain. Guizot wanted Palmerston to intervene in Portugal because this would stabilize Spain by dissuading similar rebellions there and preventing Portugal from becoming a staging ground for dissent.312 France and Britain were therefore at

307 Livermore (1966, 287); Bullen (1974b, 219, 226–27, 235–37).

308 Livermore (1966, 280–87); Bullen (1974b, 226–34).

309 Hayes (1975, 151).

310 Schroeder (1994b, 768–69).

311 As Schroeder (1994b, 769) notes, “Palmerston’s aim had always been to exclude France from Spain and open it to British influence and trade.” See also Bullen (1979b, 75–76); Rich (1992, 67); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 103–4).

312 Bullen (1974b, 213–15, 1974a, 31–35, 1979b, 73–76); Schroeder (1994b, 765–75).

loggerheads when in February 1847 Maria’s government requested outside help on the basis of the 1834 Quadruple Alliance treaty. While Britain was committed to defend Maria on the basis of its “ancient treaties,” Palmerston knew that a British intervention in Portugal would be to France’s advantage. He also did not want to be encumbered by the 1834 Treaty. France and Spain were therefore keen on the intervention while Palmerston was not.313

Palmerston proposed that Spain and Portugal plan for a last-resort intervention in which Spanish (not French) troops and a British naval force would come to Maria’s aid. This had the advantage of appeasing both Spain and Portugal, separating Spain from France, and allowing Britain to intervene decisively on land but without needing to use its own troops. It also made clear intervention legitimacy could not rest on the 1834 agreement, and that Britain was free to choose intervention participants as it saw fit—“the coalition ought to fit the mission,” in other words.314 After the Septemberists rejected an amnesty deal proposed by Britain, an intervention protocol was jointly drafted. The resulting intervention involved Spanish troops and British naval support, with the proviso that the Spanish troops, required for a decisive victory, withdraw within two months. By early July 1847 the intervention had ended the Septemberist revolt.315

In toto, the 1847 crisis interwove Britain’s dominion over Portugal with Anglo-French struggles over Spain—not recognized as in either’s sphere, but desired, since 1815, by France. The 1834 Quadruple Alliance treaty had also made Portugal’s defence a matter of Anglo-Spanish consultation, potentially changing Portugal’s status within Britain’s sphere. Throughout the crisis, however, Britain retained hegemony over the specifically Portuguese side of the question.

313 Palmerston furthermore considered the 1834 treaty specifically aimed at expelling Carlos and Miguel from Iberia, telling Henry Bulwer, the British representative in Madrid, that “the Quadruple Treaty as far as Portugal is concerned is worked out; and was worked out within a few weeks after it was signed and ratified.” Palmerston to Bulwer, 11 February 1847, quoted in Bullen (1974b, 240); see also Brown (2010, 296). Palmerston later repeated this wording to Sainte Aulaire, the French ambassador in London (Bullen 1974b, 242–43).

314 Rumsfeld (2013, 227).

315 Bullen (1974b, 238–58, 1979b, 77). In a last minute appeasement of the French, Palmerston added that the intervention’s legality rested on Portugal’s request for assistance from the 1834 signatories.

As Bullen’s analysis of the primary documents shows, Britain consistently presented the Portuguese crisis as a matter of its special relationship with Portugal, based on the ancient treaties reaffirmed at Vienna.316 Even Spain’s Sotomayor government, clamouring for an intervention and playing both sides, promised before it fell in 1847 that it would take no action on Portugal without British approval.317 Conversely, Britain consistently sought to intervene unilaterally throughout, assured no other great power would block its intervention. It only consulting with others when it tried to restrain France from consolidating its hegemony over Spain.

3.3.4 Collective intervention in no one’s sphere: the Allies in Belgium, 1831-33

In September 1830, a crisis in Belgium prompted the Allies to discuss a joint great power response. The Vienna settlement had placed Belgium under direct Dutch rule. Seeking separation from the United Netherlands, Belgians took control of Belgium, Luxemburg, and all of Antwerp, save its fortress, by October 1830. The Belgian rebels formed a provisional government and declared independence. King William I responded in November by blockading the Scheldt River.318 The cumulative effect of this revolt, which drew in all five Allies, was “the first major crisis of the post-Napoleonic period that actually threatened to develop into a major European war.”319

316 Bullen (1974b, 213–92).

317 Bullen (1974b, 238, 244).

318 My analysis here is based primarily on Dupuis (1909, 199–230); Omond (1923); Webster (1951, 1:81-176); Betley (1960); Albrecht-Carrié (1962, 48–49, 1968, 60–98, 1973, 31–36); Hayes (1975, 174–93); Helmreich (1976); Fishman (1988, 1–78); Pirenne (1990); Schroeder (1994b, 670–91); Slantchev (2005, 592–96); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 86–92); Rendall (2006, 534–37, 2007); and Sédouy (2009, 178–215).

319 Lawrence Baack, quoted in Rendall (2006, 534); see also Dupuis (1909, 205): “Le situation de l’Europe se trouvait singulièrement compliquée et aggravée: les chances de conflit apparaissent singulièrement menacantes.” [The situation of Europe was singularly complicated and aggravated: the chances of conflict appeared singularly menacing.]

Unlike Spain or Portugal, Belgium was not geographically isolated. The United Kingdom of Netherlands lay at Europe’s “crossroads,” the centre of centuries’ worth of the struggle for power. Reflecting its important location, the Netherlands-Belgium annexation had been arranged at Vienna with the explicit purpose of placing a moderately powerful buffer state between France and Germany.320 As Metternich put it, the creation of United Netherlands “had been decided at a congress, and this decision was one of the most important that had been ever taken.”321

Because the Settlement’s legitimacy as a territorial arrangement was invested in the United Netherlands, the Allies had a strong interest in resolving the Belgian crisis without fundamentally endangering Vienna’s parameters. Belgium’s status created an irony, however: the very element that made the United Netherlands central to the Settlement’s legitimacy—its strategic importance—also tempted each power to act unilaterally in Belgium and seize the opportunity to improve its position. For these reasons, the crisis might draw the Allies into war unless handled delicately.322 As Jacques-Alain de Sédouy remarks, the revolt affected “le coeur de l’Europe”—“an essential piece of the European equilibrium.”323

Because of its geographic proximity shared cultural ties with Belgium, France was “en première ligne” to respond to the crisis.324 Like in Spain, the Allies wanted to prevent a unilateral French response. The July government could use the opportunity to annex Belgium and extend its border

320 See for example Metternich’s 3 and 21 October 1830 letters to Count Wessenberg, the newly appointed ambassador to William I’s court, in Metternich (items #974 and #978 in 1880a, 5:37-41, 49–51, items #967 and #971 in 1880b, 5:34-38, 42–44). Metternich notes the United Netherlands’ strategic importance to Europe, to restraining France, and to the Vienna settlement, having been guaranteed by the Allies in July 1814.

321 Letter to Clam-Martinitz, 13 November 1832, in Metternich (item #1102 in 1880a, 5:411): “avait été décidée par un congrès, et cette décision était une des plus importantes qui eussent jamais prises.”

322 Hayes (1975, 175); Schroeder (1994b, 671–76).

323 Sédouy (2009, 182): “…c’est le cœur de l’Europe qui est touché [par Belge]… une pièce essentielle de l’équilibre européen”

324 Sédouy (2009, 183).

to the Revolutionary frontiers naturelles along the Rhine. Indeed, under the Bourbon Restoration King Charles X, the French had openly discussed doing so.325

Unlike the Spanish case, however, the other allies had direct interests in Belgium, tempting them to intervene themselves. Britain was concerned about navigation in the Scheldt and keeping the Dutch coastline free of any other Power’s exclusive influence. The Belgian crown was connected to the German Confederation by blood and the rebellion through Luxembourg, drawing in the interests of Austria and Prussia. Prussia furthermore bordered the United Netherlands and Luxemburg, and might be tempted to intervene on behalf of the Dutch, countering French preference for the Belgians.326

Russia, now ruled by Tsar Nicholas I (Alexander’s brother), moved for a joint Allied response to the crisis.327 Russia noted that the outcome could not place Belgium “under the domination of a foreign dynasty.”328 Austria (still Metternich) and Britain (now Lord Palmerston) supported nonintervention. In their view, intervention by any of the Four would mean French counter- intervention, which was unacceptable; French intervention, itself unacceptable, would mean

325 Dupuis (1909, 205–6); Omond (1923, 122, 129); Bourne (1970, 30–33) that checking France was an overriding concern not just for Britain but also Austria see Metternich’s 21 October 1830 letter to Wessenberg (item #978 in Metternich 1880a, 5:49-51, item #971 in 1880b, 5:42-44). Metternich’s instructions were that Austrian policy should “Conserve to the creation of the Powers the value of a counterweight to the ambitious views of France, and to prevent Belgium, whether by its formal incorporation into France, or by an independence that would be only nominal, from becoming part of the political domain of that Power.” [conserver à la création des puissances la valeur d'un contre-poids à des vues ambitieuses de la France, et d'empêcher que la Belgique, soit par son incorporation formelle à la France, soit par une indépendance qui ne serait que nominale , ne fasse partie du domaine politique de cette puissance.]

326 Webster (1951, 1:96); Hayes (1975, 174); Fishman (1988, 41–50); Schroeder (1994b, 676); Slantchev (2005, 594).

327 As in earlier cases, Russia sought cooperation so that it could manage the Allies as leader of a European response. But even if it chose to act unilaterally, Russian troops would have to move through Prussia to get to Belgium, thus requiring at bare minimum Prussian consent, as Rendall (2006, 535) notes.

328 Quoted from Betley (1960, 42, 62): “sous la domination d’une dynastie étrangère.”

opposition, and probably counter-intervention, by the other Powers. It was therefore best that no one intervene. The July monarchy in France, overburdened in Algeria and Greece and seeking legitimacy itself from the Eastern Powers, initially signaled that it would not intervene in Belgium if all the Allies refrained from doing so as well. Prussia also supported nonintervention, fearing both French retaliation and that the British might side with France if an Ally intervened. Russian ambition, which required Allied unanimity, was checked.329 As Albrecht-Carrié notes, “the situation for a while was quite delicately balanced.”330

Responding to the appeals of William I and seeking a settlement to the crisis, Britain called an ambassadorial conference in London for October 1830. At the London Conference, the Allies planned a joint response to, in their words, the “derangements that the troubles in Belgium have brought into the system established by the Treaties of 1814 and 1815.”331 Under the view of forming un “juste équilibre en Europe” and assuring the maintenance of “la paix générale,” the Powers agreed that the union between Belgium and the Netherlands envisioned in the Vienna settlement—“the perfect and complete amalgamation that the Powers wanted to effect between those two countries”—was a failure. They would now discuss (“discuter et concerter”) new arrangements that would best combine the “future independence of Belgium” with “the stipulations of the Treaties” [of 1814 and 1815], “the interests and the security” of the Powers, and “the conservations of the European equilibrium.”332 The agreed solution was to separate Belgium from the Netherlands, effectively reversing their union at Vienna. Belgium would become a perpetually neutral buffer state outside of any sphere, similar to Austria in the Cold War. The Powers would have to reconcile William with the loss of half his kingdom and prevent

329 Dupuis (1909, 205–13); Omond (1923, 126); Webster (1951, 1:96-97); Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 62, 1973, 33–34); Hayes (1975, 176); Helmreich (1976, 14–16); Pirenne (1990, 29–33, 45–50, 56–58, 68–81); Schroeder (1994b, 676– 80); Rendall (2006, 534–36, 2007, 275).

330 Albrecht-Carrié (1973, 34).

331 Text of the 7th Protocol, 20 December 1830, in de Clercq (1880, 3:589): “dérangements que les troubles survenus en Belgique ont apporté dans le système établi par les Traités de 1814 et 1815.”

332 Text of the 7th Protocol, 20 December 1830, in de Clercq (1880, 3:690; italics in original): “cet amalgam parfait et complet que les Puissances voulaient opérer entre ces deux pays… n’avait pas été obtenu.”

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the newly formed Belgian polity—or the weakened Netherlands—from falling under any Power’s influence, especially France’s.333

After several months of bargaining, the Allies proposed that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg become the new Belgian king, and that a Belgian-Dutch peace treaty be drawn up to divide assets between the two states. Belgium would be neither tethered to France, as many Belgian revolutionaries desired, nor administered under Dutch sovereignty, as William desired. Leopold has no bloodties to any of the ruling families of the great powers, keeping Belgium safe from great power encroachments based on dynastical ties.334 The 11th Protocol of the conference summarized the Powers’ efforts to place “dans leur vrai jour” the principles which “dirigent leur commune politique”:

They were unanimously of the opinion that the five powers owe to their interest well understood, to their union, to the tranquility of Europe, and to the accomplishment of the views recorded in their protocol of 20 December, a solemn demonstration, a glowing proof of the firm determination wherein they will not seek, in the arrangements relative to Belgium, under all the circumstances that may present themselves still, any augmentation of territory, any exclusive influence, any isolated advantage, and, to give to that country itself, as well to all the states surrounding it, the best guarantees of repose and security.335

333 Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 67); Helmreich (1976, 16, 35); Hayes (1975, 176, 179–80); Fishman (1988, 71–93); Pirenne (1990, 91–93); Schroeder (1994b, 680, 683, 687–89). This meant that Belgium should not become a Dutch sphere, either. Schroeder (1994b, 671) argues that William’s goal in 1830 was to “make the United Netherlands into at least a respectable middle-sized power, possible a major one equaling or surpassing Prussia. To this end he refused to let the United Netherlands be what the Congress of Vienna intended: a peaceful intermediary state serving as a buffer against France.”

334 In the meantime, the Provisional Government had passed a resolution perpetually excluding members of the Orange-Nassau Family (of the Netherlands) from the Belgian throne. Omond (1923, 140–48); Webster (1951, 1:121-122); Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 63–64, 67); Schroeder (1994b, 680–82); Sédouy (2009, 195–201); Bartlett (1996, 31).

335 Text of the 11th Protocol, 20 January 1831, in de Clercq (1880, 4:5): “Ils on été unanimement d’avis que les cinq puissances devaient à leur intérêt bien compris, à leur union, à la tranquillité de l’Europe, et à l’accomplissement des vues consignées dans leur protocole du 20 décembre, une manifestation solennelle, une preuve éclatante de la ferme

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William rejected the so-called ‘Eighteen Articles,’ which proposed terms perceived by William as too favourable to Belgium. William invaded Belgium in August 1831; French troops, responding to pleas from Leopold (now elected King but not internationally recognized as such), intervened to remove the Dutch. After the French evacuated in September 1831, the Allies drafted a new peace agreement (“24 Articles,” mostly of Russian design).336 They also authorized a deployment of the British fleet off the Dutch coast to prevent further conflict.337 On 15 November 1831, Lord Palmerston and Prince Talleyrand signed a treaty based on the 24 Articles that publicly recognized Leopold as King of Belgium. Initially reluctant to do so because William had not yet also accepted the 24 Articles, Austria, Prussia, and Russia signed the November treaty in April and May of 1832.338

In November 1832 French troops entered Antwerp, where William made his last stand, and a British fleet blockaded the Scheldt. The Eastern allies protested these moves and attempted to pressure William to accept some of the 24 Articles, to no avail. The joint British-French intervention successfully defeated most Dutch forces by December 1832; on 21 May 1833 William, having lost the citadel at Antwerp, renounced any further uses of force against Belgium

détermination où elles sont de ne chercher, dans les arrangements relatifs à la Belgique, comme dans toutes les circonstances qui pourront se présenter encore, aucune augmentation de territoire, aucune influence exclusive, aucune avantage isolé, et, de donner à ce pays lui-même, ainsi qu’à tous les Etats qui l’environnement, les meilleures garanties de repos et de sécurité.” See also Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 69).

336 The French intervention was post-hoc legitimized by the Allies in protocol no. 31 (Betley 1960, 199; Fishman 1988, 140–41; Pirenne 1990, 231–32). As Rendall (2007, 282) notes, none of the Allies “was happy about the French intervention, but all held that it was best to multilateralize it and thereby gain a measure of control.”

337 Rendall (2007, 284).

338 Omond (1923, 148–50); Webster (1951, 1:115-118, 122–53); Sédouy (2003, 182, 202–10); Schroeder (1994b, 684–88); Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 77, 80–82); Hayes (1975, 182–88); Fishman (1988, 103–90); Pirenne (1990, 253– 69).

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or in blockade of the Scheldt.339 William would not formally recognize Belgian sovereignty, however, until 1839.340

The Belgian intervention shows how the Concert’s collective security mechanism functioned where no Power enjoyed hegemony but every Power had an interest in seeking it. As Sédouy has noted, Britain and France cooperated closely to resolve the crisis. Louis Philippe, the “Roi des Français,” was able to assure London his July Monarchy would not be expansionist. To this extent Louis Philippe sent the “vieux lion” Prince Talleyrand, France’s negotiator in 1815, as France’s representative in London; at 78 years old, this was Talleyrand’s last major diplomatic outing.341 Talleyrand took a lead role in drafting statements, later integrated into the conference’s jointly signed protocols, emphasizing Allied support for a “separate and independent Belgium,” perpetually neutral, and framed in terms of its importance for the juste équilibre and paix européenne.342 Indeed, the conference framing of Belgian independence in terms of the needs of European equilibrium culminated in the famous phrase, found in the 19th protocol, that “Each nation has its particular rights, but Europe also has her right; the right to preserve social order.”343

The Belgian case is notable because of Belgium’s lack of sphere of influence status, significant allied interest in the dispute, and relatively cooperative outcome that, for the first time since

339 Omond (1923, 153–55); Webster (1951, 1: 154-176); Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 86, 1973, 35); Hayes (1975, 189– 90); Helmreich (1976, 14–30); Pirenne (1990, 285–97); Schroeder (1994b, 689–90).

340 Hayes (1975, 190–91); Sédouy (2009, 211–13).

341 Sédouy (2003, 180–81, 183–86). Talleyrand began his political career in 1780 and was France’s main representative at Vienna (see above); he had previously served under Louis XVI, the First French Republic, Napoleon, and Louis XVIII.

342 E.g. “Les cinq puissances accèdent aux vœux des Belges et les reconnaissent comme un peuple formant un État séparé de tout autre et indépendant.” [The five powers accede to the wishes of the Belgians and recognize them as a people forming a State separate and independent from all others.] Quoted in Sédouy (2009, 194).

343 “Chaque nation a ses droits particuliers; mais l’Europe aussi a son droit: c’est l’ordre social qui le lui à donné.” Text in de Clercq (1880, 4:15). For similar framing, see protocols 7, 11, 5, 12 and the annexes to 20 and 49 in de Clercq (1880, 3:690, 4:5, 8–9, 13–16, 22–23, 142–44); for text and analysis of the protocols, see Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 66, 68–69, 71–76, 84–85) and Sédouy (2009, 194–95).

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1815, changed the territorial map. The lack of a sphere meant great power cooperation had to rest entirely on the congress assurance process, strenuously tested because of the Allies’ competing interests and the danger Belgium might be added to another power’s sphere. To achieve this, the Powers sought assurances from each other that the outcome of the London conference would keep intact, rather than change, the Vienna Settlement and its equilibrium. France especially had to assure the others it had no designs on a subordinated or annexed Belgium.344

In sum, Allied intervention legitimacy in the Belgian case had to rest on the multilateral assurance and collective security process rather than spheres of influence, and for that reason was won with more difficulty.345 As Matthew Rendall puts it, the London congress “legitimated intervention.”346 The alignment was not perfectly unanimous, and the three Continental Allies formally condemned the joint British-French intervention. They did not move to block the intervention, however, and were arguably assured that neither Western Power intended to alter the November 1831 treaty of Vienna settlement. Reflecting this success, the Allied response to the Belgian crisis is characterized as a “prime illustration of the effective operation” or “qualified success” of the Concert security mechanism—in a case that in other circumstances “aurait sans doute conduit à la guerre.”347

3.3.5 Unilateral intervention in a de jure sphere: Russia in Poland, 1831

Inspired by the July Revolution and events in Belgium, on 29 November 1830 a group of infantry officer school cadets in Łazienki, just outside Warsaw, launched a revolt against Russian hegemony over the Kingdom of Poland or “Congress Poland.”348 Instead of suppressing the

344 As Slantchev (2005, 596) notes, Belgian neutrality “was as much a check on France as was the united Netherlands, and its position was cemented by the guarantee of all the great powers.”

345 For an account of the Belgian crisis that focuses on Great Power alignment and assurance, see Rendall (2007).

346 Rendall (2007, 279).

347 Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 60); Schroeder (1994b, 676); Rendall (2007); Slantchev (2005, 596); Sédouy (2009, 213).

348 17 November 1830 according to the Julian calendar employed in Imperial Russia (Lincoln 1978, 135). Because the sources sometimes use them, I have put the Julian calendar dates in brackets.

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revolt, many of Tsar Nicholas’ supporters and Poland’s conservatives fled the scene. Unimpeded by military force and engendered by Polish Romanticism, the revolutionaries purged the Sjem, Congress Poland’s parliament, of its remaining conservatives. On 13 (25) January 1831, the Sjem formally dethroned Nicholas and declared Congress Poland, including Russia’s Polish provinces, independent.349

Tsar Nicholas insisted on the categorical surrender of the revolutionaries, commenting to his brother Grand Duke Constantine that “either Russia or Poland would have to perish.”350 A 14 (26) December 1830 meeting between Nicholas and Prince Lubecki, a Polish representative sent to St. Petersburg, ended with the Tsar declaring, “Donc, c’est la guerre.”351 In January 1831 a Russian force numbering 120,000 men crossed the border into Poland. Although the Polish resistance was able to field 85,000 men and won several victories through early 1830, its attempts at generating international support failed. In August 1831, suffering setbacks, an internal coup displaced much of the command, including Prince Czartoryski. Russian forces soon marched on Warsaw, laying siege to the city on September 6 and capturing it two days later.352 (Chopin allegedly wrote his “Revolutionary” Étude Op. 10 no. 12, in C minor, in response.) The rest of the Polish resistance broke down and the last surrendered on 21 October 1831. The Tsar brutally punished the remaining conspirators and used the rebellion as a pretext to remove the

349 English and French language accounts the Polish uprising in the Concert context are comparatively small in number. I have relied on Webster (1951, 181–200); Leslie (1956); Betley (1960); Albrecht-Carrié (1962, 49–50, 1973, 36–37); Jelavich (1964, 97–100); Wandycz (1974, 65–91, 105–31); Lincoln (1978, 135–48); Church (1983, 107–26); Schroeder (1994b, 705–9); Sédouy (2009, 217–22); Rich (1992, 61–62); Davies (2005, 226–45); Dabrowski (2014, 315–19).

350 Wandycz (1974, 108); conversely, Prince Czartoryski is said to have said that the revolt “came either too early or too late.”

351 Quoted from Nesselrode (1904, 7:167); see also Lincoln (1978, 141). Nicholas mobilized Russia’s military as soon as he heard of the uprising on 7 December (Leslie 1956, 141–47).

352 For comparison, French troops intervened and occupied Belgium in the same month.

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Kingdom’s constitution, parliament, and army.353 In toto, the intervention had produced “more armed conflict than any other” in the period—it generated about 100,000 casualties—across perhaps the most “important strategic area” in Europe. But it also “exerted the smallest immediate impact on international politics.”354

The November uprising had presented Nicholas with “an event far more serious than the change of monarchs in Paris or the separation of Belgium from Holland.”355 The nationalist movement in Poland threatened to disturb the Russian empire and the Vienna settlement in ways that would not only be to Russia’s disadvantage, but could greatly worsen its relations with the other Powers, now under strain over Belgium (above) and the Greek revolts (covered below). The revolution also had widespread support in France and Britain, where civil society groups pressured their government to intervene on behalf of the rebels. Lord Palmerston, known for his liberal internationalism, expressed sympathy and solidarity with the Polish cause. But none of the powers intervened or even lent aid—material or moral—to the revolutionaries. Why?

The muted international response to the rebellion is attributable to the Concert’s geopolitical bargain: the Kingdom of Poland lay incontestably in Russia’s sphere of influence. Russia therefore had the right, and the means, to unilaterally deal with the uprising. “Congress Poland” was the outcome of a hard-fought diplomatic struggle at Vienna over the previous partitions of Poland—between Prussia, Austria, and Russia—in which Russia prevailed.356 A nominally independent policy with Warsaw at its centre, Congress Poland had a constitution but was formally ruled by the Russian Tsar under the title ‘King of Poland.’ Grand Duke Constantine,

353 Jelavich (1964, 98); Leslie (1956, 163–71, 194–255); Betley (1960, 232–40); Wandycz (1974, 105–17, 122); Lincoln (1978, 140–48); Church (1983, 113–16); Davies (2005, 2:236-244); Dabrowski (2014, 316–18).

354 Schroeder (1994b, 705).

355 Jelavich (1964, 97).

356 The Partition of Poland is Articles 1 through 14 in the 9 June 1815 Final Act of the Vienna Congress (Bourdilliat 1859, 48–52; Hertslet 1875, 1:216-221). Together with the partition of Saxony, the “Poland-Saxony issue” created the most divisive diplomatic struggle at Vienna. See Webster (1919, 98–123); Nicolson (1946, 148–81); Kissinger (1957, 149–71); Gulick (1955, 189–261); Schroeder (1994b, 523–38); Jarrett (2013, 96–131).

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Nicholas’ older brother, extra-constitutionally ruled Poland as a de facto viceroy when the revolt broke out in 1830.357 As Betley summarizes,

Even were it taken into account that the Treaty of Vienna provided for special treatment of those territories by all the partitioning Powers, the act of Congress at the same time stated that the “Congress”-Kingdom—let alone the other provinces—was “irrevocably tied” to Russia.358

Throughout their struggle, the Polish rebels appealed to outside sources for support, making special appeals to Austria, Britain, and France. Without foreign help, it was unlikely they would succeed.359 Józef Chłopicki, the leader of the revolt from December 1830 to January 1831, forbade the formation of units with Galician or Poznian troops—the two sections of Poland in Austria and Prussia’s spheres.360 In the end, however, “none of the powers was willing to disturb the precarious balance by espousing the Polish cause.”361

Despite overtures from Prince Czartoryski, who proposed a Habsburg ruler for independent Poland, Austria remained allied with Russia. Metternich offered Polish emissaries nothing, set up a cordon on the border, and offered Russia moral support.362 Metternich wanted the revolt ended quickly and advised its representatives to submit to St. Petersburg.363 He also advised the Pope,

357 Leslie (1956, 1–50); Wandycz (1974, 65–91); Davies (2005, 2:223-231). Constantine had in fact relinquished his title to the Russian empire when Alexander I died, placing Nicholas on the throne.

358 Betley (1960, 250).

359 Jelavich (1964, 97); Albrecht-Carrié (1973, 36–37); Wandycz (1974, 113–14); Schroeder (1994b, 707); Dabrowski (2014, 316). The revolt was mismanaged from the beginning and failed to achieve many of its short-term tactical aims; see Davies (2005, 2:231-235).

360 Wandycz (1974, 113).

361 Wandycz (1974, 113); Betley (1960, 98–99, 103–8, 122, 151–52) has furthermore argued the Powers’ main concern over Poland was that Russia, now mobilized, would aggress outside of its own sphere.

362 Leslie (1956, 223); Bertier de Sauvigny (1986, 422–23).

363 Betley (1960, 99); Schroeder (1994b, 708).

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who had urged Metternich to push the Tsar for a peaceful settlement, that the most the Papacy should do is ask that Nicholas be merciful.364 In language that evoked the Austrian position vis-à- vis Naples, Metternich called the Russian reaction to the November uprising “a national cause defended with vigour and abnegation.”365 Prussia also closed its frontier and threatened its Posnian subjects with property confiscation or imprisonment if they took part in the uprising.366

Although civil society elements in Britain and France expressed sympathy with the rebels, they had no power to check Russia.367 In Paris, the war hero La Fayette proclaimed “Toute la France est polonaise.”368 Paris was home to many Polish émigrés, including Chopin, and the July Monarchy shared the principles of constitutional monarchy with Poland.369 Nonetheless, Horace Sébastiani, the French foreign minister, ruled out material intervention and made clear that French energies would remain preoccupied with Belgium. While travelling through Poland toward St. Petersburg in the winter of 1830-1831, the French ambassador to Russia, Casimir de Mortemart, told the Polish rebels the following concerning French support: “I tell you with grief, but with a deep conviction, it will be nothing.”370 Both Mortemart and Sébastiani expected a Russian victory.371

Despite refraining from taking any material action on Poland, the French did make diplomatic attempts to draw Russia into a collective solution. There was some legal basis for a collective

364 Reinerman (2000, 604–5).

365 Quoted in Bertier de Sauvigny (1986, 423): “une cause nationale défendue avec vigueur et abnégation.”

366 Leslie (1956, 223–24); Schroeder (1994b, 708).

367 In December 1830, Russian officials repeatedly warned their French counterparts not to interfere in Poland, contrasting the November uprising to the Belgian crisis, framed as part of the “general affairs of Europe” (Betley 1960, 61, 66).

368 [All of France is Polish.] Quoted in Sédouy (2009, 218).

369 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 91); Schroeder (1994b, 709).

370 Quoted in Sédouy (2009, 219): “Je vous le dis avec douleur, mais avec une profonde conviction, ce sera rien.”

371 Betley (1960, 102–3).

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Allied response: when the Sjem deposed Nicholas and declared independence, it technically violated the Vienna settlement.372 In early 1831 Sébastiani sent an envoy to Prussia but was rebuffed; Bernstorff, the Prussian foreign minister, told the French envoy that in fact Prussia was not neutral, and wished for a Polish defeat.373

R.F. Leslie has suggested that Sébastini’s diplomatic efforts were meant to solicit a rejection— France could avoid action on the premise that it should not act alone.374 In June 1831 meetings with Nicholas, Mortemart (now in St. Petersburg) framed the uprising as European: the intervention was no longer simply a Russo-Polish affair, and had become a question concerning the Europe created in the 1815 treaties. According to France, Russia was obligated to engage with the Allies; to act otherwise would be “a mortal blow to the basis of the European equilibrium.”375 In July, Mortemart informed Nicholas that France had approached Britain in the hopes of reconciling the Polish with the Russians. These overtures did not change the Tsar’s position, which was that the Polish uprising was an internal affair.376 In a December 1831 letter to Palmerston, Nesselrode even compared Russia’s relationship with Poland to the position of Ireland vis. Britain.377

Like in France, British newspapers expressed solidarity with the Polish rebellion, as did many British statesmen.378 Lord Dudley Steward and Thomas Campbell founded a “Literary Association of the Friends of Poland,” emulating in part the philhellenic societies that had

372 Leslie (1956, 221); Betley (1960, 249–50).

373 Webster (1951, 1:188); Sédouy (2009, 219); Betley (1960, 86–87).

374 Leslie (1956, 221–22).

375 Quoted in Sédouy (2009, 220): “atteinte funestre aux bases de l’équilibre européen.”

376 Betley (1960, 243, 247); Lincoln (1978, 145); Sédouy (2009, 218–20); Schroeder (1994b, 707).

377 Ingle (1976, 31–32). As Bridge and Bullen (2005, 91) remark, “There was in fact no Polish question in European diplomacy, any more than there was an Irish question.”

378 Webster (1951, 1:183); Betley (1960, 139).

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cropped up in response to the Greek revolts.379 The British also received a retinue of Polish representatives, angering Nesselrode, Nicholas’ foreign minister.380 In a March note to Princess Dorothea Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador to London and an informal diplomat in her own right, Prime Minister Grey made it clear that while he had compassion for the “pauvres Polonais,” such compassion had never influenced his public duties.381 Indeed, the Polish issue was not seriously discussed in Parliament until summer 1833, long after the revolt was over.382

In the spring and summer of 1831, the Empire suffered several defeats at the hands of rebellion forces. France and England contemplated taking Allied action should Russia fail to put down the revolution.383 In these and other efforts, however, the British position remained consistently noninterventionist. Palmerston sought, whenever possible, to persuade Nicholas to keep Poland’s constitution and be lenient on defectors. Palmerston’s position was that “both in legality and in interest England must take her stand upon the treaty of Vienna.”384 The Vienna settlement had given Poland a constitution and, because it was signed by all of Europe, this implicated the public order rather than simply Russo-Polish relations.385 As Palmerston wrote in a March 1831 letter to Lord Granville, the British Ambassador in Paris,

379 Davies (2005, 242).

380 Nesselrode to Princess Lieven, 1 February 1831; Nesselode to his wife, 23 June (5 July), in Nesselrode (1904, 7:171-176, 190).

381 Lord Grey to Princess Lieven, 12 March 1831, in Nesselrode (1904, 7:177-178). Princess Dorothea Lieven was often tasked by St. Petersburg with carrying out delicate missions, and in this instance appears to have acted as intermediary between Grey and Nesselrode. See Webster (1951, 1:184, 197–98).

382 Davies (2005, 2:242).

383 Webster (1951, 1:185-186); Betley (1960, 168–72).

384 Bourne (1982, 354).

385 Webster (1951, 1:182, 185–87); Bourne (1970, 33, 1982, 352–55); Sédouy (2009, 220). In spring 1831, the French invited Palmerston to contemplate Franco-British mediation to the crisis; Palmerston reneged on this and all future suggests at joint mediation. In May, Palmerston suggested mediation to Berlin and Vienna, but was rebuffed by both.

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I have had conversations with Wielopolski and Walewski, and have told them both that we must stand upon our treaties; and while, on the one hand, we should remonstrate if Russia tried to depart from the Treaty of Vienna, on the other, we could not do so ourselves by helping to make Poland entirely independent.386

British policy was thus designed to defer to the Vienna settlement. It thus also deferred to Russia’s sphere. In an April 1831 letter to Lord Holland, Palmerston admitted his sympathies with the Polish: “I entirely share your feelings about Poland and should like myself to see it restored to independence.” But, he added, “one scarcely sees how that can be accomplished without breaking the Treaty of Vienna.”387 In communications with Polish representatives and his own ambassador in Russia, Palmerston explained that British policy was to respect the Vienna settlement.388 As he told Polish representative Matuszewic in July 1831, “England had neither the right nor the means to intervene on behalf of the Polish.”389

Thus despite sympathizing with the Polish rebellion, Britain’s leaders recognized Nicholas’ right to intervene.390 As Webster notes, “whatever sympathy the gallant and unexpected resistance of the Poles aroused in Palmerston and Grey, as in other Englishmen, the final victory of Russia was not only expected…but desired by them. […] on the main question of the right of the Tsar to put down the insurrection there was never any doubt.”391 The main concern of the British was that Russia would use the rebellion as a pretext to further erode the constitutional regime in Poland. But the importance of the Vienna settlement overrode this concern. Bridge and Bullen summarize:

386 Bourne (1970, 218).

387 Palmerston to Holland, 9 April 1831, quoted in Hayes (1975, 28).

388 Betley (1960, 127–29, 136); see also Vincent (1974, 93).

389 Quoted in Betley (1960, 169): “l’Angleterre n’avait ni le droit ni les moyens d’intervenir en faveur des Polonais.”

390 Albrecht-Carrié (1962, 49).

391 Webster (1951, 1:181-182).

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The British position was unequivocal: Russia ruled Poland by established treaty rights which accusations of misrule could not undermine. To attack them would be to strike a blow at the existing order throughout Europe. For the British government the Russian oppression of Poland was an integral part of the international order which contained France in the west.392

3.3.6 Unilateral intervention in a de jure sphere: Austria in Central Italy, 1831-32

In late 1830, unrest in Modena, Parma, and the Papal Estates prompted Metternich to request that the Papal regime take preventive measures to prevent a full-blown revolt. The Papal regime was unable to comply with Metternich’s request; Pope Pius VII died November 1830 and was replaced, by Gregory XVI, only on 2 February 1831. Revolts broke out in the same month, and by mid-month Rome no longer controlled most of its legations. By March a conference of legate delegates in Bologna renounced Papal sovereignty and declared themselves the United Provinces of Italy. The insurgents included Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) and his brother, Napoléon-Louis Bonaparte. Pope Gregory had meanwhile requested that Metternich intervene; Austrian troops occupied Modena, Parma, and Ferrara by 8 March. On 26 March the provisional government worked out an amnesty deal and capitulated; the remaining forces surrendered on 28 March.393

Although smaller than the other crises treated here—it involved few casualties—the Central Italy cases are worth noting because, like in Naples, Austria enjoyed hegemony over Modena and Parma, and faced no contestation from the other Allies when it intervened there, including from France. Metternich claimed that responding to the crisis was “a question of life or death” for the Hapsburg Empire.394 As Bourne writes, “When revolution broke out in Parma and Modena, and

392 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 92).

393 My account here draws from Webster (1951, 1:200-220); Reinerman (1977, 1979, 1988); Church (1983, 129– 42); Bourne (1982, 365); Bertier de Sauvigny (1986, 423, 426–28); Schroeder (1994b, 691–99); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 90–91); Sédouy (2009, 222–30).

394 Reinerman (1977, 207).

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Austria marched in to restore her client rulers, even the French could not object in view of the special interest that Austria was recognized as having there.”395

Metternich expected French meddling in the Papal Estates, however, and feared that the July Monarchy would use Austria’s weak material situation to reduce Austrian dominion over Central Italy by pushing for liberal reforms in the Estates. There was also an outside chance, evidenced by French mobilization on the Piedmontese border, that French troops might march across Piedmont in an attempt to join the Austrian intervention.396 Apart from being a clear expression of Vienna’s geopolitical bargain, this statement encapsulates Metternich’s view:

Our power is in this position like all others: each is in the case of having to defend, next to a general interest, yet one or more direct interests; certainly, the Emperor of Russia will not yield to the alliance any power over the Polish rebels, nor his Britannic Majesty, on such interference…in a matter vital to England. Our expediency is that Italy does not belong to the Revolution, or what is equivalent, to France; we want each Italian state to belong to itself. In this dilemma, the right is entirely on our side, and not to support it would be to place us in the vassalage of France; but the Emperor will never place himself in the vassalage of any power.397

395 Bourne (1982, 365); see also Webster (1951, 1:205); Vincent (1974, 93); Reinerman (1977, 214); Sédouy (2009, 224).

396 Schroeder (1994b, 692–93).

397 Metternich to Apponyi, 4 June 1831 (item #1026 in Metternich 1880a, 5:179-180): “Notre puissance est en cela placée comme toutes les autres ; chacune d'elles est dans le cas de devoir défendre, à côté d'un intérêt général, encore un ou plusieurs intérêts directs ; certes, l'Empereur de Russie ne cédera pas sur l'alliance d'une puissance quelconque avec les révoltés polonais, ni Sa Majesté Britannique … dans une question vitale pour l'Angleterre. Notre convenance est que l'Italie n'appartienne pas à la Révolution, ou ce qui équivaut, à la France; nous voulons que chaque État italien s'appartienne à lui-même. Dans ce dilemme, le bon droit est entièrement de notre côté, et ne pas le soutenir, ce serait nous placer dans le vasselage de la France; or l'Empereur ne se placera jamais dans le vasselage d'aucune puissance.”

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Sensing that French respect for Austria’s sphere could not be taken for granted, Metternich thus strove to assure the July Monarchy ahead of time that unilateral Austrian action was justified, would not disturb the Vienna settlement, and was in France’s interests. He did so by framing the Papal Estates revolt as a European issue but in which Austria had a legitimate and unilateral exclusivity. The input of the Allies was therefore welcome, but Austria would run the show. In February, Metternich instructed the Austrian representative in Paris to note to the French court that because the revolution was Bonapartist, and Austria was premiere en ligne, Austrian suppression was good for both Italy and France; Louis-Philippe’s legitimacy might be threatened if a Bonaparte sat on a throne. A “communauté d’intérêts” between Austria and France was thus “aussi évident”:

The so-called principle of non-intervention has never been recognized by us, and we will never sanction it by our admission. I consider it superfluous to enter here into a serious explanation of a question that, in our eyes, has no other value than that of a simple sentence. We will always reject the evil that will threaten us… We ask the French Government to not interfere in our tutelary action there, where it will be commanded by the most forceful reasons.

We take towards [Louis Philippe] and towards all the Courts of Europe the most formal engagement so that no view to political ambition, territorial expansion, or particular influence will ever serve as a motive for our action; it will be only following a formal requisition from the legally existing authorities that we will take the proper measures to ensure the complete independence of these authorities. We will do, in a word, only what we recognize the right and the duty to do, according to the least doubtful rules of the law of nations.398

398 Metternich to Apponyi, 15 February 1831 (items #1018 and #1019 in Metternich 1880a, 5:153-158): “Le soi- disant principe de non-intervention n'a jamais été reconnu par nous, et jamais nous ne le sanctionnerons de notre aveu. Je regarde comme superflu d'entrer ici dans une explication sérieuse sur une question qui, à nos yeux, n'a d'autre valeur que celle d'une simple phrase. Nous repousserons toujours le mal qui nous menacera… Nous demandons au Gouvernement français de ne pas gêner notre action tutélaire là où elle nous sera commandée par les raisons les plus puissantes. […] Nous prenons envers lui et envers toutes les Cours de l'Europe l'engagement le plus

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Although he secured the moral support of Prussia and Russia, from April to July 1831 Metternich nevertheless used an ambassadorial conference in Rome to coordinate Papal reforms. By consulting with the Allies after a unilateral intervention, Metternich could coordinate with Britain to contain French meddling in Italy.399 In a certain sense, Metternich desired to renew the 1815 Quadruple Alliance to encircle France and, because orchestrated by Metternich, place ailing Austria back in the center of European affairs.400 At the Rome conference, Metternich proposed a set of conservative Papal reforms aimed at preventing future crises, a timeline for a troop withdrawal, and a European guarantee under which Austrian troops would re-occupy the Papal estates if another revolution broke out. Schroeder notes that this policy, though “sane and moderate.” was replete with “internal” contradictions:

It proposed to internationalize the Roman question in order to preserve Austria’s exclusive hegemony in Italy; to reform papal rule without really changing it; to get France to cooperate in perpetuating its exclusion from Italy; and to persuade a liberal government in Britain to support an illiberal regime at Rome.401

France, which objected most to the reforms, would not agree to a Rome protocol, and so the conference ended without an Allied agreement. Carl Bernetti, the Papal Estates’ foreign secretary, asked Austria to withdraw its troops by 15 July, which it did. A new revolt began in December, and the papal government once again asked Austria to intervene, giving it control of the Papal forces. Austria reoccupied the Bologna from 23 to 24 January 1832. To the dismay of

formel qu'aucune vue d'ambition politique, d'agrandissement territorial, ni d'influence particulière, ne servira jamais de motif à notre action; ce ne sera qu'à la suite d'une réquisition formelle des autorités légalement existantes que nous prendrons des mesures propres à assurer l'indépendance complète de ces autorités. Nous ne ferons, en un mot, que ce que nous nous reconnaissons le droit et le devoir de faire, d'après les règles les moins douteuses du droit des gens.”

399 Reinerman (1977, 209–11).

400 Metternich to Apponyi, 3 June 1831 (item #1023 in Metternich 1880a, 5:170-171).

401 Schroeder (1994b, 695).

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both the Allies and Rome, France counter-intervened by occupying the Papal port of Ancona on 23 February 1832, under the understanding Rome had given it permission. Metternich used the opportunity to negotiate an agreement with France wherein its troops could remain in Ancona so long as Austria’s remained in the Papal estates; this had the effect of lessening French influence from Metternich’s desired Papal reform.402

The Papal Estates intervention shows how Austrian hegemony over Central Italy was respected by the other powers—with the exception of an increasingly dissatisfied France. Although France challenged Austrian hegemony over the Papal Estates, however, it did so under pretense of a Catholic power concerned with Austria’s proposed political reforms, not its territorial dominion over Central Italy. To this extent the French tried to insist on a distinction between Modena and Parma, inside Austria’s sphere, and the Papal estates, which were a pan-Catholic (i.e. French) concern. France may also have been concerned that Metternich planned to directly annex the Papal estates; its inhabitants preferred Austrian to Papal rule.403

The United Provinces, which had hoped for French help, were rebuffed by Louis-Philippe’s cabinet, which stated that no French blood should be spilled for a non-French cause. Further, the French occupation of Ancona was not leveraged to help the rebellion, which had flared back up, and rested on the legitimacy of Papal acquiescence.404 Nonetheless, Austria, Prussia, and Russia condemned the act, and even Saint-Aulaire, the French delegate at Rome, denounced the occupation.405 The legitimacy of Austrian intervention was not at issue for the other Allies, nor France; what France objected to was Austria’s planned reforms of the Papal estates.

402 Webster (1951, 1:207-212); Bertier de Sauvigny (1986, 427); Schroeder (1994b, 693–97); Sédouy (2009, 224– 29).

403 Webster (1951, 1:210, 213); Sédouy (2009, 224). This belief had dubious evidence; see Reinerman (1977, 208).

404 Church (1983, 139–41).

405 Sédouy (2009, 228); Schroeder (1994b, 696). Russia and Prussia had previously warned France that they supported Austria’s right to intervene in the Papal Estates; see Reinerman (1977, 215–16).

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Throughout, Palmerston supported Metternich, but worried that too much Austrian intervention in the Papal estates (and only the Papal estates) would invite France, which sought excuses to revise the Vienna settlement, to interfere as a Catholic power. Palmerston’s main aim then was to help Austria settle the Papal issue through appropriate reform, and with minimal violence, acknowledging its sphere there but also helping guard it against French interference.406 In toto, as Bertier de Sauvigny notes, the events had, on the whole, strengthened rather than weakened the Austrian hold on Papal Estates.407

3.3.7 Intervention in a de jure sphere: the Eastern Courts in Kraków, 1846

On 20 February 1846, a second Polish uprising prompted a great power intervention—this time in Kraków, a “free city” independent of Congress Poland but legally a protectorate of the three Eastern courts. The uprising was coordinated by émigrés in Paris and planned for Kraków, Galicia, and Poznań, under Prussian dominion. Prussia learned of the planned rebellion and arrested its leader before it could take root in Poznań. A rebellion organized mostly by nobles in Galicia ran into trouble when armed peasants, who the rebels sought to emancipate, slaughtered 90 percent of Tarnów’s nobility. Across the border, Kraków’s senate asked Austria to occupy it in the event the rebellion spread there. Austrian troops had occupied Kraków from 1836 to 1841, following a precedent established after the 1830 November Uprising, when Kraków was used as an organizing point for the rebels. In the 1830s and 1840s the Free City became the central node linking Poland to the Paris’ émigré community.408

Between 20 and 22 February, the rebels expelled the small occupying Austrian force, overthrew the existing regime and set up a provisional government. A manifesto declared the end of serfdom and called for an all-Polish uprising. Austrian and Russian forces promptly defeated rebel forces on Kraków’s borders and entered the city; the rebels capitulated on 4 March. In

406 Webster (1951, 1:201, 206–7); Brown (2010, 153–54); Bourne (1982, 366).

407 Bertier de Sauvigny (1986, 427).

408 My account here draws primarily from Bourne (1970, 61–63); Bullen (1974b, 161–83); Wandycz (1974, 132– 37); Schroeder (1994b, 792–93); Davies (2005, 2:246-250); Dabrowski (2014, 316).

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August, the Eastern courts held a special conference to decide the Free City’s fate. Metternich was worried that an alteration of Vienna might bring France and England together against the Eastern courts. Palmerston and Guizot were currently at odds over the Spanish succession and Palmerston wanted to align the Eastern courts against France so that its favoured candidate, the Duchess of Montpensier, would be denied any legal claim to the Spanish throne. Perhaps succumbing to pressure from Nicholas to finally solve the Kraków issue, Metternich annexed the free city on 16 November 1846, renaming it the Grand Duchy of Kraków.409

Two treaties unambiguously established Kraków’s geopolitical position in a shared Eastern sphere of influence: a 3 May 1815 treaty signed by Prussia, Austria, and Russia; and the Vienna settlement itself, which included the former treaty in its Final Act alongside additional clauses that detailed the specifics of Kraków’s new geopolitical status. These treaties reflected a compromise between the three Eastern courts: Austria did not want Kraków to join Congress Poland and therefore into the Russian sphere, and Russia did not want it (yet) to become part of Galicia. The May 1815 treaty thus established the Kraków as a “free city.” It would be neutral and a constitution, designed by Prince Czartoryski, would protect its citizens’ independent rights. But it would at the same time be a protectorate of Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Article VI of the Vienna Final Act, signed by all of Europe’s powers and not just the Eastern Courts, reestablished this protectorate status: “The city of Kraków, along with its territory, is declared in perpetuity a free, independent, and strictly neutral city, under the protection of Russia, Austria, and Prussia.”410

The 1813 treaty and Vienna Final Act placed significant restrictions on Kraków’s freedom. The Free City could not publish literature or take hostile actions against Russia, Prussia, or Austria; its immigration was restricted; and the Eastern courts reserved the right to pursue fugitives from

409 Bullen (1974b, 163–71); Rich (1992, 62); Davies (2005, 2:247-249).

410 “La ville de Cracovie, avec son territoire, est déclarée à perpétuité cité libre, indépendante et strictement neutre, sous la protection de la Russie, de l’Autriche et de la Prusse.” Text in de Clercq (1880, 2:573). Articles 6 to 20 concern Kraków.

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their own territories into Cracow’s territory.411 “From its creation,” Bullen summarizes, “Cracow was a client state”; Metternich called it a “geographical atom placed between three great monarchies.”412

The allies did not protest Austria’s intervention. Foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Secretary, and Guizot expressed hope that Austria would not alter Kraków’s constitution and withdraw its troops once order was restored.413 In August 1846 Palmerston told the House that Austria’s original occupation of Austria was undertaken in response to “plots and conspiracies” and therefore, according to the terms of the 1815 treaties, Austria was entitled to intervene.414 Put simply, Kraków’s status as an Eastern protectorate, established in the most important territorial settlement of the era, meant that the intervention was legitimate.

What did provoke the ire of the Western Allies—but only mild ire—was the subsequent annexation of Kraków, which the Allies understood to be a violation of the Vienna settlement. The Eastern courts expected some protest from London and Paris given that the annexation of Kraków, somewhat like the removal of Poland’s constitution, would violate aspects of the Vienna settlement. In October, Metternich had sent dispatches to the Austrian representatives in Paris and London justifying the suppression of the revolt. The 1815 treaties established the right of the Eastern courts, and only those courts, to intervene in Kraków. The Free City had furthermore failed to comply with the restrictions outlined in those treaties.415 The Eastern courts’ assurance strategy their alteration of the Settlement therefore curiously rested on the legitimacy of the Settlement and its geopolitical bargain: Kraków was a “centre of Polish revolutionary

411 Davies (2005, 2:246-247); Bullen (1974b, 162–63).

412 Bullen (1974b, 162).

413 Bullen (1974b, 163).

414 Brown (2010, 293).

415 Bourne (1970, 62); Bullen (1974b, 163–66).

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activity, a danger to peace and order in eastern Europe”—and as laid out in 1815, only the Eastern courts had the right to militarily take care of it.416

News of the annexation reached the public in November 1846 and provoked protests in Britain and France. Most French newspapers condemned the action. The Allies’ official responses were muted, however.417 In England, Queen Victoria, Prime Minister John Russell, and Palmerston were concerned about the intervention’s ramifications for the Vienna system. Palmerston condemned the intervention in private, but explained that no British action against the Eastern courts was intended. He dispatched a letter to Vienna protesting the intervention, but noted to the British diplomat there that only “a threat of war” would deter Vienna—a threat the Eastern courts would know “we should never utter for the sake of Cracow.”418 David Brown describes Palmerston’s “policy of reluctant acquiescence” as derived from his competing needs to support the Vienna settlement, appear friendly to the Eastern courts, and counter French encroachment on Spain.419 In March 1847 Palmerston argued that Parliament should refrain from passing “strong resolutions” against the Eastern powers, and he resisted effort by Guizot to coordinate an Anglo-French condemnation of the annexation. Guizot, noting British restraint on Kraków, followed suit in an attempt to warm the Eastern courts to his Spanish policy.420

The Eastern courts took note of this muted response. In December 1846 Nesselrode wrote to Russian diplomat Peter von Meyendorff, “We are very content with the good turn the Krakow affair has taken in London. Palmerston’s protest was as moderate as it could be.”421 Metternich

416 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 104).

417 Riasanovsky (1959, 246); Bourne (1970, 61–63); Bullen (1974b, 163–74); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 104); Sked (2008, 99); Mitzen (2013, 192).

418 Palmerston to Bulwer, 19 November 1846, quoted from Bourne (1970, 247).

419 Brown (2010, 293–95).

420 Brown (2010, 294); Bullen (1974b, 166–74, 1979a, 127–28).

421 Nesselrode to the Baron of Meyendorff, 7 December 1846, in Nesselrode (1904, 4:360): “nous sommes très contents de la bonne tournure que l'affaire de Cracovie a prise à Londres. La protestation de Palmerston est aussi modérée qu'elle pouvait l'être.” See also Bourne (1970, 247).

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responded to the French condemnation with an official declaration on 4 January 1847. As he had done in October of the previous year, he argued the intervention was undertaken according to the “letter and the spirit” of the Vienna treaties. The 3 May 1815 treaty and Final Act had given the Eastern courts, and only the Eastern courts, the right to intervene in Kraków. Austria’s annexation was within its rights and duties (“droits” and “devoirs”) of the Vienna treaties, properly understood. These precluded the Austrian Emperor from reestablishing

a political body that, after having contravened during a long series of years the conditions upon whose respect its independence was founded, ended by sacrificing the political existence given to it to insurrectionary projects hostile to any governmental and social order.

The Austrian emperor “deeply regretted” that on this “point of law” (“point de vue du droit”) there was a “difference of opinion” between the French Cabinet and the three Eastern Courts, but hoped that they would come alongside and scrupulously observe the 1815 treaties in the true sense of their letter and spirit (“observer scrupuleusement les traités dans le véritable sens de leur lettre et de leur esprit”).422

In the adjoining private letter and note to the Austrian representative in Paris, Metternich compared the Kraków annexation to a “police measure,” and explained his logic for the verdict of posterity (“l’impartiale histoire pronuncera le verdict”). At Vienna the Powers had recognized the futility of the 18th century great power politics (“ancien système politique de l’Europe”) and sought to transform them. They identified Poland’s nationalism and existence as a geopolitical entity as “a permanent hostility” to the repose. To this end they partitioned Poland—the third time in recent years—among the Eastern courts. In 1815, the Powers maintained Kraków’s independence as a free city. Its central role in the 1830 uprising and ongoing Polish national agitations made them rethink the wisdom of this decision. According to Metternich, it was

422 Metternich to Apponyi, 4 January 1847 (item #1593 in Metternich 1880a, 7:359-361): “un corps politique qui, après avoir contrevenu pendant une longue série d'années aux conditions sur le respect desquelles son indépendance avait été́ fondée, a fini par sacrifier l'existence politique qui lui avait été́ donnée à des projets insurrectionnels hostiles à̀ tout ordre gouvernemental et social.”

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Kraków’s Polish machinations, not the Eastern Powers, which violated “both the spirit and the letter of the treaties” (“à la fois l'esprit et la lettre des traités”).423

By emphasizing Krakow’s abrogation of Vienna and the reasons behind the Polish partition, Metternich framed his intervention as an exception that proved Palmerston’s rule, a rule according to which all five Allies had to decide on geopolitical changes to the Vienna settlement.424 Metternich’s reasoning here was not unlike the Allies’ reasoning when they created neutral Belgium. In the latter instance the Allies agreed that Vienna’s specifics—United Netherlands—had to be revised in order to maintain the system’s overall integrity. Put differently, the great powers had to revise the Vienna settlement to preserve it. Although Kraków was being annexed rather than separated from a preexisting polity, as Belgium was, its small size and status within another Power’s sphere (unlike Belgium) meant the annexation had almost no chance of jeopardizing the Vienna settlement unless the Allies contrived to greatly exaggerate the situation. A Polish uprising aided by Kraków, however, would jeopardize the Settlement. The annexation, a small revision of the territorial distribution, was thus a reasonable tradeoff given the potential costs to the overall European equilibrium of letting Kraków remain free—according to Metternich’s argument.

Allied protestations of the initial annexation were virtually nil and apart from civil society denunciations, the Allies did not push back against Austria. As Paul Schroeder summarizes:

The announcement of the three powers’ decision that Austria would annex Cracow…evoked pious condemnations and some public outcry from the Western powers, but no real opposition. Aberdeen, still in office during the rising, took the free city’s demise for granted and would have passed over the annexation in silence. Palmerston, who had taken office by the time it was announced, used the affair as a stick to beat the

423 Metternich to Apponyi, 4 January 1847 (items #1593-1595 in Metternich 1880a, 7:359-368).

424 Bullen (1974b, 164, 172).

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absolutists with, but really cared little about Poland and was more concerned about not driving Austria and France together.425

Even if Metternich’s argument was contrived, its contrivance was based on the fundamental reality that such a small revision so deep in the Eastern spheres was not worth jeopardizing the whole arrangement.

3.3.8 Intervention in a de jure sphere: Austria in Italy, 1848

In 1848 another set of revolutions, beginning in Sicily and then France, swept the continent. Larger in scale and scope than those of 1830, the 1848 revolutions were suppressed by local forces rather than international intervention. As Bridge and Bullen note, despite their historical importance the 1848 revolutions “had far less direct impact” than 1830 on the territorial order of Europe: “A new state, Belgium, had emerged out of the upheavals of 1830; in 1848 the old frontiers were everywhere restored.”426

Of note here is Austria’s intervention in Northern Italy.427 This intervention reopened the same issues as Austria’s interventions in Central Italy in 1831-32. In 1848, Lombard and Venetia voted for a union with Charles Albert, the King of Sardinia, in a clear revision of the 1815 geopolitical bargain.428 Palmerston hoped that Vienna would withdraw its direct rule over northern Italy, which he blamed for rousing Italian separatism, weakening Austria, and encouraging the imperial aspirations of France. In other words, Palmerston sought a small amendment to Vienna Settlement’s geopolitical bargain in hopes of saving it.429 Russia and

425 Schroeder (1994b, 793).

426 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 110).

427 See Taylor (1954, 1–45); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 104–14); Rapport (2009); Bartlett (1996, 46–52).

428 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 108).

429 Taylor (1954, 17–18); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 106–9); Bartlett (1996, 47): “much as he favoured a European equilibrium, it was, he believed, possible to improve on some the territorial dispositions of 1815.”

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Prussia assented to Austrian dominion over Italy, however, and Austria’s General Joseph Radetzky decisively defeated Charles Albert’s rebellion in August.430

1848 did signal the first crack in the Vienna Settlement and the end of its geopolitical bargain. At the invitation of Austria, Nicholas I intervened in Hungary when Vienna was unable to act quickly to suppress a revolt—although by the time Russian troops arrived Austria had succeeded in ending the rebellion.431 Before the intervention, however, Klemenz von Metternich, the “Prime Minister of Europe” and architect of the Vienna settlement, was forced from his position and went into permanent exile.432 As Kyle Lascurettes notes, the 1848 revolutions “completed the cycle of pushing the last of its architects from power, thus entrusting the Vienna System to leaders who had little prior experience with it or trust in one another.”433

Prussia intervened in Schleswig-Holstein, on invitation, to win that territory from Denmark. Although the intervention was technically prosecuted with consent from the locals, it was a clear revision of 1815. Prussia was forced to withdraw Schleswig-Holstein by Russia and Britain, themselves untrammeled by revolutions, acting in concert; the duchies were put back under Danish control in an 1851 treaty.434

Finally, the new foreign minister of the provisional government in Paris, Alphonse de Lamartine, publicly denounced the Vienna settlement in March 1848. As A.J.P. Taylor notes, “Lamartine’s circular was a dramatic act—the first official announcement by the government of a Great Power that the Vienna settlement had no moral validity. Without meaning to do so, Lamartine had put international relations on a de facto basis.” 435Although Lamartine left the position by May, 1848

430 Bartlett (1996, 48).

431 Mitchell (2018, 251–53). A statue of one of the 1848 Generals, Jozef Bem, became an important symbol in the 1956 Hungarian uprisings.

432 Rapport (2009, 59–66); Taylor (1954, 8).

433 Lascurettes (2017, 16).

434 Bartlett (1996, 50); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 109–10).

435 Taylor (1954, 5).

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marked a renewed period of French revisionism in international affairs. Napoléon III, who took power in December, would of course instigate (along with Bismarck) the 1870 Franco-Prussian war that united Germany and permanently changed the European balance. And, as we will see below, Napoleon III also shares blame for the outbreak of the Crimean War that ended the Concert.

3.3.9 Intervention in a contested sphere: Russia and the Allies in the Ottoman Empire, 1827-1853

In May 1821 the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia rebelled against their Ottoman authorities. The Danubian revolts were quickly followed by others in Greece, sparking a series of crises that forced the great powers to confront the “Eastern Question”: the geopolitical consequences of the Ottoman Empire’s 19th Century decline, or as Albrecht-Carrié has put it, “the problem of the fate of the Ottoman Empire.”436

Although the Ottoman Empire lay outside the Vienna settlement, the Eastern Question is often presented as the paramount issue of the Concert era, and its spheres of influence-intervention dynamics warrant examination.437 The Eastern Question and the Allies disagreements over it furthermore led to the Crimean War, which left Russia “utterly defeated, demoralized, and profoundly dissatisfied with the peace settlement imposed upon it.”438 After the cracks of 1848, the Crimean War destroyed the concert.439

Allied intervention in the Ottoman Empire resists generalization for several reasons, and a number of special caveats apply to the treatment below. First, almost continuous military action—from blockades to outright wars between (in various combinations) Russia, the Allies,

436 Albrecht-Carrié (1973, 40); see also Anderson (1966, xi–xxi); Rodogno (2012, 23–27).

437 An extreme example is Kagan (1997a), who as noted assesses the Concert using only the Eastern Question as a case.

438 Lascurettes (2017, 17).

439 Schroeder (1973); Mitzen (2013).

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the Sultan, and Mehmet Ali Pasha—blurs the line between nonintervention and intervention, by comparison much clearer on the continent.

Second, the case also shows geopolitical understandings, disagreements, and confusions in much greater flux than the Continental cases. The Ottoman Empire fell outside of the de jure geopolitical bargain established by Vienna. Russia’s treaties with the Ottoman Empire and with it were not discussed at the Vienna Congress, “shielding” Europe from extraneous quarrels.440 This put responsibility for the crises in the Porte in a state of ambiguity, and competition among the Powers, particularly Britain, France, and Russia, who at different times claimed different geopolitical responsibilities.441

Third, Ottoman Empire’s nonsovereign or quasi-sovereign status, and the different legal or geopolitical standings of its various constituent components, further complicate this picture.442 Put simply, while the boundaries of spheres of influence and military intervention on the Continent can be much more clearly delineated on the Continent than in the Eastern Question. To an extent this case foreshadows the post-Cold War geopolitical bargains examined in chapter 5, where tacit and de facto understandings led to shifting boundaries and misperceptions about what kind of great power assertions were acceptable to others.

I focus below on Allied interaction with Russia’s contested spheres claims in the Ottoman Empire and how this produced different intervention behaviours. In general, the Allies were willing to recognize a limited Russian sphere of action based on its bilateral treaties with the Porte. As long as Russia pressed only its treaty commitments, unilateral Russian military action against the Porte would be legitimate. The Allies contended that Russia’s sphere did not extend any further than these treaties, narrowly understood, however, while Russia tended to expand

440 Schroeder (1994b, 575); Šedivý (2013, 39–44). Metternich and Castlereagh appear to have made attempts to include the Porte at Vienna, but were rebuffed by both St. Petersburg and Constantinople.

441 Some scholars suggest this lacuna, necessary for agreement at Vienna, contained the seeds of the Concert’s end. See Ingram (2002); Vasquez (2002); Holsti (1991, 129, 136, 166); Slantchev (2005, 572).

442 Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 99–100, 1973, 40); Glanville (2013, 105–9); Rodogno (2012, 36–54).

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their meaning as time progressed. This expanded reading threatened catastrophe over the Greek revolt, where the Allies, fearing an Ottoman collapse that would fundamentally alter the European equilibrium, sought to restrain unilateral Russian action by delegitimizing it.

As Jennifer Mitzen has shown, the Allies restrained Russia by “Europeanizing” the Greek issue and “grouping” Russia under the Alliance mechanism, accepting the more perfunctory assurances from Alexander or Nicholas when Russia acted within the confines of its treaties.443 To this extent the Allies cooperated more often than not in the 1820-1840 period, intervening together in 1827 against Turkey, jointly creating the Kingdom of Greece in 1831, intervening to stop the Egypt-Ottoman war in the 1830s and 1840s, and placing the Straits under joint European supervision in 1841. When the Allies finally could not bring Russia alongside or separate its recognized sphere from its aspirational one—into the late 1840s and early 1850s—disputes over the Ottoman Empire’s geopolitical status led to the first war among them since 1815.444 Below I focus on two contrasting periods—the 1820-27 period, and the lead up to the Crimean War from 1853.

3.3.9.1 Intervention in the Greek War of Independence, 1820-1827

Russia’s legitimate interest in the Principalities stemmed from the treaties of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) and Bucharest (1812), both signed after Russia defeated the Porte in a series of expansionary wars. The former created an ‘independent’ Crimea under Russian influence and secured, for the first time, Russian access to the Black Sea, while the latter extended Russia’s territory to include Bessarabia. The 1774 Treaty granted Russia the right to represent Orthodox

443 Mitzen (2013, 142–76).

444 The literature on the Eastern Question, even by Concert standards, is vast. I have relied principally on Temperley (1925, 319–62, 390–409); Webster (1925, 2:349-402); Taylor (1954, 46–98); Riasanovsky (1959, 235–65); Schroeder (1962, 164–94, 1972, 1994b, 614–21, 637–64, 726–56); Jelavich (1964, 53–69, 73–124); Anderson (1966; 1979); Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 99–196, 1973, 40–55, 84–94); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:512-527, 567–71, 848–51; 3:1067-1111, 1193–1221, 130–1319); Grimsted (1969, 255–67);; Cowles (1990); Bartlett (1996, 26–61); Rendall (2000, 2002, 2006); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 72–85, 92–101, 114–25); Bass (2009); Sédouy (2009, 159– 77); Rodogno (2012); Jarrett (2013, 344–48); Mitzen (2013, 123–211); and Šedivý (2013).

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clergy before the Sultan and charged him with the protection of all the Empire’s Christians. Both included provisions for Turkish rule of the Principalities, including Russia’s right to request Ottoman intervention; before the revolt, Russia argued these provisions not being upheld by Constantinople. The Sultan’s court conversely accused Russia of failing to withdraw from the Empire’s Caucasian principalities as it agreed, thus illegitimately giving it about 150 kilometers of Black Sea coastline. Russian interest in the Black Sea steppe, newly settled and agriculturally developed, and access to the Mediterranean gave Russia a strong interest to intervene unilaterally when the Principalities revolt broke out in 1821.445

The Allies understood that Russia could intervene rightfully in the Principalities and only the Principalities on the basis of its treaty rights. They did not protest in 1821 when Russia ignored Ipsilantis’ appeals for help, gave the Porte permission to crush the rebellion (as per the 1812 treaty), and ordered the Russian military in Turkey to maintain strict neutrality. At Verona in 1822 they supported Russia’s charges that the Porte had failed to evacuate the Principalities, among other abnegations of the 1774 and 1812 Treaties. In 1826 they furthermore approved of Russian ultimatums delivered to Constantinople over its treaty violations, resulting in the Treaty of Akkerman. Russia’s ministers and the Tsar justified Russia’s position toward the Principalities on this basis, and myriad statements by all parties established the recognition of this rightful if limited sphere of action.446

What troubled the Allies was possible Russian action in the Greek revolution, which began in April 1821 in Morea and had much further-reaching consequences. The Greek revolts were met with a strong Ottoman response that, among other things, led to Greek massacres of Muslims and, more importantly for Russia’s Orthodox identity and burgeoning philhellenic civil societies in France and Britain, Ottoman massacres of Greeks.447 Russia’s hawkish ministers might use the

445 Schroeder (1962, 168–69); Anderson (1966, 1–27; 1979, 79–82). The 1774 treaty is sometimes “Kutchuk Kainardji.”

446 Schroeder (1962, 169, 223–24); Jelavich (1964, 73); Anderson (1966, 53; 1979, 81); Rendall (2000, 66).

447 Bass (2009, 64–75); Rodogno (2012, 63–78); see also Schroeder (1962, 170, 1994b, 614–16); Finnemore (2004, 58–60).

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Porte’s failure to protect its Christian subjects as a pretext to intervene against the Porte, ostensibly to stop the massacres, as the guarantor of Christian safety. Austria and Britain feared that such action would lead to a Russo-Turkish War in which the Ottoman Empire would be severely weakened or destroyed, and the European peace threatened. Legitimate Russian intervention in the Principalities could therefore not be allowed to illegitimately carry over into the Greek issue.448 Indeed, Ipsilantis’ ultimate goal was to foster revolts throughout the Balkans that would start a Russo-Turkish war and end in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. As Metternich put it in a December 1821 letter, “The interest of Europe pronounces against any major political change.”449

At the same time, 18th Century-style balancing—checking Russia with coercive forces—might dismantle the Alliance. The position of Austria, summarized by Bertier de Sauvigny, underlines this problem: France, unhappy with the 1815 Treaties, might look to profit from Russian intervention; Britain would defend the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and thus take a noninterventionist stance against France and Russia; Prussia and Austria, stuck in the middle, would have to support either Britain or Russia and thus alienate at least one of their most powerful allies.450 In toto, the Allies from 1821 sought to restrain Alexander, at first on their own; a concerted separation of the Greek issue from the Principalities, so the former could be made “European” and the latter left Russian, became the joint solution.451

448 Schroeder (1962, 168–77, 1994b, 615–19); Anderson (1966, 57–59); Cowles (1990, 691–92); Mitzen (2013, 124, 137–41); see also Finnemore (2004, 59); Lindley (2003, 216–17).

449 Schroeder (1962, 173). There was reason to suspect Russia wanted to reduce Ottoman powers sufficiently to place it under suzerainty in an enlarged Russian sphere of influence. See, for example, the March 1822 notes from Foreign Minister Tatischev to Metternich in Schroeder (1962, 187).

450 Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:513).

451 Schroeder (1962, 176, 187–88, 1994b, 618, 620); Jelavich (1964, 65); Anderson (1966, 59); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:513-514). Schroeder makes the case that Metternich, acting as an intermediary between Constantinople and St. Petersburg, convinced Russia to separate the two issues and thus averted a Russian intervention in 1821-22.

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In this regard the Allies could rely on Alexander’s penchant for Allied cooperation, so troublesome in previous crises but crucial in this one. After early attempts to achieve acquiescence from individual allies, in 1823 Alexander called for an Allied ambassadorial conference.452 Alexander, and Nicholas after him, understood that while Russian action over the Principalities could be legally justified, the Allies would need assurances not only there but vis- à-vis Greece. To this extent Alexander told others that without the consent of the Allies, Russian action over Greece would appear, and be rightly be understood, as unjustified expansionism.453 Alexander signaled to the Allies and his own staff that he preferred to keep the Alliance together than act unilaterally in the East, which would destroy the European concert. This inclination went against the advice of most of his ministers at popular opinion at home.454 Materially, Russia also needed to secure London’s cooperation given the British fleet’s dominant position—as Canning would put it, while “Russia might act alone over the Principalities,” it would have to “act with England over Greece.”455 Alexander wanted an Allied unanimity that would include Britain, not an easy task given Castlereagh and Canning’s noninterventionism and Britain’s interests in a Mediterranean status quo over which she was predominant.456

The St. Petersburg conference, which ran in stops and starts from June 1824 to February 1825, did not result in Allied cooperation on the Eastern Question. Russia initially proposed the creation of three autonomous Greek Principalities similar to the Danubian ones, a prospect

452 Schroeder (1962, 178–94, 1994b, 619–21, 638); Anderson (1966, 62; 1979, 83); Jarrett (2013, 345).

453 Riasanovsky (1959, 238–40); Lincoln (1978, 116–17); Anderson (1979, 80); Rendall (2000, 59–61, 63–65); Sédouy (2009, 171, esp. note 2).

454 Schroeder (1962, 177–78, 1994b, 619–20); Anderson (1966, 59–61). This was especially true of Capodistrias, who would later be President of the first, and short-lived, Greek Republic until his assassination in October 1831 (Grimsted 1969, 229–39, 256–68). Rendall (2000, 59–75) has persuasively shown that most of the relevant domestic sources of Russian foreign policy—except, crucially, Alexander and Nicholas—preferred intervention.

455 Temperley (1925, 392), quoted in Rendall (2000, 66).

456 Cowles (1990, 688–700); Schroeder (1994b, 638–45); Jarrett (2013, 346); Mitzen (2013, 149–52). Initially, Britain did not frame the matter as a Concert concern, turned down an invitation to the conference (though it still participated), consulted the Greeks unilaterally and declared them belligerents under international law.

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rejected by all the Allies.457 Alexander grew frustrated with the conference system, claiming that the Allies were using it to obstruct action on Greece. Events into late 1825 intensified the crisis, however. The Sultan had earlier appealed to Mehmet Ali Pasha, its powerful ruler in Egypt, to help it put down the revolt. Ali sent a large invasion fleet to Greece commanded by his son, Ibrahim, and by August 1825 Ibrahim was laying siege to Mesologgi, the headquarters of the Greek Rebellion. In the same month, the provisional Greek government appealed to Britain for help, and in September 1825 presented Canning with a proposal to place Greece under the formal protection of Britain. Although Canning rebuffed the Greeks’ pleas, in October false but persistent rumours emerged that Ibrahim had been authorized to depopulate Greece, sell its population into slavery, and recolonize it with Egyptians. This “barbarization plan” gave Russia and the Western courts (through the philhellenic lobby) further pretext, and pressure, to intervene.458

In December 1825, Alexander I died under mysterious circumstances and was replaced by Nicholas; Canning used the opportunity to send the Duke of Wellington to St. Petersburg, who reopened the Eastern Question with Russia, an option Alexander had extended in October of the previous year. Wellington found that Nicholas clearly distinguished between Russia’s treaty disputes with the Porte and the Greek Question, about which it was prepared to continue acting in concert.459 By April 1826, a protocol signed by Russia and Britain and assented to by the other allies. The Powers would make Greece a self-governed “dépendance sur cette Empire,” though they would allow the Porte “une certaine influence” over Greece’s choice of rulers. Articles 3 and 4 set the precedent that, if the Sultan should reject this solution, these Powers could intervene, “soit de concert” or “soit séparément,” between the Porte and the Greeks, reserving to themselves the “measures necessary for regulating the details of the arrangement in question.”

457 Anderson (1966, 62; 1979, 83); Schroeder (1994b, 638–39); Sédouy (2009, 160–61).

458 Bass (2009, 120–28); Sédouy (2009, 159–64); Rodogno (2012, 78–80); cf. also Schroeder (1994b, 642). Sédouy (2009, 164) remarks: “Que le berceau de la civilisation européenne devienne une colonie de l’islam, voilà ce qui mobilise tous les consciences en Europe!” [That the cradle of European civilization becomes a colony of Islam, this is what mobilizes all the consciences in Europe!]

459 Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:567, 3:1080-1081); Sédouy (2009, 165); Jelavich (1964, 67).

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Article 5 announced assurances, similar to those made in the Belgian crisis, that Russia and Britain would seek no increase of territory, “no exclusive influence,” and no exclusive commercial advantage from the arrangement. Article 6 called for the other Allies to act in concert with Britain and Russia in upholding the treaty.460 While the Protocol legally separated the Greek question from Russia’s other treaty obligations and bound Russia’s action toward Greece to a public legal document, it appeared to allow for unilateral Russian intervention.461

After another lull in which the Allies took no action over Greece—frustrating Tsar Nicholas, but broadening Russo-British cooperation—the Powers reconvened an ambassadorial conference in London in March 1827 with the purpose of transforming the St. Petersburg Protocol into a Treaty of alliance guarantee.462 Russia had since normalized its relations, a major stipulation of the British, with the Porte in the October 1826 Treaty of Akkerman; none of the Allies objected to its articles, which further reinforced Russia’s influence in the Principalities and Serbia.463 At the London conference, the Allies successfully framed the revolt as a European rather than Russian concern and downplayed the connection between Russia and Orthodox Greeks or any claim that, on the basis of its limited treaties with the Porte, the Balkans fell within Russia’s sphere of influence. The 4 July 1827 Treaty of London restated, while clarifying, the basic tenets of the St. Petersburg Protocol. It circumscribed the roles of the Powers in the Balkan theatre, prohibiting territorial aggrandizement, committing the Alliance to the future creation of a Greek state, and

460 [In concert or separately… the measures necessary to regulate the details of the arrangement in question.] Text in de Clercq (1880, 3:417-415); an English translation and analysis is in Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 103–6).

461 Anderson (1966, 62–65; 1979, 83–84); Schroeder (1994b, 638–47); Bass (2009, 118–30); Sédouy (2009, 164– 67) . Receptions of the protocols vary; Schroeder (1994b, 646) argues that the protocol was “alarmingly vague”; Sédouy (2009, 166–67) follows Schroeder; but c.f. Anderson (1966, 65): the protocol “constituted a minor diplomatic revolution”; and Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 104). Cowles (1990, 707) argues that it reflected Russia’s desire for hegemony over the Greek issue. Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1082-1083) outlines Metternich’s “stupefied” reaction; he appears to have sided with Schroeder, accusing the Protocol of renewing confusion between the two aspects of the Eastern question.

462 Sédouy (2009, 167).

463 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 74–75); Jelavich (1964, 73–74); Anderson (1966, 65–66); Schroeder (1994b, 647–48).

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authorizing Allied intervention within one month in case of Turkish or Greek noncompliance.464 When the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II rejected the Allies’ demands in August, the Powers implemented the additional article and, on 20 October 1827, destroyed Ibrahim’s fleet in Navarino Bay.465

The London Treaty had successfully ‘Europeanized’ the Greek issue and kept it from exclusive Russian dominion, while reaffirming Russia’s rights to intervene under the premises of its treaty disputes. Allied assurance, this time in the form of the first concrete multilateralism of the Concert, legitimized the Navarino intervention.466 Although Austria and Prussia were opposed to intervening on behalf of the Greeks, and despite the best efforts of France to bring them onside, they limited their protests to abstentions.467 The Powers resolved in February 1830 to create an independent Greek state that, like Belgium, would be ruled by a Christian prince unrelated to any of the Allies’ ruling families and would be under joint European protection, achieving this in May 1832.468

After Navarino, the Allies approved a French occupation Morea, the second collective intervention of the period, to safeguard it against further incursions by Ibrahim. The Sultan declared jihad against Russia, provoking another Russo-Turkish war. When Russia moved

464 English translation of the Treaty with analysis can be found in Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 106–13).

465 Jelavich (1964, 74–75); Anderson (1966, 66–67; 1979, 84–85); Cowles (1990, 712–17); Schroeder (1994b, 650– 53); Bass (2009, 133–51); Sédouy (2009, 168–69); Rodogno (2012, 81–84); Jarrett (2013, 346–48); Mitzen (2013, 147–58). Navarino is sometimes presented as accidental (e.g. M. S. Anderson 1966, 67; Schroeder 1994b, 652–53); the point here is that the Allies nevertheless acted in Concert against the Egypt-Turkish fleet and did not turn against one another.

466 Bass (2009, 362–63); Sédouy (2009, 172).

467 Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1082-1111); see also Schroeder (1994b, 649–50); Bass (2009, 131–32); Sédouy (2009, 168–69); Rodogno (2012, 81).

468 See the February 1830 to May 1832 documents in de Clercq (1880, 3:557-568, 573–77; 4:134-138, 165–67, 169– 70, 176–80, 241); English translation and analysis of four of these are in Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 114, 117–21). The documents make continuous references to the necessity of “ne pas s’isoler” and the important of unanimity between France, Russia, Britain and Greece.

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against Constantinople and occupied Moldavia and Wallachia in 1828, however, it did so under the restraining guidelines of the London Treaty, which explicitly separated Russia’s bilateral disputes with the Ottomans—now treated “in Russia’s sphere of influence”—from the larger issue of the Greek revolts.469 In a demonstration of Nicholas’ understanding of these parameters, the Tsar resisted suggestions that the Balkan peoples still legally under Turkish rule should be brought into the conflict on Russia’s side.470 Article X of the Treaty of Adrianople, which ended the war, made explicit Russia’s commitment to the 1829 Treaty of London stipulations.471

Overall, the arrangement allowed Russia to prosecute a war against Turkey on the basis of its treaty commitments while keeping it aligned with the other Allies on the Greek issue. This alignment eliminating the need for the Powers to check Russia with force.472 As Mitzen argues, Russia fought its war against the Ottomans “as a limited war within its sphere of influence, while keeping the Greek Question separate.”473 On this account, the 1827 Treaty of London had “a causal role in constraining the meaning of the Russo-Turkish War and keeping the Greek Question out… The decision to keep the Greek Question distinct from Russo-Turkish issues and maintain a sphere in which the sultan remained sovereign set a hard boundary for Europe.”

3.3.9.2 Intervention in the Turko-Egyptian War, 1831-1841

After Navarino, Russia used a number of crises to further consolidate its dominion over the Porte and make a bid for a recognized sphere of influence in the East. In 1831, Mehmet Ali Pasha and his son Ibrahim, seeking recompense for losing Morea to the newly formed Greek state, sought permission to invade Syria from the Sultan. When the Sultan turned Ali town, Ibrahim invaded anyway. After taking Syria, Ibrahim marched into Anatolia and defeated the Ottoman army in

469 Mitzen (2013, 123–76); Rendall (2000, 72–73); Sédouy (2009, 170, 172–73).

470 Anderson (1979, 85).

471 Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 114).

472 Rendall (2000, 79–82); Mitzen (2013, 158–68); see also Rich (1992, 55); Schroeder (1994b, 655–56, 658, 663); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 77).

473 Mitzen (2013, 167–68).

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December 1832, clearing a path to Constantinople. Fearing Ibrahim was about to overthrow the Empire, the Sultan requested Russian help in February 1833. Nicholas placed a squadron in the Straits and leveraged his position to create the 1833 Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, supposedly a mutual defense pact between Russia and the Porte but in realty an unequal treaty that subjected the Porte to Russian dominion.474 In a clear example of Russia’s desire for legitimate exclusivity over the Porte, Nicholas told an advisor that Unkiar Skelessi gave Russia “the first and strongest” grounds for intervening; under the treaty, the Porte was obliged to appeal to Russia, and no other Power, for aid in future crises. Nicholas, Nesselrode, and other Russian statesmen spoke of Russia’s “ascendancy,” “exclusive influence,” and “dominant influence,” which “belongs to her by right and de facto.” Despite some initial concerns, all five Powers accepted the treaty.475

After Unkiar Skelessi, Russia took a number of steps to indicate to the Powers that it had no territorial designs on the Porte, and that all its actions were intended to keep the Ottoman Empire intact. These included the 1833 Münchengrätz agreement, signed with Austria and which committed both to preserving Turkey and defending the Sultan, and the transformation of the unpopular Unkiar Skelessi treaty, which was to expire in 1841, into the 1841 Straits treaty, signed by all five Allies. The Four had also coordinated to bring about peace between Egypt and Turkey, signing an agreement on 15 July 1840 to intervene if Mehmet Ali Pasha, who with his son Ibrahim now controlled the Ottoman fleet and had destroyed its army, did not accept an ultimatum from the Sultan that would confine his rule to Egypt and part of Syria. In September an Allied coalition of Turkish, British, and Austrian forces intervened in Lebanon under the legitimacy of the July agreement, routing Ibrahim’s forces. Although the July agreement had the effect of alienating France, which under Louis Philippe had supported Mehmet Ali Pasha against the Porte, it was later reconciled with the Alliance by the 1841 Straights Agreement. Austria, the

474 Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 129–32); Schroeder (1994b, 653–64, 726–35); Rendall (2002, 39–43). The Secret Article of the Treaty reveals the disparity: Russia absolves the Ottomans of needing to provide aid to it, but on the condition that it close the Straits to warships if asked.

475 Rendall (2002, 43, 46, 48–49); see also Anderson (1966, 90); Sked (2008, 90); Šedivý (2013, 527–36). Unfortunately my quotations here rely on Rendall’s translations, which he sources to the Russian archive.

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other power reluctant to intervene, had been brought back into the Alliance by the July agreement.476

Russia’s overall strategy in the decades between the Greek revolts and Crimea can thus be described as a careful attempt to establish a recognized sphere of influence over Constantinople. To do so, Russia had to work with the Allies on Greece and the Turko-Egypt conflicts, make assurances about keeping the Ottoman Empire intact, and demonstrate restraint while prosecuting its treaty disputes with the Porte. The treaties were the main vehicle through which Russia dominated Constantinople and it faced little opposition when it wanted to expand them either through coercion or by taking advantage of Ottoman weakness.477 By showing restraint in an area where blocking Russia would be costly for everyone, Russia could signal its moderate intentions to the Allies.

3.3.9.3 Crimea and the end of the Vienna System, 1851-1856

All these mechanisms—deference to a de facto Russian sphere, Allied consultation and alignment, and Russian restraint—failed in 1853, and great power war ended the Vienna system. The causes the Crimean War are contested, complicated, and outside of the scope of my aims here. But, in effect, my analysis concurs with that of Mitzen: the Allies were unable or unwilling to separate issues falling under Russia’s sphere (and hence where it could act with legitimacy) from the broader Eastern Question, incapacitating the Concert’s methods of cooperation and precluding any legitimate action.478 The brief account here thus focuses, like the above, on Russia’s contested spheres of influence claims and their role in legitimizing or delegitimizing the Allies’ uses of force.

476 Anderson (1966, 84–87, 100–106; 1979, 92–96); Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 149–51); Rich (1992, 72–75); Schroeder (1994b, 736–47, 750–56); Rendall (2000, 79–85, 2002, 43–56); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 93, 98–101); Haas (2005, 78–80); Sked (2008, 89–98); Sédouy (2009, 231–60); Šedivý (2011, 419).

477 Schroeder (1972, 14).

478 Mitzen (2013, 192–95).

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After a number of increasingly heated exchanges between Constantinople and St. Petersburg over the status of Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule, Russia threatened in 1853 to reoccupy the Danubian Principalities. Russia initially framed the issue to the other Powers as a bilateral disagreement concerning only itself and Turkey—that is to say, as within its sphere. As noted above, there was legal precedent for this justification. Further, Russian occupations of the Principalities after Adrianople—1829 to 1834 and 1848 to 1851—did not “prompt great power protest” as Mitzen notes, and were “treated as matters within Russia’s sphere of influence”:

Since 1815 the European powers had accepted spheres of influence on the continent, not only in the revolts of the 1820s but also in the silence after Russia crushed the Polish revolt in 1830 and after Austria annexed Krakow in 1846. And the other powers had, until this point, treated the Principalities as de facto in Russia’s sphere of influence…. In other words, there were precedents of Concert powers granting one another limited freedom within their spheres of influence and precedents of treating the Principalities as part of Russia’s sphere.479

By contrast, the problem in 1853 was that Russia wanted to vastly extend its sphere by having the Porte transfer responsibility for the 1774 Orthodox protection guarantee from the Sultan to the Tsar. This would give Russia the right to intervene on behalf of the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox subjects, over a third of its population. Thus although Russian occupation of the Principalities had precedent, the Tsar was using his treaty rights to negotiate something that very much was outside of the established Russian sphere of influence. When Russia went ahead with its occupation on 2 July 1853, its actions were not read, as they had been before, as confined to its treaty disputes with the Porte.480

479 Mitzen (2013, 192–93).

480 Taylor (1954, 49–61); Anderson (1966, 114–25); Albrecht-Carrié (1968, 153); Schroeder (1972, 31–33); Lincoln (1978, 333–34); Rich (1992, 106–8); Haas (2005, 80–82); Sédouy (2009, 289–90). The Russian shift here, though it progressed from the 1774 treaty, was provoked or encouraged by French agitation over control of the Levant’s Holy Sites.

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France and Britain responded to Russia’s threats by placing fleets near the Dardanelles in June 1853.481 Although both signaled in private to Russia that their actions were defensive, they did not “group” Russia, as they had in previous disputes, to create “a shared interpretation of actions that would have made behaviour less ambiguous.” Nor did they treat the issue, as they did in previous disputes, as implicating the boundaries of Russia’s sphere. Instead, failing to make the Russo-Turkish war “a common concern” or relegating it to bilateral Russo-Turk relations, the Concert saw Russian actions as aggressive and attempted to deter it, confronting it with a number of protocols singed by the four other powers through December 1853.482

In January 1854, France and Britain moved their ships into the Black Sea and demanded that Russia withdraw from the Principalities in a 27 February ultimatum. Russia broke off relations, and Britain and France declared war against it on 31 March 1854 on the premise that maintaining the Ottoman Empire “in its present limits” was “essential to the maintenance of the Balance of Power among the States of Europe.”483 Austria sided with the Allies, and Prussia, which had no immediate interests in the Eastern Question, remained neutral.484 After the Powers defeated Russia in 1855 after the Battle of Sevastopol, they removed Ottoman Christians from Russia’s purview (and by extension, clearly placed the Porte outside of Russia’s sphere) and granted the Porte limited sovereign noninterference in the 1856 Treaty of Paris.485 In sum, the Powers “neither grouped” Russia as they had in 1822 nor “granted a sphere of influence” to it as they had in 1828; instead, Russia “was balanced against and then defeated by its 1815 allies.”486

The Ottoman cases, because of the precarious status of the Porte in European diplomatic practice, show the Vienna geopolitical bargain at the periphery. The Powers (minus Russia) were

481 Taylor (1954, 54); Schroeder (1972, 31–33).

482 Mitzen (2013, 194); Taylor (1954, 55–58); Schroeder (1972, 41–114).

483 Rich (1985, 106).

484 Taylor (1954, 59–63); Schroeder (1972, 116–97); Lincoln (1978, 339–40).

485 Anderson (1966, 110–48); Lincoln (1978, 333–40); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 114–25); Sédouy (2009, 289–90).

486 Mitzen (2013, 201).

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inclined to treat Ottoman issues as European from the start. While in the 1820s the issue of Russian nonrecognition was solved by pulling Russia into an Allied response to the Greek crisis, this process failed in the 1850s. Russia’s designs in the Ottoman Empire, although established in bilateral treaties, never gave it the same kind of recognized hegemony as Austria had over Naples or Britain over Portugal. This would suggest that Russia’s claims in the Ottoman Empire should have been formally addressed in one of the Vienna settlements or congress soon after. As Schroeder has put it, the Eastern Question and its various crises

demonstrated how difficult it was for other powers to stop Russia from making the Ottoman Empire its exclusive sphere of influence even when they were reasonably united in this aim…. The best way to check Russia—perhaps the only feasible one… [involved] not challenging Russia directly or competing with it for dominant influence at Constantinople, but grouping it, requiring Russia to act vis-à-vis Turkey only in concert with Europe.487

3.4 Case comparisons and competing explanations

In summary, the Vienna geopolitical bargain laid the foundation or “source code” around which the great powers interpreted and adapted their intervention politics. Where it was relatively clear, the great powers were able to single assurance and restraint and avoid confrontation. Where it was less clear—as in the cases of Spain and the Ottoman Empire—the great powers’ mutual understandings of acceptability and restraint eroded.

The expectations of my argument hold, in general, across the interventions of the period: where a crisis occurred in a given Power’s sphere, it could more easily assure its peers. Britain intervened in Portugal three times without bringing in the other Allies and without facing material contestation; Russia intervened in Poland in 1831, and Austria in Central Italy in 1831 and Kraków in 1846 on the same premises. Contestation in all these cases was perfunctory or nonexistent. In cases where Powers intervened outside of their spheres, they had to resort to other legitimacy generating activities—Allied consultation and participation or, minimally,

487 Schroeder (1994b, 661; my italics).

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Allied assurance and l’appui moral—to legitimize their interventions. The Allies intervened in Belgium twice, and the Eastern Question in 1827 and in the 1830s, on these premises.

Several key cases stand out as exceptions to my expectations, however, and warrant closer examination. In 1821, Metternich partially bound his intervention in Naples to formal Allied consultation and consensus despite Austria’s dominion there, and in 1832 he faced contestation from France when Austria intervened in Central Italy. Second, France intervened in Spain with only partial Allied assurance, as if Spain were already in its sphere. Third, Britain chose to intervene bilaterally and multilaterally in 1834 and 1847, despite enjoying dominion over Portugal.

What generated the intervention dynamics in these cases was soft or “limited-aims” Russian and French revisionism: both acted as “spoilers” in the Concert system, probing the boundaries of the Vienna settlement to see where they could revise it to their advantage without scuttling the its overall parameters.488 France and Russia both offered “creative” readings of the bargain in their efforts to revise its margins based on their religious identities—France as protector of Catholicism and Russia of Orthodox Christianity.489 In the British interventions, the historical record shows London chose to build collective intervention coalitions for reasons of military utility—in Rumsfeldian language, the coalition fit the mission—rather than to assure the other Powers. Their assurance was guaranteed by Britain’s treaties with Portugal.

I proceed by first outlining Russia and France’s soft revisionism. I then examine the two Austrian interventions, the French intervention, and the British interventions, in that order.

3.4.1 Limited revision: France and Russia as Concert spoilers

Russia and France acted on-and-off spoilers throughout the Concert era. Both sometimes challenged the Vienna settlement, particularly around its geographical margins in Iberia and

488 On limited aims revisionism, see Goddard (2018, 3–4). Goddard (2018, 16–19) calls Russia a “restrained revisionist” that sought to address its concerns through a strategy of “institutional engagement.” To an extent France in this period resembles Russia; I discuss these below. On probing, see Grygiel and Mitchell (2017, 42–76)

489 On “creativity” as a strategy of identity management and revision, see Ward (2017, 48–55).

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Anatolia. They thus exhibited “an attitude of dissatisfaction with a corresponding desire to change the status quo,” a textbook definition of revisionism.490

In their efforts to revise the system both Russia and France acknowledged the fundamental legitimacy of the Vienna settlement and the centrality of its geopolitical bargain, however, by explicitly drawing analogies between its legitimate spheres and the territories over which they wanted recognized dominion.491 They wanted the Vienna system to recognize as de jure their dominions over the Porte and Spain. The Concert geopolitical bargain and its legitimacy formed the basis around which France and Russia made their de jure revisionist claims. And on issues at the core of the Settlement—Belgium in particular—both powers showed restraint, acting within the bargain’s rules.

Russian and French revisionism thus ironically shows the importance of the geopolitical bargain to overall Concert dynamics and its intervention record. Paris and St. Petersburg made their revisionist claims in its context and according to its rules. They were thus not revolutionary or hard revisionist states, but instead wanted to alter the Settlement at its margins to improve their positions. They fit was Stacie Goddard calls

Scholars debate whether Concert-era Russia was fundamentally expansionist or restrained. While traditional analyses argued Russia’s Concert behaviour flowed from its historic expansionism, more recent appraisals argue St. Petersburg restrained its actions and was status-quo seeking.492 Two instrumental analyses of the Concert era have picked up the restraint reading in international relations: in a series of articles that take a broadly defensive realist approach, Matthew Rendall has argued that Russia was satisfied by the Vienna settlement, as such it was status-quo power during the Concert period, and therefore restrained its actions vis-à-vis the

490 Ward (2017, 11).

491 For Russia as a spoiler in these terms, see Schroeder (1962, 177, 1994b, 637); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1044); Anderson (1979, 90, 94); Yamada (2009, 346, 360). For France see Temperley (1925, 206); Webster (1951, 1:375); Schroeder (1962, 11, 208–10, 1994b, 658–59, 723); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1061-1062); Bullen (1974b, 214, 1979a, 139); Bridge (1979, 41); Bridge and Bullen (2005, 76–80, 89, 97); Larroche (2013, 149–56).

492 See Rendall (2002, 37); cf. Goddard (2018, 16–19).

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other powers and did not make a bid for hegemony on the Continent when it was able to do so.493 In his own instrumental analysis, Vladislav Slantchev argues that the Vienna settlement structured incentives in such a way that any attempts to revise the status quo would provoke counter-balancing behaviour by other powers: the delineation of “spheres of influence” and establishment of “interlocking interests” meant that “some territories were not open for contestation, and that for every potentially contestably territory, there existed some coalition of states that had a clear interest in blocking undesirable changes.” Under an endogenous “self- enforcing equilibrium” such as Vienna, satisfied powers such as Russia “do not seek a revision of the status quo because they like it” and unsatisfied powers do not seek a revision “because they are deterred.”494

These accounts persuasively explain why Russia did not itself challenge the Vienna system in conventional ways—annexing territory when it could and risking war with the other Powers over territory when it felt it needed to. But they do not explain why earlier literature depicted Russia as aggressive: it diplomatically imposed itself on the other powers, affecting their behaviour toward their own spheres or (as the Eastern Question case above shows) in areas of dispute. Slantchev and Rendall are right about Russian aggression, insofar as they focus on conventionally revisionist, aggressive, or expansionist action. But they miss out on Russia’s “normative” assertiveness: Russia acted as a spoiler not by challenging other power’s spheres directly, but insisting, especially in the early Congress period, that intervention decisions reflect Allied unanimity, preferably as the outcome of formal Congresses or Ambassadorial conferences. This was paradigmatically the case in the Naples intervention, which I treat more extensively below. Russia under Alexander and especially Nicholas also tried to establish a recognized and not simply de facto sphere of influence in the Ottoman Empire by continually using its treaty rights to force concessions from the Porte. Russia did not restrain itself in Greece because it faced a blocking coalition, but because Russian expansion on the Greek issue would be perceived as illegitimate and any Russian sphere influence unrecognized by its peers. This is

493 Rendall (2000, 2002, 2006).

494 Slantchev (2005, 567–68, 590–91).

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why, as shown above, Alexander, Nicholas, and Nesselrode all drew comparisons between Russia’s designs on the Porte and the Powers’ recognized spheres. As Schroeder notes,

Greece remained a danger spot for Europe after 1823 not mainly because of the continued fighting and the strains in Russo-Turkish relations but because of Alexander’s growing frustration with the Allies. Other powers had used Russia’s permission or help, [Alexander] felt, to win victories and gain prestige in their spheres… In Russia’s sphere, however, they used the European alliance to stop Russia from intervening to end a brutal conflict, thereby undermining Russia’s prestige…495

A geopolitical bargain analysis therefore provides a more coherent account of Russia’s behaviour in the Concert period than the existing instrumental accounts. Norms-focused and institutional approaches, such as that taken by Jennifer Mitzen, likewise tend to focus on the Congress collective security mechanism at the expense of underlying geopolitical understandings.496 While virtually all the sources I have cited here recognize that Russia sought a sphere of influence in Turkey, none examine the distinction between de jure and de facto status of spheres in the Concert period.497 They therefore mischaracterize Russia’s behaviour as conventionally expansionist, or combat the expansionist reading by asserting that Russia was conventionally satisfied and therefore a status-quo power (e.g. Rendall). Neither explains the full picture: Russia wanted the other powers to recognize its influence over the Porte as de jure rather than simply de facto—and thus Russia was actually conventionally expansionist if “conventionally” is taken to mean “by convention,” i.e., by treaty). This is why, as I have pointed out, Russia compared its

495 Schroeder (1994b, 635).

496 As noted, Mitzen (2013) gives spheres of influence—especially Austria’s—a prominent place in her narrative. Because her analysis is focused on the great power congresses, however, it does not examine how the spheres affected the Concert order or intervention legitimacy.

497 Some note that Russia sought a legal basis for intervention, and that sphere of influence were at play, but do not connect the two; e.g. Sked (2008, 90): Unkiar-Skelessi “would take Turkey out of the French and British spheres of influence and give Russia a legal basis for intervention in Turkey.”

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policy there to Portugal’s protectorate status under Britain,498 and made every attempt to separate its treaties with the Porte, the only possible legitimate basis of a de jure sphere, from the Greek crisis.

France acted as a spoiler by trying to gain a sphere for itself on the continent, insofar as it could within the confines of the Concert geopolitical bargain. This means attempting to revise the settlement without provoking a balancing coalition—i.e., altering the Settlement to satisfy French concerns without attacking the Settlement such that the equilibrium ended and France found itself at war with the other great powers. As Bullen notes, this meant Paris would inevitably clash with the already-established spheres of the other powers.499 Domestic machinations at the French court also gave foreign policy less coherence than that of the other Powers throughout the period, as Bertier de Sauvigny and Sédouy have documented. French revisionism was furthermore mostly restricted to limited diplomatic and military maneuver.

Nonetheless, all of France’s political parties condemned the 1815 settlement, giving French geopolitical dissatisfaction a strong bipartisan consensus.500 France became increasingly strident in its efforts to reclaim a sphere, culminating in Napoleon III’s post-1848 machinations in the Eastern Question and eventually in Germany. Noting French cooperation on Belgium, Bridge and Bullen observe that “the ultimate objective was the same, and in line with the objectives of every French government since 1815: the reordering of the unjust 1815 settlement in the interests of a genuine balance of power.”501

3.4.2 Austria’s Allied supplication in Naples and French contention in the Papal Estates

498 In 1839 Nicholas told the Austrian ambassador: “I do not interfere in the affairs of Spain or Portugal, but as to Turkey that is my own business.” Quoted in Grunewald (1955, 183).

499 Bullen (1979a, 124–25, 1979b, 57).

500 Bullen (1979a, 123).

501 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 80).

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In its Neapolitan and Papal interventions, Austria faced Russian and French resistance and difficulty drawing support from the other Powers, especially Britain. Russia and then France challenged Austrian primacy in Italy, though in different ways. Tsar Alexander understood the Vienna geopolitical bargain to mean that any European intervention would implicate the other Allies, or at the very least Russia under Alexander’s leadership. France on the other hand was jealous of Austria’s hegemony over Italy, especially in comparison to its reduced profile. To address these two problems, Metternich sought Allied support to assure Russia and France and draw Britain and/or Prussia into agreeing with Austrian plans, and thereby generate additional legitimacy for exclusive Austrian action. This strategy, prosecuted with vigour by Metternich, allowed the very weak but geopolitical important Austrian empire to simultaneously maintain its hegemony over Italy and establish the Concert’s rules of the game.

In Naples, Metternich could have proactively taken unilateral action to put down the revolt and not consulted the allies. The geopolitical bargain argument expects that Naples’ sphere of influence status would have given Austria sufficient legitimacy to intervene without formal Allied consultation. Instead, Metternich proactively framed Naples as “a European problem” while suggesting to the other great powers that “acting in Europe’s interest” would not require joint action or high-level meetings between the great powers.502 Put differently, Metternich established the rules of the game by construing unilateral intervention in the spheres as the “European” way to solve crises. It bound unilateral intervention to the great power consensus and legitimacy of the Vienna settlement.

An instrumental explanation of Austria’s actions would either expect Metternich to have intervened in Naples without calling for a congress, or understood his assurance strategies as a way to prevent a Russian counter-intervention. As Mitzen has shown, however, neither explanation is fully satisfying in light of the historical record. The congress system was indeed sufficiently costly for Metternich that it delayed the Austrian intervention and drew the Austrian

502 Mitzen (2013, 111).

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apparatus into a situation where the other Allies might protest, and punish, Viennese unilateralism. On the other hand, much of Austria’s action in the Naples case was indeed unilateral; Metternich argued throughout that it would be in everyone’s interest for Austria to take care of the revolt itself. Importantly, Metternich authorized the unilateral intervention before coordinating with the Allies. It is improbable that Russia would have risked war with Austria— marching its troops across the Northeast border—just to participate in putting down the Neapolitan revolt.503

An exclusive focus on the congress mechanism does not fully explain why Metternich could make perfunctory assurances to the Allies and conduct a largely unilateral intervention, however. Put differently, if Metternich was fully committed to Congress norms, why didn’t he capitulate to Capodistrias and Alexander and allow a multinational force to enter Italy, or wait until Britain too could sign on? My argument is that by bringing the Allies in but strategically moving them away from multilateralism and toward authorized unilateralism, Metternich was actually able to use Austria’s special relationship to Italy to lend legitimacy to the Congress process. Put differently, the legitimacy Austria possessed over Italy was rechanneled into shoring up the Alliance. At the same time, Metternich could reassure Russia and France that Austria would not annex more Italian territory or disrupt the Vienna system. This strategy achieved Metternich’s twin goals: upholding the Vienna settlement while shoring up the Congress system outlined in the Quadruple Alliance treaty.

As I noted above, Metternich initially framed the Naples issue as an Austrian issue, explaining to the Allies that they need not hold a congress to discuss what would inevitably be an Austrian response.504 He faced two immediate problems: Russia wanted a full-dress Congress, and France wanted to use the Congress to advocate that the rebels implement a French Charte-type

503 Mitzen (2013, 115).

504 Schroeder (1962, 41–43, 1994b, 608): Metternich “never considered dealing with the revolution otherwise than by overthrowing it with Austrian forces”; see also Kissinger (1957, 260); Metternich and Richelieu (1958, 99); Mitzen (2013, 110–12).

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constitution, thereby checking Austrian influence.505 Concluding that a congress would be the best way to proceed, Metternich carefully couched Austrian authority over Italy within the context of consultation. Metternich’s August 1820 exchange with France’s foreign minister, Richelieu, is telling of his compromise. Richelieu initially notes that Austria is “premiere en ligne” in the Neapolitan crisis, and that the crisis is of sufficient importance that the five powers should use it as an instance to show Allied unity.506 Metternich responds by asking Richelieu to have confidence in Austria’s methods, calculations, and material means:

The basis of all salvation, the only one that I know and the only one possible, must be found in an absolute and reciprocal confidence of the great courts in a just distribution of roles.507

By 18 August, Metternich was beginning to conclude that a congress was the best way to achieve his aims. Note the careful couching of Austria’s hegemony over Italy within the Allied consultation:

Austria placed on the frontlines had to occupy itself with the conservation of its positions and defend itself from domestic agitation and exterior influence. In this it has the right to act by itself and for itself; but all that it does beyond this must be in concert with its allies. Its troops that, by the geographic position of its States, must be the troops of execution,

505 Schroeder (1994b, 609–10). As noted, the French backed off of their Congress policy. Citing Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:330-331), Bridge (1979, 41) argues that the memorandum declared that “it was France who was primarily affected by events in Naples—owing to the dynastic link with the Neapolitan Bourbons—and it was therefore up to France to propose a congress.” The passage cited does not show evidence of French claims to hegemony; rather, France used the dynastical argument to press for a collective Allied response at a Congress while acknowledging Austria’s special interest in Naples. At the 1822 Verona congress, attempting to shore up Allied support for a French intervention in Spain, France about-faced and argued that as Naples was in Austria’s sphere, Spain should be in France’s.

506 Metternich and Richelieu (1958, 94–96).

507 Metternich to Richelieu, 5 August 1820, in Metternich and Richelieu (1958, 96–98): “La base de tout salut, la seule que je connaisse et la seule possible doit se trouver dans une confiance absolue et réciproque des grandes cours et dans une juste distribution des rôles.”

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need not present themselves as an army destined to make war, but as a troupe of police called to restore order and to execute the conditions of a pact that placed the repose of Europe under the guarantee of the five great powers.508

When Troppau began, Metternich’s arguments emphasized how, even within their collective context, each Power should have primacy over issues of central concern to it. As Mark Jarrett summarizes, Metternich explained that while “any threatened power had the right to appeal to the allies,” each Power “could then respond based upon its own peculiar circumstances—perhaps offering moral or material support, or even eschewing any involvement altogether.”509 The Allies should support, not bind or constrain, the Ally who possessed dominion over the crisis at issue. As I noted above, Metternich successfully brought Alexander on board with counter- revolutionary measures and moderated his desire to organize a materially collective Allied response.

The British contestation of Troppau is sometimes interpreted to show the limits of Metternich’s strategy. Such a reading challenges the geopolitical bargain argument. But the British position in fact conformed to Metternich’s preference for unilateralism. The British acknowledged Austria’s dominion over Italy and only Austrian dominion. Castlereagh’s main objections to the Troppau Protocol concerned the public form, not the substance, of the intervention. He thus contested not the “aims of the Allies but the proclamation of an official document.”510

508 Caraman to Pasquier, 18 August 1820, in Metternich and Richelieu (1958, 101–2): “L’Autriche placée en première ligne a dû s’occuper de la conservation de ses positions et de les défendre des agitations intérieurs et de l’influence extérieure. En cela elle a le droit d’agir par elle et pour elle; mais tout ce qui se fera au delà doit être de concert avec ses allies. Ses troupes qui, par la position géographique de ses Etats, doivent être les troupes d’exécution, ne doivent pas se présenter comme un armée destine à faire la guerre, mais comme une troupe de police appelée à rétablir l’ordre et à executer les conditions d’un pacte qui a placé le repos de l’Europe sous la garantie des cinq grandes puissance.”

509 Jarrett (2013, 273).

510 Kissinger (1957, 265).

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Put simply, Castlereagh supported Austrian unilateralism; he did not support Allied construal of the crisis and subsequent intervention a collective or “European” operation. This difference is subtle but important, because it means British contestation of Troppau actually supported a unilateralist reading of the geopolitical bargain—Austria’s preference. What is sometimes argued to be a breakdown of the Vienna system was actually a powerfully-argued defence of it. As Castlereagh told Paul Anton Esterhazy, the Austrian ambassador to Britain, in September 1820:

The question should be treated as a special affair, rather than general; as an Italian question rather than European, and, consequently, as in the domain of Austria rather than of the Alliance.511

In a letter to Britain’s observer at Troppau, Lord Stewart, Castlereagh drew on the 5 May 1820 State Paper and further elaborated his position on Naples:

The revolution at Naples does not, in strictness, come within any of the stipulations of the Alliance. […] The natural result of this seems to be, that Austria must…make the measure, whatever it is, her own; that she may, by previous and confidential intercourse, collect the sentiments of her Allies, and thereby satisfy herself that she is not likely to incur their disapprobation, or be disavowed by them in what she proposes to attempt ; but she must adopt it upon her own responsibility, and in her own name, and not in that of the five Powers, and she must be satisfied to justify it upon the grounds that decide her to act, receiving such an acquiescence or such an approbation from the other Powers as they may be prepared to afford to her.

511 Esterhazy to Metternich, 16 September 1820: “La chose doit être traitée comme une affaire spéciale, plutôt que générale; comme question italienne, plutôt qu’européeanne, et, par consequent, plus comme du domaine, de l’Autriche que celui de l’Alliance.” I have been unable to find the precise French original. Jarrett (2013, 237n95, 450n95) translates this as “The question should be treated as special rather than general; as Italian rather than European; and in consequence, as falling under the jurisdiction (dominion) of Austria rather than the alliance.” Webster (1925, 271) translates as “…in the sphere of action of Austria rather than of the Alliance.” Kissinger (1957, 254) shortens “sphere of action” to “sphere”; Sédouy (2009, 103) has, in the French, “sphère d’action.” In all cases the terms used—“sphère d’action’ or “domaine” connotes political authority consistent with my geopolitical bargain interpretation.

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Before such acquiescence or approbation can be expected, Austria must, however, be prepared to satisfy her Allies that she engages in this undertaking with no views of aggrandizement; that she aims at no supremacy in Italy incompatible with existing treaties ; in short, that she has no interested views; that her plans are limited to objects of self defence ; and that she claims no more from the country that she proposes to enter, than having her army sustained in the usual manner whilst necessarily stationed beyond her own frontier.

[…]

Austria must, as I conceive, be contented to find in these Conferences the facilities for pursuing what she feels to be her own necessary policy; but she must not look to the involving by this expedient other Powers in a completely common interest and a common responsibility. The consequences of so doing would be to fetter her own freedom of action.512

This stance, reflective of the legitimacy granted to Austria by its sphere of influence, is consistent with the principles announced by Castlereagh in his 5 May 1820 state paper and myriad other statements on the issue of intervention, including his public response to the Troppau Protocol, where he “again recognized an Austrian but not an allied right to intervene in Naples.”513 From Castlereagh’s point of view the Alliance mechanism should not be invoked because a state’s liberal revolution or democratic insurrection. The Alliance treaties should only be formally invoked when such a revolution threatens the European peace on a scale and with the severity of Revolutionary France. The Naples rebellion thus warranted Austrian intervention, but lay outside “the causus foederis of the alliance” as they were laid out in the Vienna treaties.514 As Castlereagh presented it to the Eastern Allies,

512 Lord Castlereagh to Lord Stewart, 16 September 1820, in Castlereagh (1848, 12: 311-318).

513 Vincent (1974, 81).

514 Webster (1925, 2:235-245); Schroeder (1962, 46–47, 51, 53); Vincent (1974, 73–83); Jarrett (2013, 240, 262, 279).

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…it is not the goals and the intentions of the monarchs that I am speaking against, but the forms and means they wish to apply. […] Let Austria, at the moment when she acts (should that indeed be the course of wisdom), openly make her reasons known to her allies. She has legitimate ones; the evidence she has of the plots of the Carbonari are by themselves sufficient grounds to justify energetic measures for the protection of her influence.515

In the words of Charles K. Webster, the British position was that in “in great dangers the Allies had a common interest” and could act in concert, but in “lesser and more remote cases their interests were not the same” and the Powers did not possess “the same means of action.”516In these instances, intervention legitimacy should rest on the spheres of influence arrangement— provided, as specific above, the responding Power assured the other Alliance powers it would not upset the settlement. Following this logic, Castlereagh recognized Austria’s “clear right in international law to take single-handed action” in Naples.517

In sum, no other Power fundamentally questioned Austrian primacy. Because Naples lay in Austria’s sphere, Austria had the right and duty to attend to the crisis. The central questions were whether this crisis should activate the Alliance’s Article VI, or serve as a basis for a statement of generalizable principles that would allow the Powers to intervene against revolutions in the Alliance name. Although they pushed hardest for a joint Allied response, the Continental powers also recognized that Austria would likely respond unilaterally if it were not restrained by the Allies, and was in its rights to do so. After convincing Metternich to host the Troppau congress,

515 As reported by Prince Lieven, the Russian Ambassador in London, from an 8 December 1820 interview with Castlereagh. Quoted in Walker (1968, 134).

516 Webster (1925, 2:239).

517 Bridge (1979, 40); see also Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 2:330, 333). This position remained consistent when Castlereagh conceded to a Russian intervention, which never materialized, in Piedmont. As Jarrett (2013, 284-285) outlines, Austria was strapped for troops and appealed, out of military necessity, to Russia, which agreed to occupy Piedmont for a short period of time. Although less preferable than unilateral Austrian action, the use of Russian troops had the side effect of keeping France out of Austria’s sphere. Like in Naples, Austrian hegemony was never at issue.

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Russia attempted to achieve a unity amongst the cabinets on a Neapolitan constitution in hopes that a unified Allied front could be leveraged in negotiations with the Neapolitan King (or, through him, the revolutionaries). If the Neapolitan government could adopt a moderate constitution acceptable to the Allies, it would spare them the need to intervene militarily. If negotiations with the Neapolitans broke down, Austria would “occupy the country on behalf of the allies.”518 By tying Austrian intervention to an Alliance guarantee, the Continental powers also sought to moderate Austrian action in Naples, potentially preventing it from annexing more territories.519 What actually happened was that Metternich used the conference to satisfy their concerns while freeing his hand.520 Once Metternich acceded to some of the Eastern powers’ demands—holding the congresses—they moderated their plans. This was aided in part by Metternich gaining the confidence of Alexander across the two congresses, at the expense of Capodistrias.521 That Austria would take the lead in any intervention was never in any dispute.

In the Papal Estates dispute, a similar contestation emerged. France confined its challenge to Austrian primacy to the constitutional reforms Metternich planned for the Papal estates, rather than its intervention there or territorial domination of Central Italy. Metternich used the Rome conference to moderate France’s revisionism by tying its actions to an Allied outcome. While this threatened to tie Austria’s free hand as well, Austrian primacy meant that Allied interference was essentially reduced to debating the precise character of the Papal reforms Austria would instate, and the length of its occupation, rather than its intervention right per se. As noted, France increasingly became more and more of a spoiler as the century progressed, this time using its status as a Catholic nation to claim influence in the Papal Estates. As Bridge and Bullen note,

French objectives in Italy were political rather than territorial; they wished to act as the patron of the reform and anti-Austrian movements within the Italian states. […]There was

518 Jarrett (2013, 252–54, 272). By and large the intended constitutions were too liberal for Metternich to accept (Schroeder 1962, 48).

519 Schroeder (1962, 48, 53); Jarrett (2013, 231, 270–78).

520 Sédouy (2009, 119).

521 Grimsted (1969, 247–54).

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no question of territorial revision, and the French were not prepared to go to war to uphold the doctrine of non-intervention in Italy. All they wanted was a striking diplomatic success…. French action in Italy was a policy of gestures rather than confrontation.522

In summary, the Vienna geopolitical bargain functioned in the Italian cases primarily by making it clear what Power was responsible for acting: Austria. The basis for this, I have argued, is the political authority granted in the Vienna Settlement to the Five over the subordinate states in the system. The bargain also prescribed moderate duties to the appropriate Power: Austria needed the consent of the sovereigns in the vassal polities, and had to consult with Allies and assure the others that it intended only to remove the threat—the restoration of a friendly government in place of a revolutionary one—rather than annex territory or otherwise upset the equilibrium. Where the disagreements in 1820 primarily resided was in the level of consultation. France and Britain preferred that Austria have a free hand, caveats above notwithstanding, while Russia and Prussia wanted to group Austria’s actions under a joint Allied banner. Where the disagreement lay in 1831-2 was over the extent to which Austrian influence in Italy meant it could rearrange the interior working of the Papal regime. In the end, only France objected Austria’s plans.

3.4.3 French semi-grouping in Spain

My argument expects that Powers intervening outside of their spheres should resort to other legitimation strategies—Allies assurance and grouping—to legitimize their interventions. Why, then, did the French intervene in Spain after abrogating their grouping legitimacy?

I argue this was for three reasons: First, France, as a spoiler and driven by Villèle- Chateaubriand’s unilateralism, was more concerned about regaining status and was willing to risk the legitimacy costs; second, Spain was not an important territory to any other Power, meaning that France faced no real material checks and thus would only face legitimacy costs; and third, France sought and acquired just enough legitimacy with the Allies to give it legal justification for an intervention. British noninterventionism and the fact France had “played ball”

522 Bridge and Bullen (2005, 90–91).

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by attending a full Congress session, appeasing Alexander, gave the intervention a patina of Allied legitimacy without restricting France.523

Neither the instrumental nor congress-based norms accounts satisfactorily explain French behaviour in Spain. An instrumental account cannot explain why France participated in an elaborate and lengthy grouping process in an attempt to assure Allies that were unlikely to block a Spanish intervention, or why France desired to regain influence in Spain in the first place given its geopolitical position as a strategic backwater.524 As Sédouy notes, France made many concessions in the Spanish intervention, agreeing not impose on Ferdinand VII a political regime closer to its priorities: “the spirit of cooperation and mutual concession once again won.”525 The norms account likewise would expect that France should have followed through on the November 1830 Allied grouping, or negotiated more freedom of movement at Verona, if it was truly concerned with the Concert’s consultation norms. Instead it separated its actions from the Allies in November-December 1822 after gathering assurances from Russia that the Tsar would move against British counter-intervention.526

In both the Spain and Naples cases, the intervening Powers sought legitimacy, rather than physical resources, from their consultations with the other Powers. In the Italian case, this legitimacy was easier to be had because of Austrian primacy. In the French case, obtaining legitimacy from the Allies was more difficult because of the disagreements between the

523 Apparently this is because Alexander hoped a revolution would break out in France at the same time, allowing an Allied coalition to reoccupy the country and drawing the Four closer together (Jarrett 2013, 326–28; Schroeder 1962, 214–15).

524 E.g. Schroeder (1962, 236, 1994b, 627): “the competition over Spain was superficial and largely meaningless; the elements of joint European co-operation and restrain at work throughout the affair were deeper and more decisive. What really happened, after all, was that France, reasserting one of its historic roles, moved to regain Spain as its natural sphere of influence, and the other European powers, so recently mortal enemies of France, either encouraged this or acquiesced in it, Britain against its will. Then France, having occupied all of Spain, withdrew with nothing permanent to show for it.”

525 Sédouy (2009, 149–50).

526 Notably, Mitzen does not include a discussion of the Spanish case in her account of the Concert.

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Powers—particular Britain and Austria on the one hand, and Russia and Prussia on the other, on what an acceptable French intervention outside of its sphere would look like. With the Verona Congress leaving the Spanish crisis “more broken open than terminated,” France took the initiative to intervene unilaterally.527 Comparing the two, Jarrett notes that

Austria had previously intervened in Italy, but she acted in the name of the alliance; the Congress of Vienna, moreover, had firmly placed the Italian states under Austrian tutelage. Villèle and Chateaubriand, on the hand, had deliberately rejected Montmorency’s policy of collaboration and spurned the chance for France to act as the agent of the allies.528

What is missing from Jarrett’s analysis—and others—is that Italy stood in a different de jure position to Austria than did Spain to France. Both Schroeder and Mitzen (2013, 106–14)note that after 1822, France about-faced on nonintervention and applied Metternich’s own arguments about Naples to Spain; part of France’s ability to do so derived from the fact that Metternich’s approach the intervention was “strictly opportunistic”: he was against it in Spain in 1820, expressing his opposition in general principles, but for it in Naples later that year.529 If all that was at stake was an intervention principle abstracted from geopolitics, however, France should have had the needed legitimacy, at least from Metternich, to intervene. Villèle and Montmorency encountered much more difficulty legitimating a French intervention, however, because Spain did not sit in its de jure sphere as Italy lay in Austria’s.

3.4.4 British multilateralism in Portugal

Why did Britain pair with Spain in 1834 and 1847 rather than intervene unilaterally, as it did under Canning in 1826? In both instances, Britain wished to limit its troop presence in Iberia, and saw no danger is allowing Spain to use its troops to help. The Quadruple Alliance treaty legitimized Spanish participation by legally grouping it with Britain, but British primacy meant Palmerston could intervene unilaterally without worry.

527 Friedrich von Gentz, quoted in Schroeder (1962, 223).

528 Jarrett (2013, 343).

529 Schroeder (1962, 253–54) and Mitzen (2013, 106–14).

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What is important for my argument is that in neither instance did Britain build a multilateral coalition as part of a legitimation strategy. Indeed, Britain rebuffed all attempts to group its Portuguese interventions with the Allies, and the Eastern courts’ protestations were mild to nonexistent. As Bullen notes, although the Eastern Allies were “in theory, as alarmed by events in Portugal as they were in Spain,” in “practice they did not accord them the same importance.”530

In 1826, for example, Metternich sent circulars to the other Allies suggesting they meet in Paris to discuss and Allied response to Portuguese crisis.531 Canning declined Metternich’s invitation but, because France might interfere and Miguel needed to be kept in Vienna until Maria came of age, limited cooperation from the Allies was necessary. To this end on 11 July 1826 Canning sent the Allies a dispatch arguing that Pedro’s charter was both legitimate—having been ordered by the legitimate king rather than installed by revolutionaries—and clear of British interference; the Eastern “legitimists” thus had no legal cause to be involved. When the Allied ambassadors met in Paris two weeks later, they had little to announce except to warn Portugal that it should keep its revolution out of Spain.532 The treaties of alliance between Britain and Spain, its fleet in the Tagus, and the general understanding that Portugal lay formally in Britain’s sphere, blocked Eastern interference in the subsequent British intervention. As Webster notes, “there was never really any question of the interference of the Alliance in Portugal”:

Britain’s special interests in Portugal were so well recognized that all agreed that no action by the Alliance could take place there. The general principles enunciated at Troppau and Laibach could indeed be theoretically applied to Portugal as much as to Spain or Naples. But Castlereagh’s emphatic protest in December 1820 against any such application was immediately accepted by all his Allies.533

530 Bullen (1979b, 66).

531 Temperley (1925, 367); Bullen (1979b, 67).

532 Temperley (1923, 79–81, 1925, 208–10, 365–72); Bertier de Sauvigny (1968, 3:1044); Schroeder (1994b, 720).

533 Webster (1925, 2:249).

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Jarrett concurs: “the British sphere of influence and the efficacy of British sea power in Portugal were so widely recognized that there was never the remotest possibility of an intervention by a foreign power.”534

In the 1834, Britain cooperation with France could be construed as an attempt to build legitimacy by coopting an ally. However, the evidence suggests Palmerston’s strategy had more to do with using the alliance to control French influence in Spain.535 At issue was not recognized British primacy in Portugal, but unrecognized French primacy in Spain. In 1847, the crisis in Portugal threatened the French position by weakening the Francophile government in Madrid. The French government’s frustration, and Palmerston’s refusal to acknowledge the applicability 1834 treaty leading up to the intervention, stemmed from the fact the 1834 treaty alone did not legitimize action in Portugal; British approval was needed. France’s influence in Spain relied on a stable Portuguese status quo, and thus was at the mercy of Britain’s refusal to intervene in its own sphere or, until spring 1847, legitimize anyone else to do the same. Bullen notes Guizot admitted in his private communications that “the French and Spanish governments would have either to intervene on terms dictated by Britain, or to refuse to intervene.”536 When the French inquired in April 1847 about whether they would be included in intervention discussions, Palmerston replied

534 Jarrett (2013, 243).

535 Some scholars have interpreted British the Quadruple Alliance as denoting an ideological break in the Alliance between the Constitutionalist West and Monarchist East. This reading emphasizes the 1834 Quadruple Alliance and its Eastern equivalent, the 1833 Münchengrätz agreement, which further formalized the principles of Troppau- Laibach and delineated an Eastern theatre of intervention, and reads into them an ideological character. Sked (1979b, 8, 2008), Bullen (1979b), Schroeder (1994b, 720–26, 737–38), and Bew (2011, 128) have argued against this reading, noting that these arrangements had more to do with spheres of influence geopolitics than ideology, and that both the Western cabinets and Eastern courts just often competed among each other as they did cooperate. As an example, Britain and Russia cooperated on the Eastern Question through the late 1830s, alienating France and Austria (M. S. Anderson 1966, 97–101; Schroeder 1994b, 740–47, 750–51; Sked 2008, 92). My analysis here, by showing that action in the spheres system was bound up by a right acknowledged—even if often contested, as interventions always are—by each of the Allies, supports these arguments.

536 Bullen (1974b, 250).

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that encroaching on Britain’s well-established sphere of influence would be a grave threat to European peace. The French denied they were doing anything of the sort.537

Conversely, Guizot’s diplomatic efforts, and his emphasis on the applicability of the 1834 treaty to the Portuguese crisis, stemmed from his aspiration that Anglo-French entente would achieve “a balance in which France would have an exclusive lead in Spain and Britain the same lead in Portugal.”538 Like Russia vis-à-vis the Eastern Question, France drew analogies between its aspirational goals in Spain and the existing de jure status of Portugal in Britain’s sphere. When the crisis ended, Guizot told the French chamber of deputies that French influence in Spain and only Spain had been “l’intérêt véritable.”539 Guizot’s actions can thus be understood as a continuation of France’s policy, dating from the 1820s, of using Iberian crises to pressure the British into recognizing France’s rights over Spain; a continuation also because, like those before it, it failed to secure that recognition. At no point was British primacy over Portugal challenged by the Allies, and its partial grouping behaviour can be understood as flowing from its desire to reduce material costs in Iberia while keeping France in check in Spain.

3.5 Conclusion

Between 1815 and 1848, a comprehensive but imperfect de jure geopolitical bargain system legitimized great powers’ interventions in their spheres. The two main challengers to the Vienna system, Russia and France, by and large worked within the bargain, even rhetorically drawing links between their geopolitical aspirations and the bargain they sought to revise. Only rarely did they challenge its authority, and even in those cases—France in Italy in 1831-32 and Russia in Naples in 1822—they aimed only to moderate or alter another power’s intervention rather than challenge it tout court.

537 Bullen (1974b, 248).

538 Schroeder (1994b, 770); see also Bridge and Bullen (2005, 96): the French “saw British intervention in Portugal as a precedent for French intervention in Spain”; and Rich (1992, 65): the French, “who since 1823 had regarded Spain as their sphere of influence in Iberia and compensation for Britain’s paramount influence in Portugal, had no desire to be relegated to the position of junior partner in Madrid.”

539 Bullen (1974b, 261).

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Despite the great achievement of Vienna, hindsight shows that its limits were ultimately crippling. Would France have instigated the Crimean War had it not been stripped of its sphere? Would it have been as revisionist, or revolutionary? Likewise, had the Ottoman Empire been included as fully sovereign power at Vienna—or acknowledged as a junior partner in a de jure Russian sphere—would this have substantially altered the geopolitical conditions that led to outbreak of World War 1?

Although the existing accounts of the Concert cannot fully explain intervention behaviour, my argument here has also been aimed at showing where the competing approaches contribute to and understanding of the period, and where they fall short. Norms approaches that emphasize great power “grouping” can give compelling accounts of what happens when no Power is acting in its sphere. Powers in these instances grouped with the Allies to generate legitimacy. The paradigmatic cases of Allied grouping in this regard were the crises in Belgium and over the Eastern Question, with French action in Spain most conforming to this expectation. When the Powers acted in their spheres, they could more fully consider military utility—as Britain did in its interventions in Portugal—and deal with the two “perterbatory” Powers, who might interfere in their designs.540

Although spheres of influence politics continued until 1914, changes to the Vienna settlement— beginning with Kraków in 1846—eroded their de jure status and broke the geopolitical bargain. The Concert bargain functioned primarily because it was derived from the legitimacy of the Vienna settlement and each Power’s commitment to upholding the spirit and the law of that settlement. Once these commitments were weakened, Europe returned to de facto spheres and predatory balancing akin to the 18th Century—the “ancien système politique” that Metternich, Castlereagh, and Alexander, strove to transform.

540 Kraehe (1983, 5).

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Chapter 4 The Cold War

“The conference in Crimea was a turning point—I hope in our history and therefore the history of the world. … It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt541

“Czar Alexander got to Paris!” —Joseph Stalin542

“The superpowers lie in the same bed, but they do not dream the same dreams.” —Zhou Enlai543

In this chapter I extend my geopolitical bargain argument to the Cold War. The Cold War is broadly understood by international relations scholars and historians as an intense, planetary, but restrained confrontation that emerged after World War II between the two “supercharged empires,” the United States and the Soviet Union.544 During the Cold War no great powers went

541 March 1, 1945, addressing Congress after the Yalta summit. See Roosevelt (1945).

542 In response to U.S. Ambassador W. Averell Harriman congratulating him on reaching Berlin. Quoted in Roberts (2006, 72, 265).

543 Quoted in Hassner (1977, 18), a play on the traditional Chinese chéngyu idiom tóng chuáng yì mèng: “same bed, different dreams.”

544 Westad (2017, 19). On the term superpowers, see Fox (1980) and Buzan (2004, 69): “the criteria for superpower status are demanding in that they require broad-spectrum capabilities exercised across the whole of the international system.” I use the term “superpower” throughout because it denotes the great advantages in global reach, capability, and system-determining effects of the Soviet Union and United States.

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to war directly with one another, a marked departure from the previous hundred years.545 This began a period John Lewis Gaddis has termed the “Long Peace.”546

Although it lacked systemic war, the Cold War was violent below the level of superpower relations. Owing to a confluence of decolonization, nationalism, and ideological competition, the period was marked by myriad international crises caused by civil wars, insurgencies, and violent separatist movements.547 This mixture of stability at the “top” and varied conflict “below” gave the Cold War a unique and puzzling intervention record. As Hal Brands notes, “At the level of superpower relations, the Cold War was remarkable for its stability. … Viewed from this angle, the Cold War was indeed a ‘long peace.’ In the third world, by contrast, it was more like a ‘long war.’”548

Between 1950 and 1989, the superpowers intervened overtly to suppress crises in Korea in 1950, Hungary in 1956, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979, and Grenada in 1983—while interfering in dozens of others through covert or indirect means, such as the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. Some interventions began indirectly but escalated to protracted open combat, such as the United States’ protracted engagement in Vietnam.549 In most of these interventions, the superpowers faced no costly pushback and invested very little time or energy into assurance strategies, justifying the interventions with a variety of reasons and often after-the-fact. In others—Korea, Afghanistan, and Vietnam—the intervening power faced more costly pushback, however, when the other superpower counter- intervened. This pattern raises a puzzle: why were the superpowers able to overtly intervene without facing pushback or counter-intervention in some interventions, but not in others?

545 Some scholars trace the Cold War to the 1917 Russian revolution (e.g. Black 2015; Westad 2017, 68). Because I focus here on the international geopolitical distribution, however, I adopt the more conventional 1945 start date for the Cold War writ large and 1955 for the beginning of the spheres system.

546 Gaddis (1986).

547 See Holsti (1991, 271–334).

548 Brands (2010, 1).

549 See Carson (2018, 187–237)

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I argue this intervention record was the result of a de facto geopolitical bargain that divided the world into three zones: two zones based on the superpowers’ exclusive spheres of military preponderance, and a third zone outside of them, open to superpower competition. The first two zones emerged roughly coevally with either superpower’s alliance structures and helped them clarify where an overt military intervention by the opposing superpower would be met by costly pushback—where intervening was acceptable only for the dominant superpower, and unacceptable by the other. Similar to the Concert, this bypassed the assurance process normally needed for an acceptable great power intervention. The third zone lay outside the two spheres, and became a dangerous field of competition between the superpowers for new vassals.

The three-zone geopolitical bargain shaped great power intervention behaviour in three distinct ways. First, it clarified where a superpower would not face costly retaliation from the other that might escalate into open confrontation. Each superpower could intervene in its sphere without worrying about escalation control or assurances, short-cutting the assurance process. This came with a second, inverse effect: intervention in a sphere by the opposing superpower would face costly pushback, and was therefore off-limits. The bargain thus freed each superpowers to intervene in its own spheres without fearing counter-intervention by the other, but barred it from intervening in the opposing superpower’s sphere. Third, in the third zone, however, the boundaries of appropriate great power intervention were much less clear. Here, other mechanisms—sovereign noninterference and escalation control—structured superpower restraint. Because of these problems, much of the activity in the third zone was covert or indirect, occurring “backstage” from the great power competition.

The Cold War dynamic shows that in an international system vastly different from the Concert in terms of scale, technology, norms, and polarity, a systemic geopolitical bargain can still structure great power intervention, helping the superpowers maintain systemic stability while enabling local violence. There are important differences, however. First, the bargain was de facto. As we saw in the Concert, the Vienna settlement and its constellation of treaties drew relatively clear geographical lines on the Continent and provided the great powers with a central point of shared reference in their negotiations and disputes. This gave them many ways to assure their peers and signal restraint. In the Cold War, no such shared point of reference existed. Although many local de jure bargains were concluded between the United States and Soviet Union—over Austria, for

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example—no central document or systemic bargain could act as a common reference point. The bargain therefore emerged de facto as the Cold War progressed, from the fact of the two spheres themselves. The superpowers sometimes interpreted the meaning of these spheres in mutually incompatible ways, as the cases of Cuba and Afghanistan, discussed further below, demonstrate.

Second, the intense ideological competition between the Soviet Union and United States exacerbated the de facto character of the bargain (and most certainly prevented a de jure settlement). Whereas the Concert powers subordinated their ideological differences to a joint commitment to l’équilibre, the Cold War superpowers did the opposite, putting into motion vast programmes intended to destroy the credibility of each other’s rival political systems.550 The balance was therefore much more precarious: revolution in a superpower’s vassal state could move it into the rival superpower’s sphere, potentially tipping the geopolitical scales. The superpowers thus intervened covertly and overtly in their spheres largely to prevent ideological discord and maintain hierarchical solidarity, since this discord was intrinsically bound up with either superpower’s geostrategic solvency and position within the balance.

Finally, when the Concert powers intervened outside their spheres they had no recourse to a collective security mechanism such as that established in the Quadruple Alliance treaties. The same superpower rivalry that prevented a de jure settlement made the United Nations a poor forum for establishing trust or signaling credible commitment. The stakes outside the spheres were high: as the cases show, a general ambiguity about acceptability meant that the superpowers feared both accidental great power war the legitimacy costs associated with rampant intervention. The absence of a working multilateral or bilateral institution vastly reduced the number of ways the superpowers could assure each other in comparison to other periods, driving much of their intervention “backstage” in the form of indirect and covert action. In these interventions the superpowers had to rely much more substantially on “escalation control” to signal restraint.551

550 As we saw last chapter, French and British efforts to liberalize the Eastern spheres were limited.

551 See Carson (2018).

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In toto, the geopolitical bargain freed the superpowers to overtly intervene in their spheres when they chose to, but had ambiguous effects outside of them. Coupled with the superpowers’ fears of conflict escalation and legitimacy costs, the bargain stabilized superpower relations, enabled overt violence in the spheres, and left them free to compete covertly everywhere else. This approach foregrounds the Cold War’s globally stabile, locally violent character, a pattern of violence increasingly emphasized by studies against the “long peace” narrative that has dominated English-language Cold War scholarship.552 It also helps complete two existing and complementary accounts of the Cold War intervention record: one which focuses on the spheres system, but which has not systematically explored how it was negotiated or affected the whole intervention record, and another which shows how the superpowers used “escalation controls” to avoid open confrontation, but which has not extended this analysis systematically across the period.553

I lay out my argument in four parts. First, I briefly review Cold War military intervention and the existing explanations of this dynamic. Second, I outline the Cold War bargain and map its spheres. Third, I examine the intervention record, focusing on seven major interventions. I conclude with a discussion of alternative explanations.

4.1 Existing accounts of the Cold War spheres

Traditionally international relations scholars have focused on the bipolar dynamics between the two superpowers, and in particular the nuclear balance of power between them, in producing the Cold War’s overall systemic stability and great power restraint.554 Because of the deterrence

552 See for example Chamberlin (2018); Westad (2007, 2017); Brands (2010).

553 E.g. Franck and Weisband (1971); Vincent (1974, 145–232); Kaufman (1976); Bull ([1977] 2012, 209–22); Keal (1983); MacFarlane (2002, 33–45); Finnemore (2004, 124–29); Carson (2018).

554 See for example Waltz (1964, 1979, 170–93); Saperstein (1991); Wagner (1993); for a review, see Wohlforth (1994, 96–102). Subsequent arguments in this vein add “unit-level” factors such as perceptions of hostility, foreign policy agendas, or nuclear deterrence to the relevant causes of the systemic balance. See Wohlforth (1993); Larson (1985, 1997); and Walt (1985). Some challenge the determination that the Cold War was bipolar, particularly as it pertains to the post-1970 international system—e.g. Buzan (2004, 51–57); see also Bull ([1977] 2012, 107–12), who

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effect of bipolarity and clarity of the Cold War’s nuclear stakes, the United States and Soviet Union only intervened when they could be sure their interventions would not escalate into direct great power confrontation and nuclear war, or otherwise upset the balance so these outcomes were possibilities.555 When the great powers did intervene or counter-intervene, they used escalation controls—a combination of concrete military postures designed to limit a conflict and signal restrain to the other superpower—to avoid escalation into systemic war.556

Other scholars have expanded this analysis to include the role played by the Cold War’s spheres system.557 According to these accounts, the Cold War was less a balance of power system but an “ideological bipolarity” that divided the world into two spheres of influence, “geographic regions characterized by the high penetration of one superpower to the exclusion of other powers and particularly of the rival superpower.”558 In each, the dominant superpower could “organize political and economic life according to its ideology.”559 Superpower intervention was largely oriented around maintaining ideological solidarity within their spheres, where the rules of the

calls the system (in 1977) a “complex balance,” differentiating the military sphere (where the United States and Soviet Union were peers) from the financial and economic spheres (where Japan was important). Because I am interested in the effects of the Cold War geopolitical bargain on intervention legitimacy, I follow the “bipolar” descriptor throughout.

555 E.g. Waltz (1979, 174): “The simplicity of the bipolar world and the strong pressures that are generated make the two great powers conservative.” For a systematic exposition of the nuclear peace argument, see Jervis (1989, esp. 1- 45); see also the recent summary by Monteiro (2014, 49–52, 95): “nuclear weapons guarantee that no state that possesses them will see its survival threatened by a state that values first and foremost its survival.”

556 Carson (2018).

557 These are Franck and Weisband (1971); Vincent (1974, 145–232); Kaufman (1976); Bull ([1977] 2012, 209–22); Matheson (1982); Keal (1983); Kratochwil (1986); Jackson (2000, 254–59); MacFarlane (2002, 33–45); Finnemore (2004, 124–29); Hast (2014, 113–37); see also Hoffmann (1987).

558 Kaufman (1976, 11); Finnemore (2004, 125); see also Bull ([1977] 2012, 110).

559 Finnemore (2004, 125); see also Vincent (1974, 351–53); Bull ([1977] 2012, 199–222).

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order entitled them to do so unilaterally.560 The superpowers also “well understood that overt intervention by the United States in Eastern Europe or by the USSR in Western Europe or the Americas would be seen as grossly illegitimate and cause for major war.”561 Thus the “danger of intervention in each other’s acknowledged spheres was reduced by mutual recognition.”562 Ideological competition, coupled with a general respect for the norm of nonintervention, drove superpower competition in the Third World’s “grey zones” into indirect forms of intervention such as covert operations and proxy support.563 In toto, the system featured “intervention within the blocs, nonintervention between them, and tenuous nonintervention prevailing outside them.”564

My argument broadly follows the above, drawing together the balance of power/escalation control and spheres arguments to explain the Cold War intervention record. It differs from existing approaches in four ways that warrant discussion here. First, existing accounts usually present the spheres system from the point of view of explaining international order or historical norm change, not intervention variation.565 Those that do approach spheres systems with

560 Vincent (1974, 324–25, 333–34); Finnemore (2004, 127–28); see also Bull ([1977] 2012, 199–212); Hoffmann (1987).

561 Finnemore (2004, 128); see also Bull ([1977] 2012, 203–5, 216–18); Allison (2013, 24–43); Clark (1989, 199); and Hoffmann (1987, 44): “Each of the superpowers has recognized the ‘legitimate interests’ of the other. This has meant…the recognition of spheres of influence, including the careful avoidance of direct military intervention in such spheres (the United States in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union in Central America), and abstention from attempts at provoking defections in such areas.”

562 Macfarlane (2002, 38); see also Bull ([1977] 2012, 216–17); Vincent (1974, 334): “Thus the Brezhnev Doctrine, formulated with respect to Czechoslovakia in 1968, is not merely similar to, but is an acceptance of an offer made in regard to superpower behaviour, by the Johnson Doctrine formulated in relation to the Dominican Republic in 1965. This reciprocal behaviour…suggests a rule of prudence that nothing be said in a crisis which can be applied at another time in a way which is against the interests of the proclaiming state.”

563 Matheson (1982, 99–108); Keal (1983, 207–8); Macfarlane (2002, 33); Finnemore (2004, 128).

564 Vincent (1974, 353; see also 351-352, 334).

565 E.g. Bull ([1977] 2012, 212-218).

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intervention in mind do so at a very high, macro-historical level.566 As a result, none present a close, comparative empirical examinations of the interventions I consider here.567 Two exceptions, by Thomas Franck and Edward Weisband and Paul Keal, are both missing cases and have different theoretical concerns than mine.568

Second, I attempt insofar as possible to describe and hold independent the spheres system on the one hand and Cold War interventions on the other. As noted, I do this for heuristic purposes stemming from my research design. Existing research on the Cold War spheres system presents the intervention-spheres relationship as more purely dialectical: the interventions delimited the spheres, and the spheres generated the intervention behaviour.569 To be sure, the existence of a sphere may be changed by a given intervention—as France attempted by invading Spain in 1823. This is especially true of de facto spheres because they do not require legitimation in international law, reducing their explicit relational quality. As we will see, scholars sometimes argue the superpowers’ behaviour in the 1956 Hungarian intervention established the spheres system, rather than (as I consider them here) representing a manifestation of a spheres system that already existed, but required more specific interpretation by the United States.

Third, I treat the Cold War geopolitical bargain and superpower relations as more antagonistic than the spheres accounts sometimes suggest, and more consistent with balance of power/escalation control depictions. In brief, I argue the spheres enabled superpower restraint only out of fear and interest, not common culture. This has important consequences for the expectations of my geopolitical bargain approach. Norms accounts usually overstate the degree to which the de facto spheres system kept each superpower out of the other’s sphere, and the

566 E.g. Finnemore (2004); Vincent (1974).

567 E.g. Bull ([1977] 2012, 189, 209–10, 216); Finnemore (2004, 127–28). The two exceptions, upon which I rely below, are missing cases, e.g. both Franck and Weisband (1971) and Keal (1983) are missing Grenada by virtue of when they were written, and the former does not have a detailed discussion of the Soviet intervention in Hungary.

568 By virtue of when they were written, Franck and Weisband (1971) and Keal (1983) are missing Grenada; the former does not have a detailed discussion of the Soviet intervention in Hungary.

569 See Vincent (1974, 334); Bull ([1977] 2012, 218).

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degree to which the spheres allowed unbridled unilateralism. Insofar as the superpowers “managed the system,” they did so only as a by-product of their ideological and security competition.570 As we will see below, the superpowers engaged in almost endless covert activities—according to one count the United States intervened covertly 66 times between 1947 and 1989—in each other’s spheres with the aim of weakening them.

Last, my research suggests that the superpowers strove to legitimize their interventions within their spheres by consulting with regional alliances structures before or during their interventions. As I explore below, White House officials sought approval from the Organization of American States for interventions in the Dominican Republic and Grenada, and had the OAS participate in its isolation of Cuba. The Soviet Union likewise consulted and indeed built an intervening coalition with the Warsaw Pact in its two interventions behind the Iron Curtain. This intra- hierarchy legitimation inverts the logic of the Concert and post-Cold War periods; in those, a great power could assure its peers through the costly signaling process of multilateral consultation and legal formalism. In the Cold War, by contrast, the superpowers appear to have relied more on the spheres themselves and their behaviour around them for great power assurance, using international institutions to legitimize the interventions within their hierarchies. In broader discussions of U.S. hegemony, these processes have been called “hegemonic bargains”—ways for the United States to legitimize its asymmetric security and economic relations with Europe, East Asia, and so on.571

This conclusion is preliminary, however, and my study suggests that hierarchical legitimation took a backseat to military utility and the needs of the superpower competition. While the superpowers consulted with their hierarchies, in other words, they did not engage in the costly legitimation strategies of the other two periods. This likely reflects the dual character of the period: strong sovereignty norms sat alongside extremely asymmetric hierarchical relationships

570 See Waltz (1979, 175–76, 194–201, 204–10); compare Bull ([1977] 2012, 204–5, 206, 218, 220–22). In the Concert era, these two were more closely connected; in the Cold War, the “happiness of the world” is a byproduct of superpower restraint than its chief goal.

571 Ikenberry (2011); Finnemore (2009); see also Chapter 5.

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between the superpowers and their vassal states. Thus while the superpowers treated their subordinates as independent polities with shared stakes in a given intervention, these consultations were ministerial to, and organized around, each superpower’s overall focus on military utility.

4.2 The Cold War bargain

As noted, I argue that a geopolitical bargain geographically structured the rules and expectations of bipolarity during the Cold War, freeing each superpower to intervene in its sphere without provoking the other into counter-intervention or counter-balancing behaviour. The bargain outlined the general boundaries of acceptable intervention as coextensive with the superpowers’ zones of predominance, enabling a tacit system of signaling and clarifying the process of “escalation control,” wherein a superpower attempts to signal restraint to the other by making diplomatic gestures and taking concrete in-theatre steps to indicate limited aims.572 The spheres greatly simplified escalation control by making it clear that within its sphere a superpower could intervene without risking costly pushback, whereas intervening in the other’s sphere would do so. The spheres acted not only as enablers of overt military intervention, but as key components in maintaining overall systemic stability through its effects on superpower restraint. In these respects the Cold War geopolitical bargain resembled the Concert bargain.

Unlike the Concert bargain, however, the Cold War’s bargain emerged de facto after attempts to arrive at a de jure agreement failed, giving it an unstable character.573 Furthermore, the Cold War bargain did not set up, nor was part of, an agreed set of norms that would govern intervention outside of the spheres. Whereas the Concert powers could resort to the congress mechanism if they feared great power confrontation, the Cold War’s ideological bipolarity greatly weakened mechanisms of great power cooperation, collective security, and joint management. As we will see, the United Nations Security Council, the nearest equivalent to the congress mechanism, was deadlocked for much of the Cold War. This means that the superpowers had to resort to

572 Carson (2018, 10–12, 44–49).

573 Bull ([1977] 2012, 218).

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escalation control to demonstrate restraint outside of their spheres—signaling to the other superpower that it did not intend to escalate a crisis by counter-intervening. Escalation control outside of the spheres was much more ambiguous and harder to communicate, as I show in the Korea case, making this a riskier endeavours. For this reason the superpowers generally “backstaged” their interventions here, relying on proxies groups and materiel support to achieve their aims.574

To recap, I argue the Cold War sphere system shaped great power intervention behaviour in three distinct ways. It restrained the superpowers from intervening in each other’s spheres by making clear where an intervention would encounter an overt and costly reaction from the other. This allowed the superpowers to intervene overtly within their spheres, and ‘tend to their own houses,’ without disrupting the balance of power. But it also meant that outside the spheres, where the effects of intervention on the balance were less certain and overt intervention risked great power war, the superpowers had to rely on escalation control mechanisms and therefore operated through third parties, covert operations, and indirect support.

Reformulated as a set of expectations, the geopolitical bargain argument expects that first, superpowers will refrain from overtly intervening in each other’s spheres because they fear direct confrontation. This expectation most clearly follows balance of power logic. Second, they can intervene in their own spheres without fearing costly or major counterbalancing from each other. This expectation follows the spheres’ logic of unspoken but reciprocal rules. Third, the superpowers will as a rule refrain from overtly intervening outside of their spheres because of nonintervention norms and the fear of escalation, using escalation control as a way assure the other superpower.

4.2.1 Mapping the spheres

In this section, I show how the de facto spheres system emerged in the immediate postwar era. I argue that, contrary to many accounts, the Allies sought to reach a de jure spheres agreement through 1945. A series of disagreements, rather than hostility to geopolitical bargains as such,

574 Carson (2018, 41–47)

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drove the Allies toward the de facto spheres system instead. Leaders on both sides understood that a postwar agreement would need to forge a reciprocal, geopolitical arrangement, and that such an arrangement would play a key role in ensuring a stable postwar order. These failures hung over the rest of the Cold War and formed the basis upon which either side understood the general contours of the other’s sphere. My account here builds on those taken by Marc Trachtenberg, Eduard Mark, Melvyn Leffler and others who emphasize U.S. attempts to broker a deal with the Soviets.575

Attempts to reach an Allied geopolitical bargain began in earnest at the 1945 Yalta and Potsdam summits. Stalin enjoyed a geostrategic position like Alexander’s in 1815 and used that position to seek recognition of an Eastern Soviet plus the recovery of various Soviet and Imperial Russian territories. These would suffice as compensation for Soviet efforts in defeating Hitler, which outstripped those of the other two allies.576 Churchill and Roosevelt were receptive—the former sought a spheres agreement as well—and to this extent they succeeded at hashing out in broad strokes a territorial settlement that included the reconstruction of Poland and partition of Germany.577

Yalta left much up in the air, however, deferring the specifics of the settlement to a later date. The Kremlin’s diplomats believed the United States’ geographic remoteness from Eurasia would make it amenable to a broader spheres-of-influence agreement. Soviet planners hoped to reach a “modus vivendi” with the United States based on “mutually demarcated spheres of influence” wherein America “would dominate the western hemisphere and the Pacific,” leaving the United

575 See Trachtenberg (1999); Mark (1979, 1981); Leffler (1984, 1992, 2007, 2010); and Layne (2006, 51–70).

576 Zubok and Pleshakov (1996, 10). The requested territories included Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuriles. See Leffler and Foner (1994, 34–40); Zubok and Pleshakov (1996, 27–35); Mastny (1979, 1996, 17–29). Thompson (2015, 237-238). For the development of Stalin’s sphere strategy, see Resis (1981a). Churchill (1948, 287–352, 545–84) gives a contemporary, inside account.

577 Gardner (1984, 52–73, 86–87). Roosevelt earlier promoted a “world settlement enforced by ‘Four Policemen’” in which the Four Allied powers would each have a sphere of influence. See Patrick (2009, 56–57); Thompson (2015, 222–23).

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Kingdom and Soviet Union to reach an “accord,” in the words of Maxim Litvinov, derived from an “amicable separation of security spheres in Europe according to the principle of geographic proximity.”578

Despite many chances to do so, no comprehensive or de jure geopolitical bargain was negotiated between the Soviet Union and the United States during this period, and by 1946 their relations began to sour. Disagreements over Turkey, Iran, and Berlin were mirrored in speeches and doctrines: Stalin’s “two camps” speech, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan. From 1945 forward the governments of Eastern Europe Sovietized, culminating in the Moscow-sponsored 1948 Czechoslovakia coup.579 Between 1946 and 1948, U.S. defence officials identified the spread of communist regimes rather than direct Soviet intervention as their main geostrategic challenge.580 The spread of communism into areas not already in the Soviet sphere would give Moscow “predominant control of the resources of these areas because of the postulated subservience of communist parties everywhere to the Kremlin.”581 United States geostrategy, which over the previous century had established a “strategic sphere of influence in Latin America,” now added forward defence positions around the Soviet periphery aimed at securing a “favourable balance of power in Eurasia.”582 The 1949 Berlin Blockade marked the “final consolidation” of either superpower’s sphere in Europe, secured on the American side by the formation of NATO and the Soviet Union’s rejection of the Marshall Plan.583 By the outbreak of

578 Pechatnov (2010, 93); Naimark (2010, 174–75) details this plan, under which the Soviet zone would include Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Turkey; a British zone would include the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

579 See Davis (1974, 170–71); Gaddis (1991, 108–13); Kissinger (1994, 446–72); Trachtenberg (2012, 69–109); Dunbabin (2014, 14–19); Black (2015, 77); Thompson (2015, 216–74). For an argument that U.S. policymakers saw increasingly worrisome signs the Soviets would be uncooperative, see Edelstein (2017, 121–50).

580 Leffler (1984).

581 Leffler (1984, 365).

582 Leffler (1984, 348–49). Containment was bolstered by NSC-68. See Thompson (2015, 260–73).

583 Kissinger (1994, 594); Hast (2014, 114–16); Gaddis (2005, 28–34); Aron (2009, 285–304).

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the Korean War in 1950, the superpowers had “discovered bipolarity” and the Cold War had begun.584

Scholars disagree on what caused the rapid degeneration in Soviet-American relationship. A prevailing account holds that the United States was committed through the end of the Second World War to creating a non-geopolitical, liberal postwar order based on the Atlantic Charter, and this ran afoul of both London and Moscow’s desires for a spheres agreement.585 This argument relies on evidence that the U.S. diplomatic corps responsible for the postwar peace considered spheres of influence and zones of exclusion to be responsible for the two world wars, or perhaps all modern war.586 Prominent U.S. policymakers made stirring proclamations to this effect from 1943 to 1945, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for whom “spheres of influence, in particular, were abhorrent,” and President Roosevelt.587 As Colin Dueck notes, “cultural factors—in the form of liberal beliefs and assumptions—acted as a crucial filter on the

584 Wohlforth (1993, 91–99).

585 This judgment is widely echoed in the literature: see Kissinger (1994, 466–69); Gaddis (1991, 110–13); Herz (1969, 113–14); Davis (1974, 141–42); Bogdan and Preda (1988, 1); Gardner (1993); Dueck (2006, 86–88, 95–100); Ikenberry (2009, 170–99, esp. 186–87, 200); Patrick (2009, 55–59, 73–74, 81–90, 213–16, 2017, 72–83); Kupchan (2012, 71–72). According to Schlesinger (1967, 28–29), only three policymakers vocally supported spheres arrangements: Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of Commerce (from 1946) Henry Wallace, and George Kennan. “They were very much minority voices.”

586 Davis (1974, 141–43); Ikenberry (2009, 172–87).

587 Herz (1974, 141). In a 1943 State Department bulletin, Hull announced that after the war “there will no longer be need for spheres of influence…or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests.” Quoted in Davis (Davis 1974, 141). Addressing Congress concerning the Yalta summit, Roosevelt (1945) said: “The conference in the Crimea was a turning point—I hope in our history and the history of the world. … It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all of these, a universal organization in which all-peace loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.”

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American consideration of strategic alternatives in 1945–1946, rendering a pure sphere-of- influence approach unacceptable.”588

A second interpretation argues that U.S. officials were, in private, “realistically disposed, within certain limits, to accept Soviet predominance in Eastern Europe,” but would not accept a “closed” Soviet system.589 Roosevelt’s public pronouncements against spheres diverged from his negotiations with the Soviet Union, where promised Stalin a number of territories, including those lost in the Russo-Japanese war, in exchange for a Soviet entrance into the war against Japan.590 Through 1946, Stalin accepted Western primacy over Italy and Japan in exchange for control over Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary.591 James F. Byrnes, Truman’s Secretary of State from July 1945 to January 1947, was open to spheres arrangements with Soviets and compared

588 Colin Dueck (2006, 96, 98). Others statesmen against spheres were John Foster Dulles, U.S. admiral William Leahy, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, State Department East European division head Charles Bohlen, and Ambassador to the Soviet Union (and later Truman’s Secretary of Commerce) W. Averell Harriman. See Schlesinger (1967, 27–28); Davis (1974, 141–42); Kissinger (1994, 467–69); Gaddis (1991); Dueck (2006, 86–88, 95–100). For a different view on Bohlen, see specifically Dueck (2006, 88).

589 Mark (1979, 202–3); Paterson (1992, 41–68); Trachtenberg (1999, 15); Koslowki and Kratochwil (1994, 288– 229).

590 Office of the Historian (1945). Thompson (2015, 225) suggests this gap was the result of Roosevelt’s efforts cooperate with the Allies while signaling an anti-geopolitics stance to his domestic audience. See also Paterson (1992, 49–50); Trachtenberg (1999, 5); Leffler (1992, 34–54). Kissinger (1994, 397) reads Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” idea as a “compromise between Churchill’s traditional balance-of-power approach and the unconstrained Wilsonianism of Roosevelt’s advisers as epitomized by Secretary of State Cordell Hull.”

591 Barrass (2009, 47–48).

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them to U.S. hegemony over the Western hemisphere.592 Byrnes actively sought to broker a spheres-of-influence division of Europe under which each side would respect the primacy of the other in its own sphere.593

In these efforts, U.S. policymakers were worried Stalin would use a tightly-controlled sphere system to continuously expand, and so preferred an “open sphere,” a concept developed by a U.S. research group in 1943.594 As the hegemon of an “open sphere,” the Soviet Union would confine its control of subordinates to their foreign policies and refrain from interfering in their domestic affairs—as the United States understood its relationship with Latin America.595 The United States also expected tradeoffs on Turkey and Iran in exchange for Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. When it appeared Stalin would not cooperate, the United States shifted its Germany policy to be less favourable to Moscow.596

Contrary to narratives that blame intransigent Wilsonianism, then, efforts by U.S. policymakers to establish a geopolitical bargain “represented neither a utopian scheme to rid the continent of spheres of influence nor a Faustian bid to dominate it, but a search for stable spheres of a kind

592 See Byrnes (1945, 709–10): “Far from opposing, we have sympathized with, for example, the effort of the Soviet Union to draw into closer and more friendly association with her central and eastern European neighbours. We are fully aware of her special security interests in those countries, and we have recognized those interests in the arrangements made for the occupation and control of the former enemy states. We can appreciate the determination of the people of the Soviet Union that never again will they tolerate the pursuit of policies in those countries deliberately directed against the Soviet Union’s security and way of life. …. We are also confident that the Soviet Union would not join in hostile intrigue against us in this hemisphere.”

593 Mark (1981); Trachtenberg (1999, 1–91, 2012, 69–102); Edelstein (2017, 129–32); Leffler (1992, 34–54, 2017, 200–202); Steil (2018, 60) see also Dueck (2006, 88–100); and Patrick (2009, 216–19).

594 Mark (1979, 203–4).

595 Leffler (1992, 34–54, 2017, 200–202); Mark (1979, 203–4, 1981, 319–21).

596 In particular, American policymakers switched from preferring a zonally-divided German trade and economic policy—the Byrnes policy, and acceptable to Stalin—to insisting Germany be treated as a single unit. See Trachtenberg (1999, 34–35).

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consonant with the interests of the principal victors of World War II.”597 These efforts fell through because of a combination of factors: the particularities of the spheres system—who would get what; the degree to which Soviet control over its subordinates would be acceptable; and the ideological differences between the two sides.598

The result was a de facto bargain, based largely on power predominance rather than a carefully negotiated juste équilibre des forces. A de jure agreement “would have led to an international outcome much like the one that actually transpired,” and outlined in the next section.599 But the bargain lacked rules that might foster shared expectations, and had no point of reference around which the superpowers could interpret and negotiate the boundaries of acceptability. By the time the Stalin ordered his agents to leave the Paris Marshall Plan conference in mid-1947, the superpowers were “irrevocably committed to securing their spheres of influence without mutual consultation.”600 As Benn Steil has noted, there then became “no use in giving Stalin pretexts to challenge American’s own Monroe prerogatives in the Western Hemisphere”—a possibly if the United States continued attempting to determine agendas in the Eastern Europe. A “friendly but “firm” line would have to be drawn around the Soviet sphere beyond which, in George Kennan’s words, “we cannot afford to permit the Russians to exercise unchallenged power.”601

4.2.2 The geopolitical bargain

This section outlines the spheres as they were understood in the postwar era and which formed the basis of U.S.-Soviet attempts to reach a de jure agreement. Like the Concert of Europe’s

597 Mark (1981, 314); Leffler (2017, 201); as Trachtenberg (1999, 15) writes: they were not “starry-eyed idealists, but rather by and large understood that Wilsonian principles could not be applied dogmatically, and that political realities had to be taken into account.”

598 Summarizing Leffler (1984, esp. 373–381); Trachtenberg (1999, 1–65); Roberts (2006, 237–320); Mark (1979, 1981); Paterson (1992, 41–68); Patrick (2009, 215–16); Edelstein (2017, 121–50); Layne (2006, 58–61). See also Dueck (2006, 88–100, 98).

599 Dueck (2006, 86).

600 Steil (2018, 135–36)

601 Steil (2018, 341). Colin Dueck has noted that the the “

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“great power” directory, the Cold War system was ruled by the superpowers, who formed a “diplomatic club from which all others could be excluded.”602 Only the superpowers possessed sphere of influence of global significance. On this basis I exclude from my analysis the putative spheres of traditional “great powers”—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Simply put, these states’ foreign policies lay outside of the center of the overall geopolitical bargain. When they intervened across borders, as France and Britain did on a number of occasions, their actions were concerned with decolonization crises and did not revise, threaten, or maintain the balance.603 The role of China in the overall balance grew in significance in the later stages of the Cold War, but only in the 21st Century has China become internationally important enough, particularly in the realm of security, to expect recognition as a great power or to affect the global balance.604 Thus while China was regionally important, from the perspective of the overall geopolitical bargain its impact on the system was primarily as a complicating variable in United States’ attempts to contain the Soviet Union in East Asia, and not as a “third superpower.”

Table 5 summarizes the American and Soviet spheres. Although I discuss the Korean War below, the spheres system was settled only by 1955, after the Korean War, death of Stalin, and formation of the Warsaw Pact. It was only then that the major components of each sphere were in place: Turkey, Greece, and West Germany had joined NATO; the Warsaw Treaty formalized the Soviet sphere the United States had created its “San Francisco” system in the Asia Pacific; ; Austria became a neutral buffer state; Korea was partitioned on the 38th parallel; and no major additions or losses happened after this point until much later in the century.605 The Korean War in particular remilitarized United States foreign policy, refurbishing NSC-68 as blueprint for an American grand strategy of military dominance and containment.606 Stalin’s death precipitated

602 Buzan (2004, 51).

603 For a brief summary, see Macfarlane (2002). Sorry, France.

604 See e.g. Deng (2008).

605 An exception is Trachtenberg (1999, 4), who argues the spheres did not stabilize until after the Cuban Missile crisis.

606 Jervis (1980); Westad (2017, 181–82); Carson (2018, 143).

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changes in Soviet foreign policy as well: Moscow, resigned to “coexistence” with the U.S. presence in Europe and seeking more dependability in relations with the United States than in the Stalin years, refocused efforts away from the Cold War boundaries in Europe to the broader superpower competition over ideology. This included its renewed effort to covertly and indirectly support communist movements in the third zone, particularly in Africa and Asia, activities relatively neglected by Stalin.607

In addition to the narrative above and their general presentation in the literature, I use treaties that establish mutual security guarantees between the superpowers and their subordinate allies as proxies for the spheres. When public, security treaties openly delineate the contours of a sphere. I use security guarantees made between the superpower dominants and subordinate states rather than economic agreements or lower-level security treaties (such as technology sharing or material support) because treaties with mutual security guarantees indicate a high level of hierarchy between the two states. They also give external parties confidence that the relevant superpower will retaliate if the subordinate state is attacked by a third party or the other superpower, a key element of the Cold War spheres system. During the Cold War, these guarantees were highly concentrated in the competing blocs described in the literature.

I map the Soviet sphere as including the Soviet Union’s fifteen constituent republics plus its 1955 Warsaw Treaty satellites. These include Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. They are regarded virtually universally in the literature as comprising the Soviet’s sphere in Eastern Europe, and often treated in international histories of the Cold War as single geopolitical grouping (‘Warsaw Pact’; ‘Iron Curtain’; ‘Eastern Europe’; ‘Soviet sphere’).608 I leave out Mongolia, which attempted unsuccessfully to join the Warsaw Pact in the early 1960s, Finland, and Yugoslavia, which has an unclear position after the split between Tito and Stalin.609 I also leave out other areas where the Soviet Union attempted through covert action to create a sphere, or win particular governments over to its side, such as Cuba and

607 Westad (2017, 195–208); Leffler (2007, 88–95).

608 See Bull ([1977] 2012, 203–5, 207–18); Vincent (1974, 334); Matheson (1982, 83); Finnemore (2004, 125–28).

609 See Kaufman (1976, 121–25); Rajak (2010, 208–19).

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Angola, which are better described as client or proxy states.610 With the possible exception of Cuba, the evidence shows that U.S. policymakers only ever recognized Eastern Europe as within the Soviet sphere, and the Soviets recognized the Western hemisphere and NATO bloc.611

For the American sphere, I have complemented the literature discussed so far with security alliances that involve mutual security guarantees in force or signed in 1955. These security alliances are drawn from a RAND database of all U.S.-security related agreements in force since 1955.612 U.S. strategy called for a forward, inviolable security and alliance perimeter that would “encircle the Western Hemisphere with a defence ring of outlying bases.”613 These arrangements clustered in three areas: North America and Western Europe (NATO); Latin America (OAS); and East Asia (SEATO and bilateral treaties).

Scholars usually avoid labelling the U.S.’s constellation of hierarchical relationships a “sphere of influence,” preferring “hegemony” or sometimes “empire.”614 I treat the U.S. alliance system as a sphere of influence comparable to the Soviet Union’s in systemic terms—not internal structural ones—for two interrelated reasons. First, the United States exerted more authority over its allies in security matters than is normal in an anarchical relationship. Among the United States’ various hierarchical relationship, the most symmetric one was with the NATO allies and “Marshall” states. Even still, the United States’ overwhelming security asymmetry with Western Europe is often downplayed in studies that emphasize NATO’s collective security components, giving it the look of a concert. To be sure, when it formed NATO the United States had not simply “unilaterally extended the Monroe Doctrine eastward, declaring external meddling in

610 I distinguish between “proxy states” and subordinate states in a sphere in that proxy states or client states are “not necessarily controlled or guided” by the dominant. See Fairbanks (1986).

611 I explore this evidence in the next section.

612 See Kavanagh (2014).

613 Leffler (1984, 350).

614 A notable exception here is Leffler (2017, 161). See also Hast (2014, 16); and Nexon and Wright (2007) for a discussion of the term “empire.”

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Western Europe off-limits.”615 As Stewart Patrick rightly points out, “Washington’s egalitarian approach gave its allies greater influence over Western security than other plausible arrangements would have afforded,” despite the Unites States’ “special privileges and responsibilities” and “leadership position.”616

Nonetheless, even though the United States did not annex the NATO states or rule over them as directly as an empire, its security asymmetry was extreme enough to warrant placing these states in sphere of influence territory insofar as the systemic structure between the United States and Soviet Union is concerned.617 NATO’s mutual security guaranteed, and internal feature, made it a no-go zone for the Soviet Union, and Moscow formed the Warsaw Pact in response. In Latin America, “America’s predilection was for a multilateral framework whose formal egalitarianism would cushion the reality of U.S. hegemony.” And in East Asia, a hub-and-spokes system did little to mask U.S. dominance. Recent studies of United States primacy have emphasized the hierarchical aspects of these regional arrangements—its legitimized hegemony.618 Indeed, the whole U.S. alliance structure has been characterized as “empire by invitation,” which captures this middle ground well.619

Second, as suggested above, the Soviet and American spheres can be considered equivalents in terms of their broad systemic effects on the superpower relationship, despite their internal differences. To be sure, the internal dynamics of the spheres were different in important ways, particular as regards our normative judgments about each, or about spheres of influence generally.620 But as part of an international geopolitical bargain they operated in the same way

615 Patrick (2009, 268).

616 Patrick (2009, 268).

617 See the typology in Lake (2009a, 52–55). NATO states we much freer in economic terms, especially later in the Cold War, so I restrict this observation to security relationships.

618 See Ikenberry (2011); Cha (2016); Steil (2018).

619 Lundestad (1986), coined to describe U.S. domination of Western Europe.

620 See e.g. Keal (1983, 113). I take up the normativity of spheres of influence in the conclusion to this dissertation.

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relationally, i.e., vis-à-vis each other: they allowed each superpower to intervene in its own sphere without disturbing the overall balance. To have this reciprocal function, each side had to recognize that its sphere’s exclusivity was premised on the exclusivity of the other’s. The historical record shows this reciprocal or relational quality was tacitly understood by the Cold War’s participants. Both Soviet and U.S. leaders viewed their spheres as rough geopolitical equivalents not only at the beginning of the Cold War but throughout.621

The strategic core of the United States’ Cold War sphere system was NATO. Because it is usually understood to be a security alliance in which the United States was a member and not a sphere of influence over which the United States presided, its description as part of the American sphere warrants defence. Simply put, from the point of view of the geopolitical bargain thesis, Western Europe functioned a zone of American (or “Western”) exclusivity. Had any of the NATO states tried to realign itself with the Soviet Union or “gone commie,” the United States would have almost certainly militarily intervened or coordinated a joint NATO intervention. Whether the United States would have accepted a neutral or nonaligned, but communist, NATO member is a tougher question. But in the 1940s the CIA led covert interventions in Italy and France to prevent them from electing communist governments.622

Counter-factual aside, the security arrangements made within NATO clearly signaled to the Soviet Union that it constituted an exclusive zone, in part because of its provenance in the Berlin blockade and negotiations over the political statuses of Greece and Turkey—which, as we saw, were traded for an expanded Soviet sphere—and in part because of NATO’s very clear Article V provisions. Under NATO’s own rules an overt intervention by another state would have activated a U.S. response. In other words, a Soviet or Warsaw Treaty attack a NATO member was almost certain to precipitate superpower war. Prominent public arguments were made in postwar United States that hemispheric defence was bound up with Western Europe because a Soviet-controlled Eurasia would necessarily impinge on the Western hemisphere—an argument that broke from

621 See Kaufman (1976, 20–24); George (1986); Trachtenberg (2012, 154–82); Allison (2013, 26); Pechatnov (2010).

622 Westad (2017, 113–14).

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pre-World War 2 American geostrategic thinking but was widely accepted in its postwar strategic thought.623 Obviously, the hierarchical relations between the United States and the other NATO members were not as asymmetrical as those between Moscow and its Warsaw Pact subordinates. But scholars as diverse in their approaches as Christopher Layne, Ian Clark, and G. John Ikenberry have all shown that NATO and other U.S. institutions such as the Marshall Plan legitimized the American hierarchy in Western Europe, and gave Washington effective tools through which it could influence its European allies in exchange for security guarantees—what Ikenberry calls a “hegemonic bargain.”624 To this extent the historian Lloyd Gardner has called the U.S. alliance system in Western Europe “the NATO protectorate.”625

I also include the Western Hemisphere as part of the U.S. sphere. This “strategic sphere of influence” was organized through a set of mutual defence agreements culminating in the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the “Rio Treaty”) and the 1949 OAS Charter.626 During the war, mutual hemispheric defence guarantees against aggression by “non-American” nations was affirmed by Latin American governments at the July 1940 Havana Conference, “offering the first legal endorsement of the Monroe Doctrine.”627 The Rio and OAS treaties affirmed the right of nonintervention and mutual hemispheric defence against non-hemispheric forces, including “international communism or any other totalitarian doctrine,” combining the Monroe Doctrine’s hemispheric geopolitics with the noninterventionism of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy.628 As Melvyn Leffler has noted, “While paying lip service to the United Nations

623 See Thompson (2015, 248–50); Carr (1945, 52).

624 Ikenberry (2011, 207–19); Clark (2011, 123–46); Layne (2006, 71–93); Steil (2018).

625 Gardner (1984, 79–100).

626 Leffler (1984, 354–56, 2017, 160–61); OAS (2009).

627 Patrick (2009, 290).

628 For the development of the norm of intervention from the good neighbor policy to the neo-Monroeist Rio and OAS treaties, see Vincent (1974, 116–38, 193–212, 193): “the specter of international communism, of the intrusion of an alien system into the American Hemisphere, was to lead to a reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine by the United States and to the formal acceptance of the doctrine as a hemispheric principle by all members of the inter- American system.” See also Patrick (2009, 289–91). For the 19th Century history of the Monroe Doctrine, see

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and worrying about the impact of regional agreements in the Western Hemisphere… the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that in practice non-American forces had to be kept out of the Western hemisphere and the Monroe Doctrine had to be kept inviolate.”629 Stewart Patrick likewise argues that Latin America’s regional defence treaties “institutionally linked the American hegemon to subordinate states in its traditional sphere of influence, maintain consensual appearances but permitting the United States to play its historical role of policeman.” This achieved “Washington’s Cold War aim of creating a ‘closed hemisphere in an otherwise open world.’”630

Consistent with this strategic vision, U.S. policymakers also implicitly “reaffirmed the Monroe doctrine” in speeches and actions, consistently framing Latin America as “our neighborhood,” a zone of special “American” influence, part of an “inter-American system,” and having hemispheric concerns different from those of the broader international community based on shared geography, history, and commitment to self-determination.631 In many instances U.S. policymakers explicitly cited the Monroe Doctrine to justify hemispheric defence despite its mixed legacy in Latin America.632 The Western hemisphere was thus framed in neo-Monroeist terms as a coherent geopolitical unit that “institutionally linked the American hegemon to subordinate states in its traditional sphere of influence, maintaining consensual appearances but

Sexton (2011); to the end of the Cold War, see Smith (1995b); vis the Good Neighbour policy, see Gilderhus (2006, 13–14); and Callcott (1968), who takes as his object of analysis the Western Hemisphere.

629 Leffler (2017, 120–30, 1984, 354–55).

630 Patrick (2009, 291).

631 These terms are from speeches by John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and James F. Byrnes; see Kennedy (1961); Johnson (1963, 1965a); and Byrnes (1945). For the general presentation of Latin American and the Western Hemisphere as a zone of special U.S. interest, see Vincent (1974, 193–208); Holsti (1991, 266); Smith (1995b); Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005, 25–126); Patrick (2009, 216, 289–91); Thompson (2015, 27, 33–55, 78, 130, 113–15, 118, 170–71, 226, 248–51).

632 See Wilson (1966). This included a House of Representatives resolution passed in 1965 asserting that communism in Latin America would “violate the principles of the Monroe Doctrine.”

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permitting the United States to play its historical role of policeman.”633 As we will see below, the United States used the OAS to legitimize its hemispheric interventions to other Latin American governments against its charter’s general intervention prohibition.634 Thus the U.S. “need to predominate throughout the Western Hemisphere was…a natural evolution of the Monroe Doctrine, accentuated by Axis aggression and new technological imperatives.”635 While American hypocrisy about attempting to deny the Soviet Union a sphere of influence (or spheres of influence in general) while jealously guarding its Hemispheric exclusivity has been noted by a number of observers, U.S. policymakers after World War 2 in fact linked Soviet dominion over Eastern Europe with the Monroe Doctrine.636

Last, Victor Cha has documented the “powerplay” alliance strategy adopted by the United States in East Asia, wherein Washington drew key Asia Pacific governments into a system of ‘hub and spokes” bilateral security agreements that allowed Washington to control their actions.637 Catalyzed by the Korean War and spearheaded by John Foster Dulles, the first stage of this “San Francisco System” included the Philippines, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.638 By 1955, the expanded San Francisco hierarchy included those plus South Korea and the Republic of China, now located in Taiwan. Cha presents these relationships as legitimized hierarchies.639 Although Cha does not examine whether these relationships were perceived as acceptable by China and the Soviet Union, David Kang and Evelyn Goh have shown how the U.S.’s East Asian hierarchy and security partnerships eventually took on this status.640 Apart from Vietnam, no superpower

633 Patrick (2009, 291).

634 Gilderhus (1992, 437).

635 Leffler (1984, 355, 2017, 130).

636 This link was especially made by George Kennan; see Steil (2018, 340–41).

637 Cha (2016); see also Patrick (2009, 286–89).

638 Green (2017, 274–96)

639 Cha (2016, 6): “…this U.S. imposed order was more or less considered legitimate by all participating governments.” See also Kang (2017, 169).

640 See Goh (2013); Kang (2017).

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interventions occurred during the Cold War in East Asia after the Korean War, however, so the ambiguous status of the alliance commitments is not immediately relevant to my study. As we will see below, in the 1960s Vietnam was not perceived as belonging to anyone’s sphere. The last element of the Asia-Pacific U.S. sphere is the 1951 “ANZUS” mutual defence treaty between the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.641 I do not include SEATO or the so- called “Manila Pact” nations in the U.S. sphere because the United States left the security commitments of those organizations too deliberately vague and limited.642

4.2.3 Intervention purpose

Like their Concert of Europe counterparts, Cold War interventions were almost exclusively status quo or system-maintaining interventions. The most important Cold War norm that bears on intervention was the norm of sovereign nonintervention, or the “traditional rules of sovereignty.”643 These norms are famously represented in Chapter I, Articles 2(4), 2(7) and Chapter VII, Article 51 of the UN Charter.644 Norms concerning human rights and humanitarianism began developing a greater international profile in this period, buoyed in particular by the extension of New Deal and Wilsonian principles into the international realm by the Atlantic and United Nations charters. At odds with states’ rights and the principle of sovereign-nonintervention laid out in Charter articles 2(4), 2(7), and 51, however, they did not yet affect intervention dynamics or justifications.645

This norm of nonintervention gave the whole period a strongly noninterventionist character. During the Cold War, states “for the most part” respected the rules of nonintervention by

641 See Watt (1970); Gnehm (2001).

642 Green (2017, 284–96).

643 Glanville (2013, 132) has persuasively shown that what IR scholars normally call Westphalian sovereignty, and its attendant norm of nonintervention, were actually the products of 20th Century decolonization and only accepted by international society after World War 2.

644 United Nations (“Charter of the United Nations” 2015).

645 See Glanville (2013, 133–51); Macfarlane (2002, 45).

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refraining from overtly intervening in other states in a manner that would violate their sovereign inviolability and territorial integrity.646 A “restrictionist”, reading of the Charter prevailed, ruling out uses of force justified on the basis of humanitarian intervention, for example, that in the post- Cold War era drew upon other Charter articles.647 When the superpowers did overtly intervene, they argued these interventions did not violate the norms of sovereign noninterference, as we will see in the cases.

The Cold War period thus features roughly two kinds of intervention: overt and covert. As noted, the superpowers interfered in the internal affairs of dozens of other states, behaviour that is often termed “intervention” in the literature but which should be qualified as informal or covert intervention (or indirect) because it does not as directly challenge the principle of nonintervention. Indeed, covert interventions are specifically designed precisely to avoid the legitimation processes that I examine here. The danger of escalation combined with the political and material costs of overt intervention, and the low costs of covert intervention by comparison, produced strong incentives for the great powers to intervene covertly. Consequently the bulk of superpower intervention in the period is covert, regardless of where it occurs regimes in the period.648 Indeed, the United States intervened covertly in its own sphere most of the time. In some instances policymakers feared the legitimacy costs of breaking the nonintervention rule, making an overt intervention too politically costly; in others there may have been a real fear of superpower conflict and escalation—such as America’s involvement in Vietnam. Assessing the variation between covert interference cases, of which there are dozens, is beyond the scope of my investigation here, so I primarily focus on overt interventions, noting important covert interventions where relevant below.

646 Glanville (2013, 132); Finnemore (2004, 128).

647 See Hurd (2011); see also Chesterman (2001, 45–87).

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Actions that involved a state protecting its nationals or territory from external harm, an extension of sovereign non-interference, were also legitimate in this period. In three instances, states intervened in crises using these justifications: India intervened in the East-West Pakistan war; Vietnam intervened in Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia; and Tanzania intervened in Uganda to oust Idi Amin. Nicholas Wheeler has made the case that the last of these shows a nascent norm of humanitarian intervention. Because these were not great power interventions, I do not deal with them here—however, analyses by Wheeler and Simon Chesterman show that support for and condemnation of these interventions at the Security Council was tied to which superpower supported which side, and their attempts to win allies in these interventions’ respective regions.649

4.2.4 Assurance strategies

During the Cold War no international organization possessed meaningful political authority such that the rest of the system accepted its rulings as legitimate. The superpowers could not, therefore, credibly signal restraint through multilateral legitimacy strategies as the Concert powers could and as the United States will do after the Cold War. The United Nations Security Council, designed to embody both the norms and power-political situation of the immediate postwar years, did not function meaningfully as a legal authority during the Cold War, and its processes were subordinated to superpower competition.650

By consensus, superpower relations did not fill this “legitimacy” gap, either. The superpowers were locked in an unprecedented ideological contest fought on an unprecedented scale that, because of the threat of thermonuclear war, had unprecedented stakes. Insofar as the superpowers “managed the system,” they did so only as a byproduct of their security

649 See Wheeler (2000, 55–136); Chesterman (2001, 71–75, 77–81). The United States, for example, did not recognize the new Cambodian government until 1990, viewing it as a puppet of Vietnam, in turn viewed as an extension of Soviet Russia.

650 Jackson (2000, 259); MacFarlane (2002, 49–50); Recchia (2015, 12). For a view more sympathetic to the United Nations in this period, see Vincent (1974, 233–77, esp. 275–77).

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competition.651 Some accounts of the Cold War focus on the rules of restraint exhibited by the superpowers, particularly as regards nuclear deterrence, détente, and military intervention.652 These rules were “rules of prudence” learned from the necessity of the security situation, however, and not indicative of a deeper sense of shared global responsibility.653 No “common culture” existed at the international level, nor did a system of great power management dedicated to, in the language of the Concert, the happiness of the world.654 The spheres organized political legitimacy only in the sense of acceptability rather than morality or justice—“as acceptable, appropriate, or natural—the way things are done…. the way things must be.”655 As Carsten Holbraad summarizes, “the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States has been characterized by restrained conflict rather than by limited cooperation… they should be seen as rivals engaged in a continuous struggle, but a struggle subject to certain restraints.”656

Austin Carson has recently explored the ways in which the superpowers employed “escalation controls”—concrete military actions and diplomatic signals—to prevent the Korean and Vietnam wars from escalating to open confrontation; I integrate some of his findings into my cases

651 See Waltz (1979, 175–76, 194–201, 204–10); compare Bull ([1977] 2012, 204–5, 206, 218, 220–22).In the Concert era, these two were more closely connected; in the Cold War, the “happiness of the world” is a byproduct of superpower restraint than its chief goal.

652 See in particular Hoffmann (1987); Holbraad (1979, 96–113) for intervention, Keal (1983); see also Bull ([1977] 2012, 110): “The United States and the Soviet Union have developed some agreed rules in relation to the avoidance and control of crises and the limitation of war. There is not, however, any general system of rules among the great powers as a whole in these areas.”

653 Allison (2013, 25–26); Bull ([1977] 2012, 216): “The two super powers recognize the facts of each other’s predominance in certain areas, but they recognize one another’s rights to a sphere of influence only in the sense of rights that are conferred by rules of the game.”

654 Bull ([1977] 2012, 110). Hence spheres reciprocity was not, in Allison’s (2013, 26) words, “an inter-subjective process in the sense of developing genuine shared understandings about appropriate conduct.”

655 Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 173).

656 Holbraad (1979, 109).

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below.657 Although Carson prefers the term “conspicuous constraint” to costly signal, the escalation control argument can be cast in credible commitment terms: a state can prevent escalation (in part) by sending “costly signals” from a military instrumentality point of view— refraining from certain uses of force, distancing regular troops from an operation, using proxies, etc.—that show credible commitment to restraint.658 My argument is that a functioning geopolitical bargain largely bypasses the need for costly signals intended to assure a peer of a credible commitment to restraint. They did not bypass entirely conspicuous constraint signaling, as we will see below, which speaks to the negotiated nature of geopolitical bargains, especially the de facto Cold War one. But they did arguably reduce the level of conspicuous constraints needed for assurance, however, as a comparison with the Korea case shows. Put differently, spheres systems act as escalation control mechanisms themselves.

Last, as noted above, each superpower legitimized its rule inside its sphere through the construction of legal security agreements. The success of these arrangements in producing attractive or ideologically faithful societies not only kept the hierarchies intact but functioned as a kind of advertisement to the rest of the world: each superpower’s ideology—“models of human endeavor that had universalist pretensions”—promised decisive answers to the question of human happiness.659 I thus find evidence that the logic of chapters 3 and 5 is inverse here: rather than assuring each other through legitimacy strategies, the superpowers had to assure their own allies that their interventions were legitimate. It is unclear, however, whether the superpowers did so via costly signaling; as we will see below, the United States efforts to legitimize its interventions to regional organizations were limited. The Soviet Union appears to have spent more time consulting with the Warsaw Treaty allies before intervening in Czechoslovakia, for example.

657 Carson (2018).

658 Carson (2018, 58) defined a conspicuous constraint as “actions and commitments that are detectable, legible, sacrifices.”

659 Westad (2017, 99); Niebuhr ([1952] 2008, 65–88).

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4.3 Military intervention during the Cold War

The United States overtly intervened unambiguously inside its sphere twice: in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983; and the Soviet Union intervened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The United States also intervened on the edge or outside of its sphere in 1950 in Korea, 1965 in Vietnam, and in 1958 in Lebanon; the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan in 1979. Although several liminal cases do not perfectly fit my overt intervention criteria—Korea and Vietnam—their overall importance to the Cold War warrants their inclusion and they bear on my case by showing the geopolitical bargain dynamic’s effects, or lack of effects, on interventions outside the spheres. I also briefly discuss Cuba at the top of the U.S. section. For reasons of space I exclude more minor covert and indirect interventions, such as the U.S.’s involvement in many Latin American coups, though I discuss these as general background in the following sections. The sea of covert intervention cases in the Cold War is vast, and a comprehensive treatment of them in light of my geopolitical bargain theory must wait until a future study.660

In toto, the intervention record matches my expectations. When the superpowers intervened in their own spheres, they did so without counterbalancing or imposing costs on each other. Moreover, they avoided providing material or political support to rebellions in each other’s spheres, even after in three instances instigating them—a form of “conspicuous constraint” that signals the spheres were understood. The cases therefore also show limited, but clear, evidence the superpowers attempted to credibly signal restraint to one another. The interventions outside the spheres are more mixed: in Lebanon the United States was assured the Soviet Union would not counter-intervene by its own intelligence; in Korea, the United States, Soviet Union, and China all engaged in elaborate escalation control behaviours and signaling, consistent with my expectations that intervention outside of the spheres system is a more “mixed-bag.” The Soviet presence in Vietnam was distant, and therefore the intervention there had almost no chance of escalating to superpower war. The United States nonetheless restrained its intervention to avoid directly attacking Soviet personnel.

660 O’Rourke (2016) argues that of the 72 U.S. interventions of the 1947-1989 period, 66 were covert and six overt.

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What the cases also show is the superpowers went to some lengths to legitimize their interventions through intra-alliance multilateralism and regional consensus—especially the United States. These legitimacy strategies are difficult to disentangle from military instrumentality, however, because they were relatively costless when multilateralism was not needed—e.g., Dominican Republic—and only costly when the intervening superpower desired a multilateral intervening coalition—e.g. Czechoslovakia. This indicates that while both superpowers were concerned about credibly signaling restraint within their alliance structures, they did so only so long as it did not impede military need. Securing the integrity of their hierarchies via military force was more important, given the superpower competition, than concerns about intra-alliance legitimacy.

This section begins with a discussion of Korea, which sets the stage for the rest of the period. I then proceeds to the Soviet Union’s interventions in its sphere; the U.S. interventions in its; and then briefly consider the three extra-spheric overt interventions: Lebanon, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

4.3.1 “A substitute for World War III”: U.S. intervention in the Korean War

More than any other postwar event, the Korean War shaped the superpower relations of the next several decades, launching its global, militarized character. As Robert Jervis has written, “no other events that were likely to have occurred” would have militarized the Cold War to the same extent; “without Korea, international history would have been very different.”661 Because it involved near-direct confrontation between both superpowers and a regional power so close after World War 2 but remained localized in its physical destruction, Colin Stueck has called the Korean episode “a substitute for World War III”: a near-miss that, after several years of escalating Cold War tensions between the superpowers, established rules of restraint and thereby “played a stabilizing role in international politics.”662

661 Jervis (1980, 563).

662 Stueck (1995, 3, 350).

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Here, I focus on three aspects of the Korean crisis relevant to my argument: the general strategic shift it caused, which effectively put the systemic de facto geopolitical bargain into play; the United States’ use of the United Nations to legitimize its intervention, which appears to have been geared to supplicate allies rather than the Soviet Union; and the superpowers’ “escalation control,” which helped them prevent open confrontation outside of their spheres and established “the pattern of the Communist-Western confrontation known as the Cold War.”663

As World War 2 drew to a close, the Roosevelt administration proposed the allied victors jointly rule Korea in a four-power trusteeship to prepare it for independence. When American and Soviet forces defeated the Japanese and occupied the peninsula in mid-1945, however, Truman and Stalin scrapped these plans, fearing one or the other would exploit the ongoing Chinese Civil War to dominate the peninsula. They instead agreed to divide the peninsula along the 38th parallel into Soviet and American zones in August 1945—a local, de jure geopolitical bargain— though with no specific arrangement about its duration or agreement about next steps.664

Although the Truman administration subsequently wanted to create an independent, unaligned Korean state, Stalin preferred the partition to a Korea dominated by Japanese or American influence. To this extent Moscow set up the Korean Worker’s Party (KWP) in their zone, led by former anti-Japanese guerilla fighter and Soviet partisan Kim Il-sung; in the south, Syngman Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea by a U.S.-backed United Nations electoral council, replacing the U.S.’s provisional government in August 1948. In the north, Kim and the Soviets denied the United Nations supervisory committee access, founding the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in September 1948. Facing budgetary cutbacks and seeing the Korean peninsula as possessing little strategic importance, the White House reduced its presence to a small training force and scattershot set of aid packages. Both superpowers had withdrawn

663 Black (2015, 71).

664 My account of the Korean episode is based on Jervis (1980); Leffler (1992, 361–493); Stueck (1995); Taliaferro (2004, 131–72); Cumings (2010); Black (2015, 63–75); Thompson (2015, 259–74); Cha (2016, 94–121); Westad (2017, 159–82); Green (2017, 265–96); Carson (2018, 142–86); Chamberlin (2018, 104–57); Shen and Xia (2018, 27–76).

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the bulk of their occupying forces by mid-1949, although Soviet assistant to the North, particular in terms of heavy military equipment, remained substantial.665

There was no historic basis for the North-South division of Korea and it immediately caused tensions—each regime had supporters across Korea.666 Rhee continuously complained about United States inaction against the North or Soviet Union on the issue.667 For his part, Kim begin planning an invasion of the South in June 1949, and sought permission from Stalin, from whom he would need material support but who was reluctant to allow any conflict that might escalate into a Soviet-American showdown.668 When Kim invaded the South in June 1950, Korea returned to Washington’s geostrategic vision as a central front in the global struggle against communism and the United States’ containment strategy.669

President Truman’s decision to intervene in the Korean War was bold and unexpected: in late December 1949 U.S. officials had publicly stated South Korea and Taiwan lay outside the U.S. security perimeter while Japan and the Philippines lay inside it.670 In contrast with the Kremlin, the White House’s understanding of the geostrategic significance Korean peninsula was “abysmally poor.”671 Washington now risked both “entrapment in the periphery” and open

665 As George Kennan explained to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in summer 1949, “the collapse of the South would have no major impact on overall U.S. strategic interests in the region.” See Green (2017, 266–68); Taliaferro (2004, 135–37); Westad (2017, 162–66).

666 Black (2015, 63). Dean Rusk, who hastily created the partition on the day Japan surrendered from using a map from National Geographic, said the division at the 38th parallel “made no sense economically or geographically.” See Chamberlin (2018, 106–7).

667 Cha (2016, 94–97).

668 Shen and Xia (2018, 30–31); Weathersby (2002). Both Mao and Stalin were against the war until Stalin changed his mind in 1950; see Shen and Xia (2018, 27).

669 Jervis (1980); for an account of the lead-up to the Korean War, see Stueck (1995, 10–46).

670 These officials included U.S. Commander in the Far East General Douglas MacArthur and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. See Black (2015, 64); Chamberlin (2018, 114).

671 Green (2017, 265).

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confrontation on Asia’s mainland with the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, or both.672

According to the domino theory logic, however, if Korea fell to communism, so might the rest of East Asia.673 The defeat of the U.S.-backed Kuomintang nationalists by Mao Zedong’s communist insurgency the previous year had already shifted the balance of power in the region in the Soviet Union’s favour, or so Washington thought. This emboldened U.S. interventionists. With “concerns of a global nature,” Truman thus “dealt with Korea in a wider cold war context.”674 At the same time, however, U.S. military planners believed the North would quickly fold and the Soviet Union, “aware that it would lose a global war, would not counter U.S. intervention militarily.”675 This would allow the United States to demonstrate resolve without risking the costs of great power confrontation. As Paul Thomas Chamberlin summarizes, “at the edge of the Pacific ocean, Washington mounted its first full-scale intervention to halt the expansion of communism in the developing world.”676

Stalin meanwhile interpreted the same set of circumstances all as evidence the United States would not intervene, leading him to eventually change his position and authorize Kim Il-sung’s invasion, in January 1950. Geostrategically, a unified Korea would give Stalin a way to balance against a renewed Japan, which he read as increasingly threatening after being snubbed out of its postwar occupation and subsequent peace process.677 Stalin could also test Mao, who he distrusted despite the recently signed Sino-Soviet pact, by asking for his consent in allowing the

672 Taliaferro (2004, 132–33).

673 Black (2015, 74, 2016, 177–80, 185–87); Cha (2016, 104–5).

674 Leffler (1992, 366, 361).

675 Thompson (2015, 268); Leffler (1992, 367–68).

676 Chamberlin (2018, 105).

677 Roberts (2006, 366–67); Weathersby (2002, 3); Shen and Xia (2018, 31).

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war proceed.678 Most importantly, Stalin came to believe the United States would not counter- intervene. The U.S. had not intervened to save Chiang Kai-shek from defeat at the hands of Mao’s communists; this convinced the vozhd that Washington was “reluctant to intervene on the Asian mainland,” as opposed to its clear commitment to defend its sphere in Europe.679 Last, Stalin’s recent acquisition of nuclear weapons and the establishment of NATO in Europe may have convinced him a tougher stance toward the United States was both warranted and possible.680 In January 1950he allegedly told Mao that he no longer intended to maintain the Allies’ postwar agreements, exclaiming “To hell with Yalta!”681

The details of the rest of the war are well-known, so I will not recount them in detail here: after initial defeats that drove the South Korean forces to the bottom tip of the peninsula, the United States intervened in September 1950 at Inch’ŏn, halfway up the peninsula. The intervention divided the North Korea forces and U.S. forces, leading a UN-authorized coalition, rapidly moved north of the 38th parallel to the Yalu river, which separates Korea northwest border from China. A Chinese counter-intervention launched in October 1950 reversed the coalition progress, and brutal war of attrition set in before an armistice could be brokered, after more than two years of negotiations and 575 meetings,682 in July 1953. The Korean peninsula remains locked in the resulting de facto geopolitical entente, although Beijing soon after replaced Moscow as

678 Westad (2017, 164–69); Zubok (2007, 79). Shen and Xia (2018, 32) suggest this may be because Stalin “wanted to respect the division of labor between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties so that he would not be cornered on the Korean question in the future.”

679 Westad (2017, 167); Shen and Xia (2018, 31).

680 Zubok (2007, 80); Black (2015, 64); Shen and Xia (2018, 31).

681 Chamberlin (2018, 114).

682 Shen and Xia (2018, 67).

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Pyongyang’s great power sponsor.683 The war caused some three million casualties; reflecting the international nature of the war, half of all combat deaths were non-Korean.684

Although not a clear case of a sphere of influence intervention, the American involvement in Korea is important for my study for three reasons. First, at the grand strategic level, it ended any possibility the United States would step back from globalism and regress to its interwar mean. What catalyzed Korea’s sudden transformation from strategic backwater to central front in the global confrontation with communism was “the immediate assumption that the North Korean invasion was a proxy move by the Kremlin.”685 A concatenation of events fostered this belief: the “loss of China” the previous year; the end of American nuclear monopoly in August 1949 and worsening relations with Moscow, epitomized by the Berlin Blockade; and the consequent changes in Cold War strategic thinking—domino theory and expanded containment—that blended the ideological with the geopolitical, a common motif throughout the rest of this chapter.

As a result of Korea, U.S. policymakers organized American grand strategy around the “expanded definition of containment” of Paul Nitze’s NSC-68, which now “came off the shelf and became the centerpiece of U.S. strategic planning going forward.”686 Calling for a sweeping remilitarization of efforts to combat global communism, NSC-68 put the systemic geopolitical bargain into operation, so to speak, describing the cold war as a “real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake” and calling a “defeat of free institutions anywhere a defeat everywhere.”687 As Melvyn Leffler summarizes, “in the worldview of NSC-68… diplomacy was a zero-sum game. The stakes were global preponderance.”688 This expanded containment had a

683 Shen and Xia (2018, 75–77, 107).

684 Classic accounts are Cumings (2010); Hastings (1987); for international emphases, see Stueck (1995); Barnes (2014). To a great extent the Cold War was launched on the Korean peninsula, and there it remains.

685 Thompson (2015, 267); see also Weatherby (1993, 425); Leffler (1992, 361); Chamberlin (2018, 117–19).

686 Green (2017, 283, 277).

687 Thompson (2015, 266, 260; see also 259-274); Leffler (1992, 355–60).

688 Leffler (1992, 357).

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marked effect on the U.S. presence in Asia, which would become the most violent theatre in U.S. efforts to combat communism—indeed in the Cold War—and eventually draw the United States into Vietnam. Thus “while Latin America was Washington’s imperial workshop and Eastern Europe was Moscow’s laboratory of socialism, the contested borderlands of southern Asia served as the staging grounds for both the superpowers’ containment strategies and for new modes of revolution and resistance.”689

When the United States intervened in Korea in summer 1950, its East Asian sphere had not yet crystallized; apart from its occupation of Japan, Washington had no formal defence plans beyond its pacific island security perimeter. And as Victor Cha and Michael Green have shown, U.S. intervention in Korea catalyzed the American sphere in East Asia, not the other way around.690 The United States kept bases in Japan and bolstered its support of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, now in Taiwan.691 Directly or indirectly the Korean episode reversed America’s postwar demilitarization, doubled its military spending, transformed NATO from a political organization into a primarily military one, “dusted off” NSC-68 and therewith globalized the containment doctrine; moved the U.S.’s offshore defence perimeter to the Asian mainland; and reduced the influence of minimalist realists like George Kennan on American foreign policy in favour of more muscular liberals like John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, and Paul Nitze.692

Conversely, the Korean War had almost the opposite effect in the Soviet Union. Internal dissent as the war drug on imposed heavy political costs on Moscow, strongly deterring “the Kremlin against sanction a conventional military ventures into territories outside the Soviet sphere of influence.”693 Indeed, the Soviet Union would never again directly military intervene outside its

689 Chamberlin (2018, 3).

690 Cha (2016); Green (2017, 274–96); cf. Black (2015, 73).

691 Cha (2016, 67–69, 94–121, 144); Black (2015, 73–74).

692 Jervis (1980); Leffler (1992, 266–397); Stueck (1995, 41–43); Casey (2005, 2008); Black (2015, 72–75); Thompson (2015, 263–64); Green (2017, 274–78); Westad (2017, 181–82).

693 Stueck (1995, 6).

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sphere, with the exception of its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and after Stalin’s death his successors pursued limited détente with Washington.694

Second, the United States used the Security Council to legitimize the war in Security Council resolutions 82 and 83. This did not set a precedent, however. The Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council over the PRC’s exclusion from China’s seat at the Security Council, and Stalin ordered the Soviet ambassador specifically not to attend the meetings on Korea.695 Although the role of the United Nations in the Korean War is often discounted as epiphenomenal, recent research shows it played a role in legitimizing the conflict to allies and keeping them in. Put differently, the United Nations helped the Truman administration defray the war’s increasing costs—material, political, and human—through burden sharing.696

The Security Council resolutions should not be confused with the costly signaling or great power assurance strategies of the Concert and post-Cold War periods, however. Because of the Soviet boycott, the United States’ initial legitimation was effectively costless—it passed the same afternoon—and ministerial its military considerations. It is therefore difficult to argue the United States used the Security Council to send costly signals about superpower restraint. Rather, as Orne Westad suggests, the resolution may have helped the United States legitimize its postwar hegemony within its alliance structure, a tactic U.S. leaders repeated, with mixed results, in the Latin America interventions; and shore up the legitimacy of the United Nations, then less than five years old, as an international organization that could act as an effective collective security institutions.697

694 Stueck (1995, 6, 353); Leffler (2007, 88–95).

695 Roberts (2006, 366); Chamberlin (2018, 121).

696 Barnes (2014, 28–59). Note that the United States still contributed more than 80 percent of the total UN ground troops and efforts to burden share, particularly with Latin America, were largely unsuccessful; see Stueck (1995, 194–99); and Carson (2018, 151–52).

697 Westad (2017, 170, 178); Carson (2018, 155).

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Third, more research shows that throughout the war the superpowers learned how carefully avoid escalate into open confrontation—in a term, “escalation control.”698 As Austin Carson argues,

…this early encounter in the Cold War was fertile ground for misunderstanding. … Overall, the Korean War was underinformed by previous experience…. Localization of the conflict to the Korean peninsula was a pressing challenge. Failure do so could turn the war into a regional conflict involving China or, in the worst case, a global war between American and Soviet forces.699

William Stueck likewise argues the Korean War “contributed significantly to the evolution of an order that escaped the ultimate horror of a direct clash of superpowers.”700 Although the war “militarized America’s containment policy and helped to ensure that the Cold War would be fought on Third World battlefields,” it also gave the superpowers an opportunity to learn and negotiate how to confront each geostrategically without turning to open superpower war.701

Some of this “escalation control” took place, as it does in my later cases, through indirect diplomatic communication, unofficial channels, and the like. The United Kingdom played a not insubstantial role in encouraging American restraint: When General MacArthur publicly suggested the United States use atomic bombs to break the North’s advances in early 1951 and Truman later said his administration was giving “active consideration” to the idea, British Prime Minister Clement Atlee flew to Washington to encourage Truman to exercise restraint, hold the line, and press for concessions.702 In the early stages of the war, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States warned U.S. leaders in November 1950 that overextension in East Asia could escalate into broader conflict. The State Department likewise released a statement arguing that

698 Carson (2018); see also Stueck (1995).

699 Carson (2018, 149–148).

700 Stueck (1995, 3).

701 Chamberlin (2018, 105); Stueck (1995, 348–53).

702 Thompson (2015, 269–70).

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the Soviets were aware escalation control in the Korean theatre would be difficult because of instability in China.703 As the war began, U.S. officials agreed their “key task was to allow [the Soviets] a graceful means to extricate themselves from the crisis.”704 Overall, communications between the Soviet Union and the United States suggested the superpowers “downplay Soviet and Chinese involvement in the Korean War” for the purposes of avoiding a great power confrontation.705

Both sides also took concrete steps to prevent escalation while indirectly imposing costs on the other side. United States decision makers feared a Korean intervention could escalate into a direct war, and paid close attention to Soviet activities during the initial phases of the intervention. White House officials found the Soviets attempting to distance themselves from the intervention by hiding their presence on the ground. Austin Carson argues that “Soviet efforts to distance itself from the invasion were a key indicator for American leaders that an over intervention would be unlikely to prompt a larger war.”706 During the White House reciprocated Soviet efforts to publicly avoid signs of a superpower intervention by encouraging (or ordering) its officials to avoid speaking frankly about Soviet involvement, and focus attention on North Korea.707

Truman also consistently resisted military advice that U.S. forces seek to “roll back” Soviet influence on the peninsula, listening to concerns about escalation expressed by the CIA and State Department instead.708 The White House also restrained the boisterous Rhee, who saw the war as “an opportunity to fulfill his ambitions of unifying the peninsula” and often jeopardized American war plans by trying to entrap Washington in aggressive strategies, threatening the

703 Carson (2018, 149–50); see also Taliaferro (2004, 149–50).

704 Leffler (1992, 368).

705 Carson (2018, 151).

706 Carson (2018, 155).

707 Carson (2018, 153–57).

708 Taliferro (2004, 149–50).

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withdrawal of his support, sabotaging the armistice negotiations, and the like.709 Austin Carson has plausibly argued that the United States was aware of Soviet air support to the North, but concealed this from media and from other “frontstage narrative” sources in an effort to control escalation and domestic pressure that would inevitably come from hawkish congressmen if they knew about the covert support.710 Further, the United States did not pursue communist aircraft into Chinese airspace, and notably never used atomic weapons.711

The Soviet Union’s counter-intervention was covert, aimed to minimize Soviet exposure, signal superpower restrain, but also impose real costs on the UN coalition. Soviet assistance to the North was largely material support until, after October 1950, Stalin requested China involve itself on Kim’s behalf using a volunteer force. The Soviets furthermore supported the North with an air support campaign waged by the MIG-15 fighters of the Manchurian-based Soviet ‘Group 64.’ The United States and Soviet Union were therefore involved in direct clashes.712 Out of fears of escalation, Stalin “was only willing to deploy Soviet personnel in ways that maximized plausible deniability,” having them appear as North Korean or Chinese forces.713 Somewhat humorously, Soviet pilots were instructed to communicate only in a set of memorized Chinese words when engaging in dogfights. 714 Stalin elsewhere went to lengths to avoid provoking the United States into a wider war, attempting to restrain both Mao and Kim.715 Throughout the war, U.S. officials were aware of Soviet restraint.716

709 Cha (2016, 97, 94–104).

710 Carson (2018, 167–72); cf. Gaddis (2005, 60).

711 Black (2015, 69); one of the first to suggest the United States use nuclear weapons, or threaten their use, to solve the Korean dilemma was Syngman Rhee. See Cha (2016, 96).

712 Black (2015, 68).

713 Carson (2018, 159).

714 Carson (2018, 159).

715 Carson (2018, 159–63); Weatherby (1993, 2002); Roberts (2006, 364–70); Zubok (2007, 81); Shen and Xia (2018, 27–43).

716 E.g. Leffler (1992, 442).

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Before the war broke out Stalin outline the central problem to Kim: because the Soviet Union was bound by the 38th parallel agreement; breaking it would provoke a U.S. counter-intervention. If the South was as aggressive as Kim suggested, it would eventually attack, giving Kim the pretext he needed for an invasion.717 The Soviet Union communicated these concerns to Pyongyang through 1949, only allowing a “more active stance on the unification of Korea” after the victory of Mao’s communists and subsequent Sino-Soviet Friendship Pact. 718 As mentioned, Stalin read the lack of U.S. intervention on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese civil war as evidence that Washington did not want to intervene in Asia. The vozhd furthermore thought the new Sino-Soviet axis would further deter the United States from desiring to intervene in Korea.719 As Kathryn Weathersby has put it, the key factor in Stalin’s reasoning was “whether the attack would prompt the United States to intervene and thus possibly drag the USSR into direct conflict with its far more powerful adversary.”720 Unfortunately, Stalin read the change in geopolitical forces in precisely the opposite manner as Washington.

Once the war began, Stalin remained cautious about precipitating a Soviet-American confrontation. At the United Nations, Stalin did not send his ambassador back to a second Security Council resolution on Korea, despite the urging of his diplomats.721 When the Soviet diplomats resumed attending the Security Council in August 1950, “their initial truculence turned quickly to a more moderate posture,” and they began pushing for a ceasefire.722

717 Weathersby (2002, 4): “Stalin: ‘If the adversary has aggressive intentions, then sooner or later it will start the aggression. In response to the attack you will have a good opportunity to launch a counterattack. Then your move will be understood and supported by everyone.’”

718 Weathersby (2002, 9, 4–11).

719 Zubok (2007, 80).

720 Weathersby (2002, 11). Gaddis (2005, 58) reports that the United States had 369 operation atomic bombs by the end of 1950 to the Soviet Union’s 5.

721 Apparently this was, as Stalin told Czechoslovakian communist president Gottwald, so that the United States would become “entangled in the military intervention in Korea” and “squander its military prestige and authority.” Zubok (2007, 80); see also Chamberlin (2018, 119–20).

722 Leffler (1992, 377).

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Throughout the war the Soviets “were standing on the sidelines,” restricting their involvement to flight sorties after effectively approving the war.723 The Soviet Union refrained from attacking United Nations supply routes in a war where the United States’ command of the sea was crucial for both offensive maneuvers and, into late 1950 and early 1951, retreats.724 In communications with North Korea, Stalin and other Soviet officials tried to restrain Kim Il-Sung’s enthusiasm while attempting to minimize Soviet participation beyond covert appui materiel. In the lead up to the war the Soviet Union ignored Kim’s request that it allow other communist nations, such as Czechoslovakia, to join the war.725 Stalin had long made it clear to Kim he could not count on direct Soviet assistance, and should appeal to Mao, who had a better understanding “of Oriental matters,” for additional support.726 Despite the North’s radical changes in fortune, Stalin did not alter the Soviet Union’s essentially noninterventionist stance at any point during the war: Moscow would supply weapons, advisors, and concealed air support, but nothing else.727

The Chinese intervention, although central to the war and important part of the Sino-Soviet relations, was less important to overall Cold War stability, and had ambivalent long-term effects on the Sino-Soviet relationship.728 A direct Sino-American confrontation did not risk systemic war in the way a Soviet-American confrontation would. Nonetheless, U.S. policymakers were worried overt Chinese involvement would draw the war out of the Korean peninsula, and authorized MacArthur to proceed to the Yalu River only under the assumption the Mao’s forces

723 Westad (2017, 170).

724 Black (2015, 67).

725 Shen and Xia (2018, 36).

726 Weathersby (2002, 10); Roberts (2006, 368–69). Mao and Kim did not have good relations in the lead up to the war, and Kim consistently deferred to Moscow while cutting Beijing out of the loop. Mao offered Chinese troops to Kim in May 1950, for example, and Kim refused, later only notifying Mao the war had begun three days after the opening of hostilities. See Shen and Xia (2018, 27–43, esp. 33–34, 37).

727 Weathersby (2002, 16–17); Roberts (2006, 368–69). Stalin also preferred to keep China out of the Korean situation so that he could more easily control the situation through Kim. See Shen and Xia (2018, 39).

728 Stueck (1995, 363–65)

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near the border were placed there for defensive reasons.729 Truman nonetheless asked MacArthur to use only South Korean troops near the Chinese border.730 MacArthur was later relieved of duty when he suggested, publicly, the war be expanded past what Truman and the Joint Chiefs thought the Soviets and Chinese would view as an acceptable limitation on the use of force.731 After much deliberation by Mao and Stalin, the Chinese counter-intervention force was labeled a “Chinese People’s Volunteer” force in an attempt to prevent an open war between the United States and China. Stalin had previously blocked Chinese intervention so he could better control the Korean situation, and only ceded to Kim’s requests for Chinese support at the nadir of the war, in October 1950.732 The “volunteer” nomenclature was applied consistently all the way up to the armistice talks, where the Chinese delegates technically represented the volunteer corps.733

In toto, the Korean intervention shows a “successful” case of superpower intervention in a war between two allies set on radically revising a local geopolitical bargain. The crisis was “successfully” resolved because overt U.S. intervention, mixed Chinese intervention, and costly but covert Soviet counter-intervention did not (!) escalate into a regional or global war between two or more powers. The war was a disaster for Korea, however, destroying the country and featuring “perhaps the most intense violence of the post-1945 era.”734 This underlines how negotiated great power stasis, even in the context of , did not prevent and perhaps even enabled terrible local violence.735

729 Cha (2016, 97); U.S. policymakers debated the wisdom of pursuing the status-quo ante throughout the war; see, e.g., Leffler (1992, 374–75).

730 Black (2015, 67).

731 Black (2015, 69).

732 Shen and Xia (2018, 34–43).

733 Carson (2018, 175–81); Black (2015, 68).

734 Chamberlin (2018, 105).

735 Stueck (1995, 353–60).

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Ambiguity about the geopolitical boundaries of acceptable great power behaviour, however, precipitated the confrontation, with Moscow and Washington reading the changing East Asian geopolitical context in opposite ways. In the lead up to and throughout the war the most important political calculations revolved around Korea’s location, and the mutually incompatible interpretations of either superpower about what that location meant for the overall balance if it swayed to one side or the other. Stalin and Kim’s certainty that the United States would not intervene in Asia demonstrates the ambiguity of early Cold War superpower relations, and in particular the ambiguity about what kinds of crises—and where—would precipitate overt superpower involvement.

A lack of common understanding about the limits of acceptability precipitated another crisis in the next decade, in Cuba. What is striking about the remainder of the cases in this chapter, however, is how the superpowers were able to avoid war and negotiate the boundaries of their spheres without recourse to any systemic territorial settlement, effective international forum, or shared sense of purpose.

4.3.2 “Peaceful Coexistence”: Soviet interventions in the Eastern Bloc

The Soviet Union intervened twice in its sphere during the Cold War, both times to put down democratic or “counterrevolutionary” governments. These interventions match the expectations of my theory. In both instances the revolutions were in part enabled by interference by the United States, and precipitated major, violent interventions aimed at preserving the status quo. In both instances, the United States condemned the interventions at the United Nations Security Council as violations of the norm of sovereignty but refrained from imposing any costs on the Soviet Union or supporting the rebels in any material or political way, even when doing so would be relatively costless.

Between Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the October 1956 intervention, the European geopolitical bargain began to stabilize. In May 1955 Austria became a neutral state, guaranteeing not to reunify with Germany. The Austrian State Treaty precipitated an Allied agreement on the future of West Germany, which subsequently joined NATO. In response, the Soviet Union’s formalized its sphere of influence with the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, signed in Warsaw, which bound its members together in a mutual security guarantee.

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The Eisenhower administration, although publicly adhering to a soft power strategy of “liberation,” began to accept the Soviet status quo in Eastern Europe in its strategic planning documents.736 And Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as the Soviet Union’s leader in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, began formulating a “peaceful coexistence” doctrine that would ease East-West relations.737

In February 1956, Khrushchev delivered his now-famous “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, the Great Terror purges, and outlined a reorientation in Soviet domestic and foreign policy postures. War with the capitalist West was no longer a historical inevitability; soviet communism would win the global struggle through its example, not through an end-times confrontation with the West. Importantly, de- Stalinization meant “different countries could take different roads to socialism.”738

4.3.2.1 “Conquered and in Chains”: Hungary, 1956

De-Stalinization set off two major reform movements, one in Poland and another in Hungary, by mid-1956. The Polish People’s Army suppressed the Poznan protests in June before a Soviet intervention could take place.739 In Hungary, however, events would eventually precipitate a Soviet intervention. On October 23, 1956, protesting students demanded the ruling Hungarian Working People’s Party install then-disgraced Imre Nagy as Prime Minister and withdraw the Red Army from Hungarian territory. Party leaders installed Nagy on October 24 in an attempt to quell the increasingly violent rebellion, now clashing with Soviet forces. Nagy announced on October 30 he would end the Party’s monopoly rule and transform the Hungarian government into a coalition party system. On October 31, Nagy announced Hungary was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, and appealed to the United Nations to be recognized as a neutral country.740

736 For an overview of these events, see Dunbabin (2014, 199–228).

737 Black (2015, 94).

738 Barrass (2009, 106); see also Black (2015, 95).

739 Black (2015, 95–96); Zubok (2007, 114–15); Westad (2017, 200–201).

740 This would deprive the Soviet Union of the legal pretext of its intervention; see Békés et al. (2002, 212).

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Initially open to negotiations with the new Hungarian government, the Soviet Union reversed course, sending tanks into Budapest early in the morning on November 4. By November 7 the Soviets had installed a new loyalist government. Two-hundred thousand people fled to neighbouring countries; about 7,000 died in the fighting, and another 45,000 were sentenced to prison or interned in camps. Nagy was executed, after being forced out exile in Yugoslavia, on July 16, 1958. It was the first counterrevolution against communism since 1917.741

Between October 24 and November 4, the Soviet leadership agreed on a basic policy of accommodation. They negotiated with Nagy’s government concerning the protestors’ demands and agreed, for the time being, on nonintervention. Khrushchev in particular did not want the Soviet Union to be seen as an aggressive state, noting French and British belligerence in the ongoing Suez crisis.742 The Politburo also made several public moves to indicate their accommodation. On October 30, the Soviet Foreign minister announced the Soviet Union was ready to withdraw its troops.743 Three factors appear to have pushed Khrushchev’s mind toward intervention, however: his fear Nagy’s reforms would spread to the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and so on, where demonstrations were already taking place; Nagy’s announced restoration of a multiparty system; and his plan to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw pact.744 Zubok and Pleshakov note that Hungary’s closeness to Moscow was comparable to Cuba’s closeness within the American sphere of influence.745A Hungary exit would be disastrous for the Pact, and for Khrushchev’s position within the party.

741 I have based this account primarily on Kissinger (1994, 550–67); Békés (1997, 2006); Békés et al. (2002); Judt (2005, 313–232); Granville (2004); Gati (2006); Zubok (2007, 115–19); Black (2015, 93–98); Westad (2017, 198– 208); and my own review of the State Department historical archives, cited by document number under Keefer et al. (1990).

742 Zubok (2007, 117).

743 Westad (2017, 204).

744 Zubok (2007, 117); Judt (2005, 316–20).

745 Zubok and Pleshakov (1996, 242).

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Two aspects of the Soviet intervention are worth mentioning. First, on October 30 the Politburo also released a document in Pravda systemically outlining post-Stalin Soviet intervention policy. Titled “Declaration by the Government of the USSR on the Principles of Development and Further Strengthening of Friendship and Cooperation Between the Soviet Union and Other Socialist States,” the document stated that “the great commonwealth of socialist nations” was founded on “respect for territorial integrity, state independence and sovereignty, and noninterference in one another’s internal affairs.” The commonwealth “presupposed” close “fraternal cooperation and mutual aid among the countries of the socialist commonwealth in the economic, political and cultural spheres.” Although mistakes had been made in the past regarding these principles, governments now deviating from them would find themselves liable to correction. 746As Paul Keal has noted, the document revises the principle of nonintervention to mean “‘socialist sovereignty,’ that is to say, rule of the Communist party.’”747 The Soviet representative at the United Nations could thereby defend the intervention while at the same time affirming the principle of nonintervention. The Soviet Union was intervening only on behalf the Hungarian people against the illegitimate, “reactionary” and “fascist” Nagy regime.748 Pravda editorials published at the beginning and end of the crisis justified the intervention with similar themes: imperialist forces had caused Hungary to deviate, and Soviet forces had entered the country on behalf of Hungary’s working people.749

Second, to generate additional legitimacy for his decision, Khrushchev coordinated the intervention in Bucharest with Romanian, Bulgarian, and Czech leaders. He also consulted China and Yugoslavia before ordering Marshal Konev to take Budapest at dawn on November 4.750 This indicates that, like Washington’s efforts to legitimize its interventions within its sphere through

746 Quoted from Békés et al. (2002, 300-302: Document 50).

747 Keal (1983, 119).

748 United Nations (1956b).

749 Keal (1983, 118–19); Vincent (1974, 166–67).

750 Zubok (2007, 117–18); Judt (2005, 317); Békés et al. (2002, 347-355: Documents 75-77).

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regional organizations, Khrushchev was concerned with intrasphere consensus, possibly because the legitimacy of his own position in the Kremlin hierarchy could not be taken for granted.751

Despite the students’ expectations the United States would intervene, there was virtually no Western involvement in the revolt—no public action apart from a Security Council resolution that was vetoed and passed in the General Assembly. The lack of Western assistance dismayed the protesters. For years the United States ran covert operations in Hungary encouraging liberal movements, particularly through Radio Free Europe, as part of Eisenhower’s “liberation” policy.752 Under CIA guidance, these continued during the uprisings.753 On October 24, the U.S. legation in Budapest urgently requested U.S. policymakers to condemn the intervention at the “earliest and highest level”—“virtually every Hungarian of scores spoken to in the past 24 hours have demanded, ‘Give us arms,’ ‘Give us diplomatic assistance’, ‘What is America going to do for us in this hour’?”754 President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles released short statements on October 25 and 28, respectively, deploring the Soviet intervention, but committing to nothing except to extend assistance through International Committee of the Red Cross operations. In a line evocative of British statements on the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1847, Eisenhower’s final line reads: “The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary.”755

One explanation of U.S. reticence toward Hungary is that the revolt coincided with the Suez Canal crisis, drawing great power attention away from Budapest.756 Even if Suez had this effect, U.S. strategy toward the Eastern Bloc had cooled. Eisenhower’s first Eastern Europe strategy, laid out in the 1953 NSC-174, recommended undermining satellite regimes in the Bloc, using

751 See Zubok (2007, 117).

752 See Granville (2004, 158–201).

753 See Wilson Centre (1956a, 1956b); Kissinger (1994, 550–67).

754 Quoted from Keefer et al. (1990, Document 103); see also Kovrig (1991, 93).

755 Eisenhower (1956b); Dulles (1956).

756 E.g. Sestanovich (2014, 80); see also Ambrose and Brinkley (2011, 156).

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any means “short of military force,” for their eventual “liberation.”757 But in 1955 U.S. intelligence determined that no means “short of war” could detach a satellite from the Soviet Bloc.758 NSC-5608, its Annex, and 5608/1, all circulated in July 1956, effectively ruled out the use of military force to dislodge a satellite; the Soviet Union’s power preponderance would make it too costly.759 NSC-5608/1 was reaffirmed by the National Security Council on October 31.760 Two days before the Soviet intervention, U.S. intelligence determined that Moscow, facing the options of a satellite breakoff or military intervention, was likely to intervene.761 The Suez argument also does not explain why, when it might be materially costless, the Western Allies did nothing to help Nagy’s government—the United States ignored his requests to be recognized as neutral, for example, and dragged its feet on having the issue taken to the United Nations Security Council.762 The gap between Washington’s private stance toward Eastern Europe in 1956 and the “unchanged nature of American propaganda” fostered false hope that has been described as hypocrisy.763

The United States decided early on it would not intervene in Hungary—the question was not raised at all at any high level—and attempted to signal its recognition of Soviet preponderance in its sphere to Moscow. Put differently, the Eisenhower administration communicated “conspicuous constraints” that signaled their acknowledgment of the Soviet sphere and that there would be no dangerous U.S. counter-intervention.764 These signals were intended to assure that a

757 Baehler et al. (1988, Document 51).

758 Keefer et al. (1990, Document 3).

759 Keefer et al. (1990, Documents 73, 76, 80).

760 Keefer et al. (1990, Document 151).

761 Keefer et al. (1990, Document 137). This report also noted that “It seems unlikely that US action short of overt military intervention or obvious preparation for such intervention would lead the USSR deliberately to take steps which it believed would materially increase the risk of general war.” See also Békés et al. (2002, 210).

762 Kissinger (1994, 561).

763 Kissinger (1994, 563); Gati (2006, 218); Békés (1997, 52).

764 Carson (2018, 58).

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Hungarian break from the Warsaw bloc would not significantly alter Moscow’s security situation or alter the geopolitical bargain in ways that might precipitate a superpower confrontation.

First, the United States’ efforts in bringing the Hungarian crisis to the United Nations Security Council were muted. Csaba Békés has convincingly shown the United States took the issue to the Security Council only so it could appear to be “active” in the face of a crisis it may have precipitated.765 The resolution tabled on November 4 condemned the intervention, called for a Soviet withdrawal, and affirmed “the right of the Hungarian people to a government responsive to its national aspirations and dedicated to its independence and well-being.”766 But it made no reference to the Nagy government’s desire for neutrality.767 That the resolution was pro forma is confirmed by other evidence: when Marshal Zhukov complained to Charles Bohlen he “regretted” that the Hungary matter was before the Security Council, for example, Bohlen replied the Soviets could “hardly expect otherwise since intervention with Soviet troops gave it a strong international aspect.”768

Second, the administration attempted to signal to Moscow that they would not form military alliances with any breakaway satellites. At a National Security Council meeting on October 26, Harold Stassen noted the Soviet Union would soon need to either crack down on its satellites— go back to Stalinism—or let events take their course. To open an easier path toward the latter, Stassen suggested Eisenhower assure the Soviet Union, through an intermediary, that the United States would not exploit the independence of a satellite by enjoining militarily. This intermediary could make the case that Soviet Union’s security concerns could be just as well satisfied by a ring of neutral buffer states in the model of Austria.769 Eisenhower agreed the Soviet Union should be assured, consistent with a noninterventionist stance on Poland (experiencing a non-

765 Békés (2006, 497); see also Keefer et al. (1990, Document 104).

766 Quoted from Keefer et al. (1990, Documents 164, 167).

767 Békés (1997, 61).

768 Quoted from Keefer et al. (1990, Document 138).

769 Keefer et al. (1990, Document 116); Békés (2006, 497); Békés et al. (2002, 209).

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military crisis) Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had announced on Face the Nation the previous week.770

The new message was inserted into a campaign speech delivered by Dulles on October 27, 1956:

And let me make this clear, beyond a possibility of doubt: The United States has no ulterior purpose in desiring the independence of the satellite countries. Our unadulterated wish is that these peoples, from whom so much of our own national life derives, should have sovereignty restored to them and that they should have governments of their own free choosing. We do not look upon these nations as potential military allies.771

The U.S. administration had this portion of the speech repeated several times: by U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, in an October 28 Security Council meeting772; by the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Charles Bohlen, who reiterated the speech to the Soviet leadership, including Georgy Zhukov773; and by President Eisenhower, during an October 31 televised address: “We have also—with respect to the Soviet Union— sought clearly to remove any false fears that we would look upon new governments in these Eastern European countries as potential military allies.”774

Statements made by NATO officials further emphasized this point. On December 18 Dulles said that the United States had “no purpose at all to turn these satellite countries into our allies, in the sense that we have no desire to surround the Soviet Union with a band of hostile states and to

770 Békés (2006, 496); see also Keefer (1990, Documents 119-121).

771 Quoted from Keefer et al. (1990, Document 128). My italics. Waltz (1979, 208–9) connects Dulles’ statement on Hungary with unspoken superpower management.

772 United Nations (1956a, 9); Békés et al. (2002, 209).

773 Keefer et al. (1990, Documents 131, 134, 146); according to Bohlen, Zhukov found it difficult to “reconcile” the neutrality statement with the President’s encouragement of “rebels” in Hungary. See also Békés et al. (2002, 209).

774 Eisenhower (1956a); Békés et al. (2002, 209); see also Kissinger (1994, 559). This address was toned by Dulles to remove references to “irresistible force of liberation”; see Keefer et al. (1990, Document 149).

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revive what has been called the cordon sanitaire.”775 The French Foreign Minister made public assurances France would not intervene under “any circumstances,” and Sir Anthony Eden’s government announced in Parliament it did not have the “slightest intention” of exploiting events in Hungary to “undermine the security of the Soviet Union.”776 In a March 23 1957 press conference, Dulles stated that aiding the Hungarian uprising would not have assisted “the people of Hungary or the people of Europe or the rest of the word.”777

Last, the United States did not pursue any options that might have aided the Hungarian revolt— giving covert support to the rebels, recognizing their belligerent status, or outlining a disarmament proposal, all options considered by the National Security Council.778 No resolution supported by the United States had any teeth, and internal documents kept U.S. policy recommendations confined humanitarian assistance and public admonishment.779 U.S. Recognition of the Nagy government or Hungarian neutrality might have upset the Soviets, but also delayed their intervention long enough for the revolution to consolidate its reforms.780 Charles Gati suggests the United States could have taken many diplomatic initiatives of relatively low cost, e.g., suggest the United Nations secretary general fly to Budapest, propose a mutual reduction of forces, or temporary withdraw its forces from somewhere in Western Europe in exchange for a Soviet withdrawal.781 In addition to ruling out the use of force, the U.S. government stated that it would not recognize a “Hungarian government hostile to Moscow.”782

775 Quoted in Keal (1983, 122).

776 Békés (1997, 57).

777 Quoted in Kissinger (1994, 565).

778 Kovrig (1991, 97).

779 E.g. Keefer et al. (1990, Document 174): “It is not recommended that we revive the cold war on the scale of intensity of the late Stalin period. We shall certainly take some steps, and very definite ones, to register our revulsion against the Soviet attack on Hungary.”

780 Kovrig (1991, 102).

781 Gati (2006, 220).

782 Keal (1983, 121–22).

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Like Palmerston’s efforts to induce reform in Italy and Poland, Western diplomats in the Hungarian crisis could and did press for liberal outcomes within the Soviet sphere. Their liberalism was not all cheap talk. Communications across the period show that U.S. policymakers still preferred what amounted to a 1956 version of the 1943 “open spheres” concept: the Soviets could have a sphere, but it should not determine the kinds of governments in them. Dulles’ communications with the State Department missions and his White House colleagues, for example, consistently show a concern with working toward a Soviet withdrawal from Budapest, but not the removal of Hungary from Soviet predominance.783

4.3.2.2 “Socialism with a Human Face”: Czechoslovakia, 1968

In 1968 the Soviet Union intervened to put down another liberalization movement in a satellite. In late October 1967 the Czechoslovak Communist party suppressed a student-led protest in the Strahov district of Prague. Instead of ending dissent, however, the crackdown led to societal- wide pressures for reform. The party’s Central Committee responded in January 1968 by electing Alexander Dubček as First Secretary. Under pressure, Dubček began implementing a series of Party-sponsored reforms under the slogan ‘Socialism with a Human Face,’ and by June the regime had relaxed almost all controls on public expression, leading to more demands for reform.784

Throughout the spring of 1968, the Dubček regime assured Moscow that it would remain a loyal Warsaw Pact ally and had no intentions of ending communist party control in the manner of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. As the reformist movement radicalized, however, the Politburo became skeptical Dubček could continue to liberalize and still maintain control. Other Warsaw pact leaders expressed concerns Czechoslovakia might be spinning out of control.785 Moscow

783 See for example Keefer et al. (1990, Document 143).

784 I have based my account on Judt (2005, 436–49); Westad (2017, 374–77); Kovrig (1991, 112–17); Valenta (1979); Black (2015, 130–31); Keal (1983, 123–32); and the historical documents, cited under Miller (1996).

785 Dunbabin (2014, 567).

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drew up invasion plans by May.786 At a July 26-27 meeting, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev demanded the regime put an end to “anti-Soviet statements.” When it did not, leaders from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria met in Moscow on August 18 and agreed to forcibly remove the regime. Three days later, 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops crossed in Czechoslovakia, took over the government, and began reversing Dubček’s reforms in a process of “normalization.”787 Seventy-thousand Czechoslovakians fled west and approximately 100 were killed in the invasion.788

The legitimation strategies of the two superpowers mirrored 1956 and can be described as follows: ideological restoration and conspicuous, even deferential, silence. Moscow’s initial pretext for the intervention was an invitation from Czechoslovakia’s leaders. Those leaders denied making any such invitation, and the justification was roundly rejected at the United Nations.789

A second, deeper justification was the September 1968 ‘Brezhnev Doctrine,’ itself a systematic articulation of the October 30, 1956 declaration that justified the Hungarian intervention.790 The Brezhnev doctrine was formulated in response to the 1956 uprisings, Yugoslavia’s neutrality, Romania’s emerging independence, and instability in East Germany. The Politburo and especially Brezhnev feared that “falling dominos” in Central Europe would destroy the Soviet sphere.791 Mirroring U.S. concerns about communism in its sphere, Moscow feared the Soviet Bloc was increasingly penetrated by Western influences.792 Brezhnev also feared a Western response, and had to be assured by his foreign minister Gromkyo that “the international relations

786 Dunbabin (2014, 567).

787 For an account, see Andrew and Mitrokhin (1999, 248–61).

788 Judt (2005, 444); Black (2015, 130); Westad (2017, 374–77); Zubok (2007, 208).

789 Vincent (1974, 176); Keal (1983, 131).

790 Franck and Weisband (1971, 33–40).

791 Zubok (2007, 207).

792 Andrew and Mitrokhin (1999, 249).

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now are such that the extreme measures”—such as the invasion of Czechoslovakia—“cannot produce aggravation of the international situation. There will be no big war.”793 Because of its similarity to U.S. justifications vis-à-vis the Western Hemisphere, Edy Kaufman calls Brezhnev’s doctrine a “Soviet Monroe Doctrine.”794

According to the doctrine, each communist party can “apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in its own county,” but the Soviet community reserved the right to intervene in any Warsaw country that deviated from those principles.795 The doctrine thus circumscribes rightful membership and its nonintervention right to socialist states.796 It also circumscribes who can intervene: only other nations belonging to the Soviet community can judge or intervene in another. Franck and Weisband note this equates intervention to “a rescue operation by the community… purely a family matter and none of the neighbours’ business.”797 These circumscriptions had two effects on the Soviet legitimation strategy.798 Like Khrushchev in 1956, Brezhnev sought consensus from the Warsaw pact nations—though this time the intervention was conducted entirely through the Warsaw alliance structure.799

The United States’ treatment of the Czech ordeal also mirrors its 1956 performance and has been variously described as “remarkably quiet” and “nonchalant.”800 Internal documents show that

793 Quoted in Zubok (2007, 208).

794 Kaufman (1976, 28–29).

795 Judt (2005, 443). R.J. Vincent (1974, 176) summarizes: “If a state whose sovereignty was defined by its membership of the socialist system was threatened by counterrevolution, then action in its defense did not deny its sovereignty, did not interfere in it, quite the contrary, it upheld it.”

796 Keal (1983, 125).

797 Franck and Weisband (1971, 38).

798 The Soviet representative at the Security Council used this rationale to attempt to place the ordeal outside of the Charter’s jurisdiction. See Franck and Weisband (1971, 33–47).

799 Kovrig (1991, 112–17); Keal (1983, 133).

800 Keal (1983, 127); Westad (2017, 376).

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Washington effectively ruled out intervening long before the Soviet Union mobilized half a million troops. As Jiri Valenta puts it, “The United States deliberately decided to pursue a policy of silence, giving every possible signal of noninvolvement.”801 Throughout the episode the United States did little to recognize the existence of the Dubček government, condemning the intervention unqualifiedly only at the United Nations, where it was “short-lived and perfunctory.” 802

As early as March U.S. policymakers were aware Dubček’s reforms made Moscow uneasy, and Soviet intervention a possibility, if a remote one.803 As it became clearer Dubček was getting into trouble, Under Secretary of State Eugene Rostow sought support within the State Department for measures that might deter the Soviet Union. In a May 10 letter to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Rostow recommend the United States use NATO to immediately deter the Soviet Union from intervening in Prague. He called the failure to act in the 1948 “one of the most serious mistakes of our foreign policy since the war”; American reticence toward Hungary in 1956 “gave the Soviets full license.”804 In July, Rostow reiterated his demand for meaningful deterrence mechanisms, noting that “Czechoslovakia is surely in the Soviet spheres of influence. But that fact hardly justifies murder in broad daylight.”805

801 Valenta (1979, 131).

802 Kovrig (1991, 115). A July 12 State Department contingency paper, prepared in the event Moscow intervened in Czechoslovakia, recommended the U.S. support United Nations involvement only to expose “Soviet brutality.” This might impose some “restraint” on them by catalyzing international criticisms of their intervention.” The United States should not take the lead in tabling any resolution, and “on the basis of the Hungarian experience,” might encourage the Assembly to “profitably adopt a number of resolutions of a humanitarian nature. Quoted from Miller (1996, Document 66).

803 A March 25 telegram sent from the U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia Jacob Beam to the State Department noted that “for the first time in history, a Communist regime has purged [a] top leader by bringing pressure to bear on him.” Beam also noted, however, that the “Czechs are not Poles or Hungarians. Neither history nor popular attitudes thus far in crisis suggest that Czechs as a nation will lose their heads.” See Miller (1996, Document 57).

804 Miller (1996, Documents 60, 67).

805 Quoted from Miller (1996, Document 67).

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Rostow’s recommendations for a military deterrent fell flat. Rusk, Under Secretary Nicholas Katzenbach, and “other senior officials” disagreed strongly with “both the analysis and the recommendations” offered by Rostow.806 In a May 11 communications with NATO, Rusk recommended the same strategy the Eisenhower administration took toward Hungary in 1956: keep quiet, refrain from public statements, and eliminate “anything that has appearance of unusual concern.”807 A NATO exercise scheduled for 23 July was relocated away from the border.808 And U.S. European Command was given orders earlier in July proscribing it from increasing patrols on the border or any actions that might be interpreted as support for Dubček.809

The United States refrained from any kind of high-level activity that might appear antagonistic. An August 23 memorandum from the State Department dismissed proposals that a NATO or Tripartite (U.S., U.K., France) or Quadripartite (+West Germany) meeting be held to discuss the Czech issue. “After careful review,” it reads, “we have concluded that our present course of mobilizing world opinion through the United Nations offers the best hope at this time of influencing the Soviets toward moderation in the present crisis.”810 A September 4 National Security Council paper recommended the United States adopt a “balanced approach that will satisfy the immediate objective of expressing censure of Soviet action without destroying overnight our longer-range goals.” It recommends, as censures, cancelling cultural trips—such as “the trip of the Minnesota Band to Russia”—and discouraging the development of new commercial activities with Warsaw pact states.811

Publicly, U.S. officials expressed sympathy with the Czech people, decried the intervention, and denied they had any intention of intervening. At the end of July Rusk denied, both publicly and

806 Quoted from Miller (1996, Document 60n1).

807 Miller (1996, Documents 62).

808 Kovrig (1991, 113).

809 Valenta (1979, 132).

810 Quoted from Miller (1996, Document 86); see also Bischof (2010, 227).

811 Miller (1996, Document 92).

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to the Soviet Ambassador Anatolii Dobrynin, that the United States intended to be involved in any way with the Czechoslovakian crisis.812 Throughout the episode U.S. policymakers took opportunities to reiterate in public or to the Soviet ambassador directly that the United States had no commitment to intervening on Prague’s behalf, possessed no defence commitments to Prague, and even had not “contemplated” intervening in the issue.813 In an August 30 speech, President Johnson condemned the Soviet intervention in strong terms, arguing “we cannot and we must not in the year 1968 return to a world of unbridled aggression. Surely it is too late in history for small nations to be denied their right to national existence.” In the very next line, however, Johnson said:

There are no questions that I know of that cannot be settled and should not be settled by peaceful means, if the governments will only take the time and the patience to try and find the peaceful answers. So, let no one unleash the dogs of war. … For those problems we have the courage and the patience and I hope the vision and the knowledge to try to resolve them as men should resolve them in the 20th century-around a conference table instead of on a battlefield. Such will be my purpose in the remaining days of my public service.814

Because of its reticence toward Czechoslovakia and the close resemblance between its justifications and Moscow’s, the White House was dogged by accusations it had made a secret “spheres of influence” agreement with the Kremlin. Austrian, German, French and Czech press all reported rumours of “superpower complicity” in which Moscow kept its hands off Latin America in exchange for nonintervention in Eastern Europe. A British MP likened the U.S.’s reticence to Munich.815 President Charles du Gaulle and the French foreign ministry joined in these accusations, comparing the Dominican Republic intervention to U.S. handling of Czechoslovakia and arguing the superpowers still adhered to the Yalta agreement. On several

812 Valenta (1979, 131–32); see also Rusk (1968): “I think the most important thing-and I hope it will be important to the Soviet Union-is the massive unanimous reaction of the entire world to this situation.”

813 Miller (1996, Documents 84, 85, 93).

814 See Johnson (1968).

815 Keal (1983, 128).

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occasions, Rusk denied these claims, including in a September 4 NSC meeting and a speech delivered in Connecticut.816 In a White House briefing where a reporter compared Czechoslovakia and Dominican interventions, he responded:

That is a type of moral myopia that passes my understanding. There is all the difference in the world between acting to meet the common danger under a treaty of mutual security and to enable the people of a country to work out their own future, institutions, their own choices without having answers imposed upon them by forces from outside… This is the difference between black and white. Those who try to confuse it, it seems to me, are undertaking an enormous burden and, among other things, an enormous disservice to the clarity which is important if we are to have peace in the world.817

Despite these statements about spheres of influence, U.S. policymakers, including Rusk, nonetheless acknowledged “the reality of Soviet military position and the existence of the Warsaw Pact.”818 Indeed, throughout the episode, U.S. policymakers demonstrated a keen awareness of why the Soviet Union was intervening. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations George Ball described the doctrine of containment as assuming “a recognition of a balance of power that must not be upset and suggest in less clear outlines, the implicit acceptance by both sides of broad spheres of influence.”819 In September, Rusk called the Soviet presence Eastern Europe “a sphere not of influence but of dominance.”820 Internal documents show U.S.

816 Bischof (2010, 223–25); Keal (1983, 126); Miller (1996, Document 93): “It is important that everyone know we have never had any understanding with the Soviet Union about respective spheres of influence as De Gaulle alleges. The current difficulty arises out of Soviet violation of the Yalta agreement, not out of that agreement itself which called for free elections in Eastern Europe. There is a great difference between the Warsaw Pact and NATO with respect to internal affairs of members. NATO is operative only in the event of international aggression and grants no rights to a member to intervene in the affairs of another.”

817 Rusk (1968, 263).

818 Quoted in Kovrig (1991, 115); see also Keal (1983, 128).

819 Quoted in Keal (1983, 128).

820 Quoted in Keal (1983, 130).

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policymakers consistently discussed and understood Soviet actions in terms of its desire to maintain its sphere of influence—in the words of Charles Bohlen, its “bunker zone”821—against countervailing forces and “contagion.”822

In toto, U.S. communications in both 1956 and 1968 bear a striking resemblance to the communications amongst the French and British diplomats at the time of the 1830 Polish uprising. Their commitments to liberalism meant they shared a “deep and natural sympathy” with the revolutionaries’ struggles against an oppressive status quo.823 Public protests in support of the rebellions took place in their home countries.824 But the geopolitical bargains of their eras demanded they subordinate those sympathies to an overriding security context, and that challenging that context would do more harm than good. This required separating public rhetoric, where the status quo could be disparaged in fora like the United Nations, from careful signaling and especially action, where the bargain had to be upheld. As Csaba Békés summarizes, “1956 produced clear evidence that the European status quo and the system of spheres of interest was, in reality, a workable agreement between the superpowers.”825 The unfortunate consequence is that many Hungarians, misled by U.S. propaganda efforts, ended up “conquered and in chains.”826

4.3.3 Preventing “another Cuba”: U.S. Interventions in Latin America

During the Cold War, Latin America was a site of intense but mostly covert superpower competition. Moscow supported communist movements and regimes through its proxy, Cuba,

821 Quoted from Miller (1996, Document 74).

822 Miller (1996, Documents 74, 76, 81, 93, 94).

823 Cabot Lodge quoted from United Nations (1956a, 9); see also Charles Bohlen and Dean Rusk on American sympathies for the Czechs in Miller (1996, Documents 70, 95).

824 Keefer et al. (1990, Document 132).

825 Békés (1997, 62).

826 Camus (1957).

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while Washington supported counterrevolutionary or non-communist regimes. Except for the military interventions discussed below, all of this activity was covert.827

The two overt U.S. interventions in its own sphere match the expectations of my theory. Uprisings inside the American sphere were in part enabled by interference by Cuba or the Soviet Union, although their influence was greatly exaggerated in the Dominican case. Both uprisings precipitated fast, militarily unilateral U.S. intervention intended to restore the status quo. The Soviet Union (and Cuba) condemned both instances at the United Nations Security Council on the basis they violated the UN Charter’s norm of sovereignty non-interference. But they refrained from imposing any costs on the United States or supporting the uprisings by material or political means, even when, in the case of Grenada, this meant losing hard infrastructure. Last, the United States made concerted efforts in both cases to cooperate with or secure the consent of relevant regional organizations, indicating that the United States was concerned to legitimize its interventions within its sphere.

4.3.3.1 “Deep trouble”: failed U.S. intervention in Cuba

The 1959 revolution in Cuba altered the Cold War’s geopolitical structure by placing a communist state well inside the U.S. sphere. Although not explicitly aligned with the Soviet Union at first, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary campaign was waged with explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-American rhetoric.828 The United States had a long history of controlling Cuba’s external and internal relations, including several occupations, from the Spanish-American war onward—in the words of Gaddis Smith, “keeping Cuba out of the hands of a strong and hostile power was one of the oldest objectives of American foreign policy.”829

827 Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005, 27–136) detail these efforts.

828 Brands (2010, 28–29).

829 Smith (1995b, 91); for a background of this history, see also Smith (1995b, chapter 5); Crandall (2006, 9–34).

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In 1960, that “hostile power” was the Soviet Union, or more broadly, international communism.830 The presence in the America’s traditional sphere of influence of a potentially hostile communist state “revived the old strategic dilemma of extra-hemispheric penetration, this time in the context of a global contest for influence in the Third world.”831 This meant that a Fidel Castro-run Cuba was unacceptable to U.S. foreign policymakers. After Fidel nationalized U.S. interests in early 1960, President Eisenhower moved to suspend Cuba’s sugar export quota. This provided the opening for Soviet diplomat Anastas Mikoyan to travel to Havana and forge the Soviet-Cuban alliance. In March 1960 Eisenhower tasked the CIA with drawing up an invasion plan; Castro feared imminent U.S. invasion.832

When John F. Kennedy assumed office in February 1961, the CIA-plan had already been approved by Eisenhower and was effectively already in motion. Initially a plan for a full-bore U.S. invasion, Kennedy ensured the operation would be covert so that the intervention appeared as “a Cuban force within Cuba, not as an invasion force sent by the Yankees.”833 During his campaign Kennedy had criticized Eisenhower for inadequately dealing with the Castro situation.834 The covert operation was also compatible with Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress” program, which aimed to generate U.S. favour in the region through targeted economic and social aid and CIA-led covert intervention, thereby addressing what Kennedy saw as the root causes of support communism—social and economic malaise—without eroding the U.S.’s legitimacy through needless military belligerence.835 As Jim Rasenberger writes, “at a time when

830 Cuba was in fact quite autonomous from the Soviet Union; the hierarchal relationship Washington feared—that Cuba was equivalent to a Soviet Bloc vassal state—was ironically brought closest to fruition by the Bay of Pigs. See Mikoyan (2012).

831 Brands (2010, 33).

832 Westad (2007, 170–74); Brands (2010, 32).

833 Quoted in Saunders (2011, 114).

834 Crandall (2006, 19–20)

835 Smith (1995b, 103–4); Brands (2010, 37–68); see also Lebow and Stein (1994, 20), who suggest “The president ruled out an invasion as too costly, certain to antagonize European allies, contrary to America’s traditions, and too likely to provoke a wider confrontation with the Soviet Union.” I see evidence for the first three, but not the last.

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American were nearly hysterical about the spread of communism, they simple could not abide Castro. He had to go. And the CIA, in 1960, was the tool Eisenhower, then Kennedy, intended to use to speed him on his way.”836

The Bay of Pigs fiasco became an infamous example of an indirect intervention: Cuban exiles would bear the costs of the intervention while the U.S. would provide air support, which was withdrawn at the last minute. By his own admission and in these words, Kennedy had “fucked up” and was in “deep trouble.”837 Most immediately the Bay of Pigs deepened Cuba-Soviet ties and precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis—known in the Soviet Union in more geopolitical terms as the “Caribbean crisis.” Both sides had to rely on a complex and wide variety of escalation controls, signals, and interpretations of events to signal restraint and escape a militarized great power confrontation that would have likely been more destructive than anything since the world wars. The details are among the most well-known in American foreign policy history, so I will not recount them here.838

Apart from the complex escalation control, what is important for my argument is how the crisis and political status of Cuba was understood and framed by U.S. policymakers as an unacceptable breach of the U.S. sphere of influence by “extra-hemispheric” or “non-hemispheric” forces, a phrase commonly used in subsequent Latin American operations and repeated, most recently, in Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy.839 To an extent the U.S. sphere functioned in terms of signaling to the Soviet Union that the U.S. would block any overt Soviet moves there. Where the sphere system did not function is in Moscow’s choice to subvert counter-intervention by placing a nuclear deterrent on Cuba. The Cuban episode therefore shows how the de facto

836 Rasenberger (2012, xvii).

837 Grow (2008, 28).

838 See Lebow and Stein (1994); Zelikow and Allison (1999); Nathan (2016).

839 Trump (2017, 51): “Together, we will build a stable and peaceful hemisphere that increases economic opportunities for all, improves governance, reduces the power of criminal organizations, and limits the malign influence of non-hemispheric forces.” Emphases mine.

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geopolitical can remain the organizing element in a crisis but fail to prevent unforeseen revisionism, in this case the Cuban revolution and Soviet aid.

U.S. policymakers both in the White House and Congress explicitly understood the Cuban revolution and the subsequent missile crisis as violations of the Monroe doctrine.840 Some congressmen noted no exception to the doctrine could be made for Cuba, while others—such as Hubert Humphrey—called for a renewal of the doctrine suited to 20th century (anti-communist) ends.841 A Joint House resolution (540) passed after the revolution quoted the Monroe doctrine and called on the United States government to unilaterally intervene “to forestall intervention, domination, control and colonization by international communism in the New World.”842 Chief of Naval Operation Admiral Arleigh Burke said that the United States “has never renounced the Monroe doctrine.”843 When Khrushchev denounced the U.S. hegemony in Latin America as imperialist in a 9 July 1960 press conference, President Eisenhower released a statement in which he said the United States, “in conformity” with its Rio Treaty obligations, would not “permit the establishment of a regime dominated by international communism in the Western Hemisphere.”844 Khrushchev then publicly denounced the Monroe Doctrine on July 12—despite its “positive role” in the past it had “outlived its time.. its self.” The State Department replied that the “principles of the Monroe Doctrine are as valid today as they were in 1823 when the Doctrine was proclaimed.”845

840 See Keal (1983, 132–41); Smith (1995b, 113–14); Brands (2010, 48–49); Gleijesis (2011, 346); Saunders (2011, 71–72, 106, 112–14).

841 Wilson (1966).

842 Quoted in Smith (1995b, 98); see also Wilson (1966), who reviews these statements in the House and media.

843 Quoted in Smith (1995b, 99).

844 Quoted in Dickinson (1960).

845 “U.S. Stand Against Reds in Cuba Has Its Roots in Monroe Doctrine” (The New York Times 1961).

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The crisis brought a renewal of references to the Monroe doctrine such that “at no other time was the doctrine so often mentioned, invoked, and used as a weapon of domestic politics.”846 A “committee for the Monroe Doctrine” was formed after the Bay of Pigs crisis; its membership included William F Buckley, Jr—and another joint resolution calling on the United States to affirm the doctrine was introduced to the House by James Battin.847 By and large these references remained confined to Congress, media, and policy analyses—including a Time magazine cover story titled “The Monroe Doctrine and Communist Cuba”—and did not stem from the White House. Stemming mostly from hawkish figures in the U.S. foreign policy community, these invocations defending the doctrine and, seeking to pressure Kennedy into a tougher line on Castro, suggested he had abandoned it.848

While it did not explicitly address the Monroe Doctrine ‘choir,’ the Kennedy administration used strong “hemispheric” language throughout the crisis. At a 29 August 1962 press conference, Kennedy answered a question about the Monroe doctrine by replying that it

means what it has meant since President Monroe and John Quincy Adams enunciated it, and that is that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere…. That’s why we worked in the OAS and in other ways to isolate the Communist menace in Cuba.849

During the Crisis, Kennedy’s public statements referred to the threat of extra-hemispheric forces and the United States’ firm policy stance to resist them. His October 22 address to the nation called the placement of missiles on Cuba a “threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” in “flagrant and deliberate defiance of the Rio Pact of 1947,” the UN Charter, his own previous public warnings, and “the traditions of this nation and hemisphere.”850 Gaddis Smith argues this

846 Smith (1995b, 104).

847 Wilson (1966, 341–42).

848 Wilson (1966, 333–36, 341–46) reviews these statements; see also Smith (1995b, 91–112).

849 Quoted in Smith (1995b, 105).

850 Quoted in Smith (1995b, 110).

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was an attempt by Kennedy to “satisfy the Monroe Doctrine choir without becoming entangled in debate over mere words.”851 As Smith notes, Kennedy later planned to address the issue in speech drafted for 22 November 1963: “it was not the Monroe Doctrine that kept all Europe away from this hemisphere—it was the strength of the British fleet and width of the Atlantic ocean.” 852 For obvious reasons he did not deliver it.

By most accounts, Khrushchev understood the Cuban issue in similarly geopolitical terms, with a major caveat: much as Moscow and Washington’s interpretations of the same set of events led them to diametric conclusions, so too did Khrushchev and Kennedy interpret them differently here. The arrival of a communist ally on the U.S.’s doorstep was cause for celebration in Moscow. The Caribbean, which the Kremlin “regarded as the United States’ backyard,” was not a central concern in the Soviet Union’s global grand strategy.853 Now, a bridgehead for international communism had been created that could spread socialism within the U.S. sphere. As Hal Brands notes,

Cuban socialism would present a striking contrast with the exploitation and underdevelopment present in much of Latin America and act, Khrushchev explained, as ‘a magnet that would attract other Latin American countries to Socialism.’ More broadly, supporting Castro would allow Moscow to position itself as the patron of anti-imperialist social and economic change throughout the Third World.854

The overall Soviet strategy in Latin America should note be overstated, however. In January 1960 Khrushchev had expressly renounced turning revolutionary struggles into “wars between

851 Smith (1995b, 110).

852 Smith (1995b, 112).

853 Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005, 27–28); for the Soviet view on Cuba, especially that of Khrushchev, I have consulted Zubok and Pleshakov (1996, 206–7); Zubok (2007, 143–53); Miyokan (2012). Compared to the wealth of documentation of the U.S. side of the crisis, the Soviet side is still relatively unknown.

854 Brands (2010, 32).

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states”855; Soviet efforts in Latin America would be aimed at fostering indigenous revolution for the purposes of taxing American energies. By utilizing Cuban cooperation and (often brusque) American overreaction to turn popular opinion against Washington, Moscow’s long-term goal was to force Washington to divert resources away from the more crucial European theatre so that Soviet efforts there could be more effective.856 In other words, the strategy exploited the fact the United States would not tolerate communism in its own sphere.

It is in this context that the Soviet decision to place missiles on Cuba should be understood, even if this move was “poorly conceived.”857 After the Bay of Pigs, Moscow believed it was only a matter of time before the United States would invade Cuba and remove its communist regime. The stakes of the Cold War ideological competition were simply too high for Moscow to let this happen. Even here, however, spheres thinking framed the crisis for both sides: while the United States understood the placement of missiles on Cuba in neo-Monroeist terms, the Soviet Union saw them as securing a new equality in the geopolitical balance of forces. NATO had positioned missiles in Turkey and possessed the better half of Berlin, well inside the Soviet sphere.858 As Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Stein summarize,

Khrushchev wanted to prevent an American invasion of Cuba, and to offset American strategic superiority…. Like Berlin, that other flashpoint, Cuba was a beleaguered outpost within the other side’s sphere of influence. The Soviet Union was unprepared to abandon Cuba, just as the United States was unwilling to give up its precarious position in Berlin. Both superpowers regard the other’s outpost as an affront and a danger.859

The Cuban revolution and Castro’s alignment with Moscow sets the stage for the next set of interventions examined here. Castro’s relations with the Soviet Union cooled—he was upset by

855 Black (2015, 105)

856 For an overview of this strategy, see Brands (2010, 37–69).

857 Lebow and Stein (1994, 50).

858 For these points see Lebow and Stein (1994); Mikoyan (2012, 89–99).

859 Lebow and Stein (1994, 20).

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the capitulation, and the Soviet Union attempted to both distance themselves from and restrain Castro, fearing his active revolutionary zeal would draw the United States into another intervention, or a clash with the Soviet Union. Soviet-Cuba relations declined in the 1960s; Moscow’s strategy toward Latin America subsequently became more diffuse, less ideological, and less militarized as it prioritized material support, trade and technology agreements, and what the Soviet press called “businesslike cooperation and mutual understanding.860 Like Korea, the Cuban episode discouraged the Soviet Union from too directly confronting the Soviet Union, and vice-versa. As Vladimir Zubok summarizes, “never again would Soviet leaders risk a head-to- head clash ‘between the two systems’ in the manner practiced by Khrushchev.”861

The Cuban crisis permanently reoriented Washington away from its stance of Good Neighbour nonintervention, which Truman reaffirmed after World War 2, toward the strategic organizing principle of preventing “another Cuba.” After the Bay of Pigs operation, the United States covertly or indirectly sponsored three more coups in the region—in 1964 to help the Brazilian military depose President Joao Goulart; in 1973 to help oust Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was replaced by Augusto Pinochet; and throughout the 1980s in Nicaragua in support of the “Contras.”862 In the background of these covert interventions, the United States put into play vast anticommunist programs aimed at reducing the region’s susceptibility to communist movements, parties, and propaganda through a number of economic and political programs. These included Operations Charly, Condor, and the infamous Mongoose (which aimed to assassinate Fidel Castro); less covertly, the “Alliance for Progress” announced by John F. Kennedy in March 1961 aimed to improve social and economic conditions in Latin America in an effort to combat the root causes—poverty and corruption—that made communism appealing. 863 The United States intervened overtly in the region twice in this period: in 1965 in the Dominican Republic, and in

860 Brands (2010, 146, see also 38, 41, 51-56); Westad (2007, 175–76).

861 Zubok (2007, 151); see also Trachtenberg

862 For an overview, see Smith (1995b); Brands (2010, 44–48, 56–65); Crandall (2006, 20–21).

863 Kennedy (1961).

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1983 in Grenada; I turn to those next. A third intervention took place in 1989 in Panama, which I examine in the next chapter.

4.3.3.2 “Budapest on the Caribbean”: Dominican Republic, 1965

In April 1965, a rebel group took over the main radio station in Santo Domingo and called for the return of Juan Bosch, the Dominican leader overthrown in September 1963. This action precipitated widespread violence against the existing government, a military triumvirate headed by Reid Cabral, who they managed to overthrow by April 24. U.S. leaders, including President Johnson, feared the Dominican Republic would, in his words, “go Castro” and turn into “another Cuba.”864 Although little evidence supported the idea Bosch’s supporters were communists or connected to Havana, previous C.I.A. reports listed the Dominican Republic as one of twelve “hemispheric countries ripe for Communist success.”865 On April 28th, Johnson announced insertion of “the necessary” American troops to protect American citizens in the Dominican, initially a contingent of 1,500.866 By May 2, the United States placed more than 20,000 troops on the island, overwhelming the rebels’ armies, who soon agreed to a truce. The total number of troops peaked at 25,000, replaced by an OAS-run Inter-American peace force made up mostly of American troops but which operated under the OAS mandate. The Dominican Intervention was the first “direct” U.S. intervention in Latin America since 1928, and directly challenged the norms and institutions regulating hemispheric relations, especially the principle of nonintervention, established in the Rio Treaty and OAS Charter.867

864 Lawler and Yee (2005, Documents 42, 43). On the “not another Cuba” theme, see also Brands (2010, 48–49); Ferguson (1973, 528–29); Yates (1988, 34); Saunders (2011, 156–64).

865 Smith (1995b, 127).

866 Johnson (1965a); Grow (2008, 80).

867 I have based this case primarily on Franck and Weisband (1971, 70–95); Keal (1983, 141–47); Yates (1988); Smith (1995b, 122–29); Crandall (2006, 35–103); Grow (2008, 75–92); Saunders (2011, 156–64); and my own survey of the State Department historical archives, cited by document number under Lawler and Yee (2005); see also the review in Ferguson (1973).

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Three aspects of the intervention stand out from the perspective of the Cold War geopolitical bargain. First, U.S. policymakers were concerned about regionally legitimizing the intervention through OAS. The United States intervention risked stirring up anti-Americanism if it lacked an official regional sanction. Although they denied the organization meaningful decision-making or military roles, the OAS cooperated with these wishes.868 The United States requested the OAS hold an emergency meeting the evening of April 29, where the Council of Ministers passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire. This resolution, and subsequent decisions by the OAS, were used by U.S. officials in their public statements on the Dominican to argue the intervention had regional legitimacy.869 In an April 30 White House meeting between Johnson and a number of his key advisers, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy recommended the administration “move through” OAS because the mission “had no international cover” or “legitimacy”: to “quash Castro,” the United States would “need above all else to get hemispheric opinion on our side.”870

At the same time, the United States acted swiftly and unilaterally, securing OAS legitimacy only after the intervention was a fait accompli. Johnson’s response in the April 30 meeting captured this strategy:

I am not willing to let this island go to Castro. OAS is a phantom—they are taking a siesta while this is on fire. How can we send troops 10,000 miles away and let Castro take over right under our nose? Let’s just analyze—we have resisted Communists all over the world: Vietnam, Lebanon, and Greece. What are we doing under our doorstep? … I want us to feverishly try to cloak this with legitimacy. We cannot stand with our hand in our pocket

868 Brands (1987, 614).

869 For this aspect of the intervention see especially Keal (1983, 141–47); Franck and Weisband (1971, 70–95); Crandall (2006, 77–79).

870 Lawler and Yee (2005, Document 42). The meeting included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, George Ball, Jack Valenti, Richard Goodwin, Bill Moyers, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas C. Mann, and Deputy Secretary of Defence Cyrus Vance

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and let Castro win. Military get ducks in a row. Diplomats see if we can do anything to get observers in here or troops from other Latin American countries.871

In other internal communications Johnson expressed dismay that the OAS was “sleeping through the day”; the President ultimately decided to intervene without waiting for formal OAS approval, and on a scale beyond what was recommended by his advisers.872 An OAS peace force was brought in only after a ceasefire was established and 25,000 U.S. troops occupied the island.873 OAS representatives meanwhile expressed anger they were not consulted ahead of time, that the United States had violated the Rio principle of nonintervention, and later, that the United Nations had intervened by passing a resolution declaring a ceasefire.874 Nonetheless, the intervention was viewed as widely legitimate within the organization, assuaging White House fears that it would open the region to further anti-Americanism and Soviet interference.875

Second, United States policymakers framed the intervention both internally and externally as hemispheric defence against communism, or what came to be called the “Johnson doctrine.” Johnson himself supported the view that the United States needed to protect the Western hemisphere from extra-hemispheric threat of communism. During the 1954 Guatemalan crisis, Johnson introduced a resolution to the Senate reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine and supporting action to stop “external interference in the Western hemisphere” on anti-communist grounds.876 More recently, John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson had publicly defended neo-Monreanism at the Security Council, arguing during the Cuban missile crisis that:

871 Lawler and Yee (2005, Document 42).

872 Saunders (2011, 156–57); Crandall (2006, 77–79); Lawler and Yee (2005, Documents 44, 48): in a 30 April, 5:00 p.m., phone call with Robert McNamara: “I have the feeling that if we don’t take over that island within the next 24 hours or before the last man folds, we never will.”

873 Vincent (1974, 204–8).

874 Lawler and Yee (2005, Documents 55, 73).

875 Crandall (2006, 77–79).

876 Saunders (2011, 137–38).

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The foremost objection of the states of the Americas to the Castro regime is not because it is revolutionary, not because it is socialistic, not because it is dictatorial, not even because Dr. Castro perverted a noble revolution in the interests of a squalid totalitarianism. It is because he has aided and abetted an invasion of this hemisphere – Cuba has given the Soviet Union a bridgehead and staging area in this hemisphere…it has invited an extra- continental, anti-democratic, and expansionist power into the bosom of the American family.877

The Johnson Doctrine justified the 1965 intervention in terms of the Cold War geopolitical bargain: communist interference in the U.S. sphere was dangerous because it could upset the balance of forces in America’s “backyard,” and this justified the abrogation of nonintervention.878 Of the five major addresses Johnson gave concerning the crisis, only the first, delivered on April 28, concerns itself primarily with the protection of U.S. citizens.879 Although Johnson intended to add the justification of hemispheric anticommunism to that statement, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson convinced him to remove it.880 Statements made on April 30, May 1 (two), and May 2, when the troop presence swelled from 500 to over 20,000, justify the intervention in neo-Monroean terms, in which hemispheric intervention by the United States secures “the right of all the free people of this hemisphere to choose their own course without falling prey to international conspiracy from any quarter.”881 In the May 2 statement, which was broadcast on television and radio, Johnson argued that:

The American nations cannot, must not, and will not permit the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere. … Our goal, in keeping with the great principles of the inter-American system, is to help prevent another Communist state in this

877 Quoted in Keal (1983, 136).

878 Crandall (2006, 22).

879 Johnson (1965a).

880 Franck and Weisband (1971, 77).

881 Johnson (1965c, 1965b, 1965c, 1965d).

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hemisphere. … We will defend our Nation against all those who seek to destroy not only the United States but every free country of this hemisphere.882

Internally, although alarmist dispatches from the U.S. Ambassador in the Dominican Republic Bennett warned that the island could fall to communism, there was virtually no evidence Castro and communism had much to do with the crisis.883 The day before announcing a U.S. intervention on television, Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara told the President there was insufficient evidence the crisis had to do with Castro, and recommended he avoid saying that “powers outside the hemisphere are trying to subvert this government” and menace the Inter- American system.884 In the run-up to the intervention, Johnson consistently asked for evidence of “Castroites” or “Castro terrorists” and framed the crisis as necessitating hemispheric, anti- Communist defence.885 It is unclear the degree to which Johnson or administration actually believed the island might fall to communism, and simply erred on the side of caution. Nevertheless, anticommunism became the public justification after April 30.886 The orders Joint

882 Johnson (1965d). For this shift in justifications, see Franck and Weisband (1971, 75–76).

883 Smith (1995b, 127); Grow (2008, 81–85).

884 Lawler and Yee (2005, Documents 39, 40, 42, 44).

885 Lawler and Yee (2005, Document 44). The April 30 telephone conversation in this Document, between Johnson and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Abe Fortas, is instructive:

President: “Here’s what I think we ought to do: I think we ought to get the CIA to give us name, address, chapter and verse—I don’t mean to surface all that, but I mean to show that we got proof so that a lawyer like you [could] say that this is a case of Cuba doing this job; that’s number one. Number two, we ought to have our military forces in sufficient quantity, an adequate number appropriate ready to take that island. If we can get any other forces to join us well and good. Before we act we’ll try that, but to take that island so that Castro doesn’t take it. Next, I think we ought to invite the OAS, any of their countries, or anybody else for that matter who wants to prevent bloodshed and to preserve peace to go in and join with us to be sure it’s not just a United States operation. But if all this fails I’m not going to sit here and say I think down the road I can work it out after a Communist government sets up and starts issuing orders.”

886 Grow (2008, 88–91); Saunders (2011, 156–64).

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Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler gave to Lt. General Bruce Palmer, Jr., who assumed command of U.S. ground forces in the Dominican on April 30, pithily summarize this view:

Your announced mission is to save US lives. Your unannounced mission is to prevent the Dominican Republic from going Communist. The President has stated that he will not allow another Cuba—you are to take all necessary measures to accomplish this mission. You will be given sufficient forces to do the job.887

A related narrative emerged at the United Nations, where Stevenson used the OAS resolutions to legitimize the U.S.’s intervention. 888 The day after Stevenson notified the Security Council of the intervention, Cuba’s representative Alvarez Tabio denounced the intervention as a contravention of the UN Charter.889 On May 1, the Soviet Union requested the Security Council hold an emergency meeting on the issue, enclosing a statement from the Russian Media outlet TASS that denounced the invasion on the basis it violated the Dominican Republic’s territorial integrity—“a cynical violation of the elementary norms of international law and of the UN Charter”—and accused the United States of using the OAS to hide its “imperialist designs.”890

On May 3, Stevenson defended U.S. actions at the Security Council debate in hemispheric terms, repeating the phrase “the American nations will not permit the establishment of another communist government in the Western hemisphere.”891 Stevenson noted the audacity of the Soviet Union “pointing an accusing finger” at the United States given its crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and argued that the OAS, not the United Nations, was the “appropriate vehicle for resolving the problems of this Hemisphere.”892 As Franck and Weisband note, Stevenson “thereby captured the essence and foreshadowed almost the exact text of the Brezhnev

887 Quoted from Lawler and Yee (2005, Document 43)

888 For a summary see Keal (1983, 144–47).

889 Stevenson (1965); Roa (1965).

890 Fedorenko (1965a, 1965b, 2); see also Keal (1983, 145–46).

891 United Nations (1965, 16).

892 United Nations (1965, 11–12); see also Keal (1983, 144–45).

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doctrine.”893 Stevenson’s legal argument was that the use of the OAS was consistent with Article 52 of the Charter, which authorizes regional organizations to deal “with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional security, provided that such arrangements… are consistent with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.”894

The Soviet representative, Nikolai Fedorenko, argued in response that the United States was “now openly proclaiming the basis of its policy in the Western Hemisphere is intervention in any Latin American country whose domestic affairs and aspiration to independence are not yet to the taste of United States imperialism.”895 Tabio accused the United States of reaffirming, “in all its brutal perversity the old policy of the ‘big stick,’ the evil corollary of the so-called Monroe Doctrine.”896 Fedorenko then tabled a draft resolution on May 4 that condemned the “armed intervention” as a “gross violation” of the UN Charter and called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Dominican Republic.897The United States was able to defer the Soviet motion to 7 May on the premise that the OAS was “seized” of the Dominican matter and should have jurisdictional priority.898

What is notable about the exchange is that while Cuba and the Soviet Union accused the United States of using the OAS to violate the UN charter and cloak imperialism, OAS officials themselves did not want a resolution tabled at the United Nations. They viewed the crisis, like the United States, as a hemispheric issue. This suggests the United States used the OAS

893 Franck and Weisband (1971, 80).

894 United Nations (“Charter of the United Nations” 2015, Article 51).

895 United Nations (1965, 43).

896 United Nations (1965, 20).

897 See Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1965).

898 Lawler and Yee (2005, Document 59).

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institutions not to legitimize its intervention to the Soviet Union, but to legitimize its hegemony over Latin America and create a precedent within the region for future interventions.899

Third, there is no evidence U.S. policymakers were worried about counter-intervention by the Soviet Union, in contrast to the missile crisis.900 They understood the crisis in hemispheric terms as dispute between Cuban Castroism and the Dominican in the immediate sense, and between proletariat communism and democratic capitalism in a broader “hearts and minds” sense—as “another Cuba” that must be avoided.901 This regional dispute between ideologies had a global geopolitical component: U.S. officials may have understood that, after the events of 1961, the Soviet Union itself would stay out of the Western Hemisphere, much as the United States stayed out of Hungary.902 President Johnson and his advisers compared the intervention to the crackdown in Hungary, seeking to avoid a “Budapest on the Caribbean.” At least two articles— one in the New Statesman—compared the intervention to Hungary.903

Apart from its rhetorical activity at the United Nations, the Soviet Union did not provide the Dominican Republic with material or political support, nor did it make any threats to use force or suggest any costly measures to punish the United States or set a precedent against such intervention in the future—as it did during the Cuban Missile crisis.904

899 See Lawler and Yee (2005, Documents 73, 86); Lake (2009b, 44).

900 In the 545 pages of internal documents the State Department has released about the Dominican Republic in the Johnson years, “Communism” or “Communist” is found 606 times, on 248 pages; “Castro” 118 times, on 57; “Soviet” or “USSR” appears 12 times, on 11 pages; “Moscow” 4 times, on 3 pages; “Russia” or “Russian” on none.

901 Grow (2008, 85–87).

902 This is the argument of Trachtenberg (2012).

903 Yates (1988, 77, 171); Lowenthal (1972); Crandall (2006, 70, 244).

904 Keal (1983, 147); Kaufman (1976, 20). As far as I have been able to find, the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Dominican Republic was nonexistent. English-language sources by both American and Russian scholars shed no light on the issue, nor do the Wilson Centre Cold War history project digital archives (as of 2018). A more thorough examination of the archives is warranted.

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A number of scholars have used this difference between speech and deeds to argue that by 1965 a reciprocal rule had been established between the Soviet Union and the United States as regards their spheres.905 As Paul Keal notes, the Soviet Union “did not suggest and took no action which would suggest that it might attempt to prevent future United States intervention in Latin America.”906 Indeed, relations between Moscow and Havana had deteriorated significantly in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, and Moscow worried Castro might cause another U.S.-Soviet confrontation.907 Yates suggests that in private conversations with U.S. officials, Soviet officials equated the intervention with Moscow’s own in its sphere.908 Regardless, the U.S.’s strong framing of the crisis as a hemispheric issue in which non-hemispheric actors, and in particular the Soviet Union, could play no legitimate role underscores how the intervention combined the ideological, regional, and global—but in a manner where, at the highest level, Soviet-U.S. restraint could be taken for granted.

4.3.3.2.1 Intervention in “America’s Pond”: Grenada, 1983

The 1983 U.S. intervention in Grenada has a similar profile. In October 1983, left-leaning Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was deposed and then killed by a military junta led by Hudson Austin. This catalyzed a crisis that led President Reagan to order 2,000 troops to the island on October 24. They evacuated American students, deposed Austin, and forcibly removed a small population of workers from a handful of Soviet proxies, including Cuba and Libya. The Soviet embassy was shut down.909

905 E.g. Keal (1983); Vincent (1974, 324, 334); Franck and Weisband (1971).

906 Keal (1983, 147); Kaufman (1976, 20).

907 Brands (2010, 41–42, 51–52)’; Zubok and Pleshakov (1996, 268–69).

908 Yates (1988, 172). Unfortunately I cannot find Yates’ source.

909 I have relied on Weber (1995, 92–99); Crandall (2006, 105–70); Smith (1995b, 161–84); Grow (2008, 137–58); Brands (1987); and

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Although smaller in scale than the Dominican intervention, this was the largest U.S. military operation since the Vietnam War.910 Like in the Dominican case, U.S. authorities relied on, or at least utilized, intelligence that overstated the level of Cuban involvement in the crisis.911 And like in the Dominican case, the intervention was also framed as an anti-communist measure to prevent Cuban interference from disturbing the United States’ “neighbourhood.”

The Reagan administration legitimized the intervention in two ways. Like U.S. justifications for its intervention in the Dominican Republic, these shifted in the first days of the intervention toward a broader justification of hemispheric anticommunism.912 First, the intervention was said to protect U.S. citizens’ whose lives might be at risk. This justification did not hold up well after the fact: American students on the island were probably not in any real danger.913 Second, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States had authorized the United States to intervene. Mirroring Johnson’s strategy vis-à-vis the OAS, White House officials argued that OECS consent meant the principle of nonintervention was not actually being violated (or could be). As Reagan explained in a 25th of October press briefing, the intervention was a “multinational effort” comprising the region’s “collective intentions.”914 In this instance the invitation to intervene by the OECS appears genuine—though this does not mean the intervention violated Grenada’s territorial integrity any less.915 As Cynthia Weber has shown, this legitimation strategy shifted the relevant “international community of judgment” for the intervention away from the United States and the United Nations to the OECS.916

910 Crandall (2006, 140).

911 Crandall (2006, 106–7).

912 Morales (1994, 80–81).

913 Crandall (2006, 135–37); Williams (2007, 159–60); Grow (2008, 152–53).

914 Quoted in Crandall (2006, 150).

915 Grow (2008, 148–49).

916 Weber (1995, 96, 107).

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The third objective of the intervention was to prevent further Cuban interference in Grenada. This justification overtook the others when, on October 27, Reagan explained this rationale in a televised “Address to the Nation.” The United States had discovered that Cuba indented to use an airport on Grenada as a Cubano-Soviet military base, indicating Castro planned to occupy the island and shift the frontier of the Cold War. Grenada was not a “paradise for tourism,” but instead a “Soviet-Cuban colony” which the United States had saved “just in time.”917

This rationale was not a sudden discovery, however. Like in the Dominican case, U.S. policymakers had for a time understood Grenada in the context of the “an extension of the Soviet/Cuban axis into the Western Hemisphere.”918 They were also familiar with the Grenada airport project, which in the context of the crisis became “a major threat to Western security in the Cold War.”919 The Reagan administration targeted Grenada in particular in a series of economic destabilization and military intimidation programs aimed at undermining support for the Grenadian government.920 As Gary Williams summarizes, from day one the Reagan administration portrayed the Caribbean in particular as “an area that must be secured and denied to extra-hemispheric incursions.”921

Although U.S. policymakers did not deploy the same amount of public “hemisphere”-talk as they did in 1965, U.S. policymakers, including Reagan, emphasized the Caribbean’s position in “our neighbourhood,” often drawing links between further flung episodes such as the Iran hostages crisis or Beirut to underscore Grenada’s proximity.922 This fit with Reagan’s broader rhetoric concerning the Western Hemisphere, which drew links between its physical and political

917 Reagan (1983a).

918 Crandall (2006, 106); see also Williams (2007) for an overview.

919 Grow (2008, 145).

920 Grow (2008, 143–45).

921 Williams (2007, 55).

922 Weber (1995, 94–95). See for example Reagan (1983b): “we weren't about to wait for the Iran crisis to repeat itself, only this time, in our own neighborhood—the Caribbean.”

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closeness and strategic importance.923 Within Reagan’s hemispheric vision, the Caribbean in particular occupied a place of special strategic interest: in his view, it was transforming from “America’s pond” into a “Communist lake.”924 In a March 1983 speech, Reagan argued the Soviet Union, through its proxies, were striking “at the heart of the Western Hemisphere.”925 That same year he unveiled the “Caribbean Basin Initiative,” a package of trade and assistance deals aimed at curbing the appeal of communism—a 1980s neoliberal equivalent to the Alliance for Progress.926 Although the State Department’s internal papers from this period are still under declassification review, accessible documents surrounding the crisis written in the U.S. diplomatic and security communities show the general framing of 1965 had not substantially changed: Soviet infiltration into the “Western Hemisphere” through its proxy, Cuba, must be stopped.927

The intervention became Reagan’s first foreign policy victory, despite the vast power asymmetries involved—the world’s largest military power had just invaded a Martha’s Vineyard-sized state that had no navy or air force, and an army of only 2,000 men.928

923 E.g. Reagan’s (1984) May 1984 “Address to the Nation on United States Policy in Central America”: “We Americans should be proud of what we're trying to do in Central America, and proud of what, together with our friends, we can do in Central America, to support democracy, human rights, and economic growth, while preserving peace so close to home. Let us show the world that we want no hostile, communist colonies here in the Americas: South, Central, or North.”

924 Quoted in Williams (2007, 55).

925 Smith (1995b, 164).

926 Williams (2007, 60–61).

927 See for example a Department of State and Department of Defence (1985) report on the “Soviet-Cuban connection in Central America and the Caribbean.” Gary Williams (2007, 4) argues that apart from the official reasons, the intervention was guided “by the United States’ interventionist tradition in what it considers its sphere of influence and ‘backyard,’” and the ideological and geopolitical contest of the Cold War.”

928 Smith (1995b, 178); Grow (2008, 156–58). Reagan may have been convinced to conduct the intervention by the recent Iran hostages crisis, or a broader desire for a decisive use of U.S. military force after a sequence of crises. See Grow (2008, 150–58); Brands (2010, 198–99).

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Internationally, however, the intervention was deeply unpopular. The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning the intervention after the Council approved it 11 to 1, with three abstentions. The General Assembly approved the motion 108 to 9, with 27 abstentions. This made the intervention less popular at the United Nations than the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.929 The intervention also had a mixed reaction at the OAS.930

As was the case with the Dominican intervention, Cuba and the Soviet Union led the charge in verbally condemning the United States. They accused the United States of breaching the United Nations Charter, thus “posing a serious threat to international peace and security.”931 U.S. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick defended the intervention in Johnsonian terms: Bishop had “freely offered his island as a base for the projection of Soviet military power in this hemisphere.”932 Grenada had already fallen under the “permanent intervention of one neighbouring and one remote tyranny;” the United States was therefore legitimate in overtly intervening to defend the hemisphere.933 Although the intervention implicated Soviet and Cuban interests much more directly than the Dominican intervention—both Cuba and the Soviet Union had supplied materiel to Grenada—the Soviet reaction was especially muted, with the intervention barely registering in its press.934 I am unable to find any record of the Soviet Union threatening harm or imposing material costs on the United States.

In toto, U.S. actions and rhetoric in these interventions show that U.S. policymakers understood them through the lens of the Cold War geopolitical bargain. The Western Hemisphere and

929 Nanda (1984, 401).

930 Crandall (2006, 152–56).

931 Quoted in Nanda (1984, 402).

932 Quoted from United Nations (1983, 6).

933 Quoted from United Nations (1983, 7).

934 See Schmeman (1983); see also the essays collected in Valenta and Ellison (1986). Unfortunately the full Soviet side of the Grenada crisis has yet to be uncovered.

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especially Caribbean area constituted “American’s backyard,” an area of special intervention privilege.

4.3.4 Interventions outside the spheres: Lebanon, Vietnam, and Afghanistan

The superpowers overtly intervened three times outside of their spheres after 1955: the United States in Lebanon in 1958, Vietnam in the 1965, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1979. In Lebanon, the United States propped up an unpopular regime. The U.S. marines sent to Lebanon did not restore or remove a regime, however, nor did they engage in direct combat. The Lebanon case is therefore liminal—a use of conventional forces across borders, but not in a way that flagrantly violated sovereign non-interference or restored or revised the geopolitical bargain.

The Vietnam war is also liminal, never involving a clear intervention profile like those discussed above; indeed U.S. involvement in Vietnam was the result of a gradual buildup, ostensibly to aid the ailing Ngo Dinh Diem regime in South Vietnam. Despite its immense cost to the United States and especially Vietnam, the Soviet Union only minimally involved itself by providing air support to the North Vietnamese military.935 Indeed, Vietnam’s greatest geopolitical significance was in eating up U.S. resources and therefore opening the way to détente, contributing to the Sino-Soviet Split, and casting a long shadow on subsequent U.S. interventions as an example of how not to prosecute one.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, by contrast, more easily qualified as an overt intervention, despite the Soviet Union’s attempt to legitimize it as a kind of rescue mission. The intervention was widely perceived as illegitimate, and, unlike the Soviet Union’s interventions in its spheres, caused significant and costly international backlash, including United Nations-authorized sanctions.

Both conform to the broad expectations of my geopolitical argument. Outside of their spheres, the superpowers will be cautious about intervening in two ways: ensuring there’s little to no

935 Carson (2018, 187–237).

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chance of a direct superpower conflict; and concerning themselves with the broader legitimacy of their operation so that they do not erode the geopolitical legitimacy of their ideology.

4.3.4.1 The Middle East “Vacuum”: Lebanon, 1958

The 1956 Suez crisis left the Middle East without defined great power spheres of influence, producing concerns in Washington that the Soviet Union would fill the Middle Eastern “vacuum.”936 Washington was particularly concerned with the pro-Soviet sympathies of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was instrumental in ending European rule over the Suez Canal, and his ‘Nasserite’ followers.937 In 1957 Eisenhower ordered a review of U.S. Middle East policy, the results of which became the “Eisenhower Doctrine.” The Doctrine called for cooperation with Britain in economically and politically supporting client regimes so they could better resist Soviet influence.938

Camille Chamoun’s Lebanon was one such regime.939 In 1958 Chamoun sought to amend Lebanon’s constitution so he could seek a second term. With American help Chamoun had rigged the June 1957 parliamentary election in his favour.940 Worried his domestic opponents were combining with Nasserites in the newly-formed United Arab Republic (UAR) to topple him, Chamoun secured a personal security guarantee from Eisenhower: the United States and United Kingdom would jointly honour a request for intervention under certain conditions.941 To this effect the United States sponsored a Security Council resolution to send observers to Lebanon, by request, to investigate UAR infiltration; it passed on July 10 with a Soviet abstention.942 Responding to a June 18 press conference question about what conditions might

936 Saunders (2011, 77); Dunbabin (2014, 239–40).

937 Westad (2007, 123–28).

938 Dunbabin (2014, 239–40).

939 See Smith (1992, Document 4).

940 Saunders (2011, 79).

941 Saunders (2011, 80).

942 Gendzier (2006, 265–67).

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prepare the United States to “take military action” in Lebanon, Eisenhower answered that further American involvement would depend on the “judgments” of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and the observer team.943 Washington then had to assure Chamoun that rapid military assistance would not “require the concurrence or recommendation” of the UN mission, to which Chamoun replied he would not request U.S. assistance “unless the knife is at my throat.”944 Internal documents show Secretary of State Dulles hoped the United Nations presence would save Washington from having to intervene on Chamoun’s behalf.945

After a coup in neighbouring Iraq on July 14, however, Chamoun requested the United States and United Kingdom fulfil their pledge and by, in the words U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Robert McClintock, demanding the “6th fleet here within 24 hours or else he would at last know where he stood re assurances of support from the West.”946 On July 15, a contingent of 8,000 U.S. Marines landed in Beirut; by August, 14,000 were stationed in-country.947 On July 15 Eisenhower stated the deployment was in response to the “urgent plea” of the “freely elected” government of Lebanon and aimed to “protect American lives and by their presence there to encourage the Lebanese government in defense of Lebanese sovereignty and integrity. They do not go as combat forces and not in any act of war.”948

The United States couched this reasoning in the previous Security Council resolution and Article 51 of the United Nations’ Charter, and introduced a Security Council resolution calling for the United Nations “to take over the defence of Lebanon.”949 This resolution was vetoed by the Soviet Union in the Security Council, though a counter-proposal introduced by the Soviet Union

943 Quoted from Eisenhower (1958).

944 Quoted from Smith (1992, Documents 97, 98); Gendzier (2006, 277).

945 Smith (1992, Documents 75, 79).

946 Quoted from Smith (1992, Document 121).

947 Dunbabin (2014, 243).

948 Quoted in Gendzier (2006, 324); see also Westad (2017, 456).

949 Smith (1992, Documents 138, 145); Gendzier (2006, 319–20).

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on July 17 was voted down by a majority.950 The deployed U.S. Marines did not fire a shot, and were conceived primarily as relief for local Lebanese security, who could help suppress the insurrection.951 The intervention’s primary purpose appears to have been demonstrate U.S. capabilities, its commitment to assist friendly states, and perhaps signal to the Kremlin it should not extend its sphere into the Middle East.952

Although it involved the overt use of troops, it is difficult to classify the Lebanon intervention an overt “intervention” in the way this study has defined the term. First, although it was a military intervention, the troops deployed were there to “stabilize existing conditions with a show of force,” not restore a deposed regime or depose one.953 Chamoun’s regime, though unpopular, was still the legitimate government of Lebanon. This means the intervention did not risk generating legitimacy costs associated with sovereign nonintervention. Internal documents show the Eisenhower administration was very concerned about the legitimacy of the intervention, and that any U.S. action would have follow from a Lebanese request for “friendly assistance.”954 Officials worried other kinds of intervention would “smack of imperialism” and generate a wave of “anti- Western sentiment,” threatening other regimes friendly to the United States and damaging its reputation.955 Because of the United Nations drama and perceptions in Lebanon that the United States arrived as an imperialist, the intervention had some legitimacy issues—but these subsided as the intervention continued, and the occupation was over by October 15.956

950 Dougherty (2012, 45); Gendzier (2006, 319–20).

951 Saunders (2011, 82–83). Allegedly their presence on Beirut’s beach was good for ice-cream business there; see Dunbabin (2014, 243).

952 Smith (1992, Documents 124, 127); see also the analyses in Westad (2017, 256–57); Dunbabin (2014, 243); Gendzier (2006, 308).

953 Saunders (2011, 85).

954 Smith (1992, Documents 84, 87, 92-94).

955 Quoted from Smith (1992, Documents 92, 94).

956 Dougherty (2012, 49–52)

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U.S. intelligence furthermore found that there was no chance of a confrontation with the Soviet Union. A National Intelligence Estimate circulated on June 5, 1958 found that if the United States intervened to support of Chamoun against a United Arab Republic-supported uprising, “the Soviet reaction would probably be confined to vigorous diplomatic and propaganda action.” U.S. military engagement on UAR soil might provoke a stronger reaction such as the introduction of Soviet “volunteers” to the field of operation.957 But it was “unlikely the USSR would take action which it estimated would involve serious risk of general war.”958 This was also the consensus at an emergency July 14 meeting held in the President’s office, attended by major officials from the State and Defence departments.959 On the eve of the intervention President Eisenhower said he was more concerned less with the “Russian question” so much as “the temper and attitude of the people throughout the area.”960 The Soviet response was as predicted: the Soviet Union protested the U.S. troop presence at the Security Council by submitting its own proposal (voted down by a majority) and vetoing the U.S. proposal, but did nothing else.961

Strategically, then, the intervention was low risk: it did not challenge the Cold War geopolitical bargain, endanger superpower relations, or erode U.S. legitimacy. Eisenhower could thus bolster U.S. credibility at very little cost, avoiding an intervention where “he would have to fight the tide of popular opinion, take over institutions, and possibly rebuild them.”962

4.3.4.2 Vietnam

A complex military engagement that does easily fit the criteria of an overt intervention, Vietnam is an outlier in my theory. It featured no precise moment where U.S. leaders engaged an

957 Smith (1992, Document 60). A Soviet mission officer suggested this to the United States at the United Nations on June 20; see Smith (1992, Document 101).

958 Quoted from Smith (1992, Document 60).

959 Gendzier (2006, 305–6).

960 Quoted from Smith (1992, Document 124).

961 Gendzier (2006, 319–21); Smith (1992, Document 149).

962 Saunders (2011, 85); Ambrose and Brinkley (2011, 168).

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assurance or legitimacy strategy and then intervened with military force. Rather, the conflict is better understood as an iterated military engagement that involved multiple justifications, junctures of intervention, and escalation control strategies.963 Under Kennedy, the American presence in Vietnam began as a support mission for Diem’s proxy government, rather than an overt intervention in the style of the other cases here or even Korea, where large numbers of U.S. troops immediately saw front-line combat.964 Because the observers sent by the Kennedy administration had combat roles, and Johnson subsequently escalated the U.S. presence into an obviously military one, however, some studies nonetheless classify it as an overt intervention, although with the caveat that is slowly escalated and featured no clear assurance structure.965

Overall, the superpower engagement in Vietnam fits my expectations about conflict outside of the spheres. To this extent superpower interaction in Vietnam mirrors Korea, but a diffuse and protracted version of Korea: the United States overtly intervened while the Soviet Union counter-intervened covertly, attempting to impose costs on the United States while minimizing its footprint. Like in Korea, the Kremlin attempted (successfully) to have Beijing bear the brunt of the costs of counter-intervention. This escalation control strategy was designed to reduce the potential for a great power confrontation, which both Moscow and Washington feared would escalate the Vietnam crisis into a larger regional war.

Three points are worth noting. First, like in Korea, the United States’ decision to intervene was driven by domino theory logic, and its efforts aimed to prevent what it perceived to be the Soviet sphere spreading into an area up for grabs.966 As Orne Westad summarizes, the lesson of the Cuban missile for Washington was that the Cold War had become “a zero-sum game, in which a

963 For a summary see Westad (2007, 180–85, 189–206).

964 Westad (2017, 317–18).

965 Saunders (2011, 120); Carson (2018, 233–35).

966 Black (2015, 113); Westad (2017, 314).

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loss for one side was a gain for the other. And the Soviet Union, or even worse, China, was seen as controlling Vietnamese Communism and standing to gain through its success.”967

Washington’s main concerns were limiting its exposure to Soviet forces to prevent great power escalation and avoiding legitimacy costs at home, beginning with the dubious Gulf of Tonkin pretext for escalation, with which President Johnson was able to gain congressional authorization for the first bombing campaign.968 Austin Carson argues the decision to escalate the overt intervention was informed by Washington’s sense of urgency: the South was on the verge of collapse, and Washington decided “against the operational constraints that accompanied covert tools.”969 These two goals might have been at odds. The United States’ bombing campaign rules of engagement were careful to avoid striking targets that might precipitate a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, and, based on the Korean precedent, Washington feared a Chinese intervention if it invaded North Vietnam.970 Indeed, the Korean War was the dominant historical analogy used by U.S. leaders to calculate escalation control during Vietnam, and informed Chinese thinking as well, where the Communist Party suggested restraint and blamed Moscow for employing its Korea strategy of pushing China into war with the United States.971

Second, evidence about Soviet concerns are mixed but generally support my expectations. According to Vladislav Zubok, before 1965 Kremlin leaders “had not ascribed any geopolitical important to Vietnam and Indochina.”972 The American escalation drew their attention, and internal Soviet politics (post-Khruschev) were divided between those who supported and those who were skeptical Mao’s China; the former advocated for a more direct assistance to Vietnam in hopes it would warm Moscow’s relations with Beijing, while the latter group feared and

967 Westad (2017, 314).

968 Westad (2017, 321).

969 Carson (2018, 234).

970 Black (2015, 113–17); Carson (2018, 196–98).

971 Carson (2018, 196–98); Khong (1992, 99–102).

972 Zubok (2007, 198).

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advocated for a more minimal and distant response. The latter group got their way, deepening the Sino-Soviet split but reducing superpower tensions in Vietnam. The “memories of the Berlin and Cuban missile crisis” may have affected the ability of this group to control Soviet foreign efforts.973 Although the Soviet Union increased aid to North Vietnam after 1965, it largely left the support of North Vietnam to China, which was substantial.974 Michael Lind argues this emanated from a Soviet strategy to let the United States “bleed” fighting the North Vietnamese.975

Third, Vietnam’s “mission creep” deeply informed U.S. military strategists views’ toward intervention, and in particular those of Colin Powell, National Security Advisor under Reagan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman under Clinton, and Bush 43’s Secretary of State. Under the “Powell Doctrine,” an adapted version of the Weinberger Doctrine, the U.S. military would push for last-resort uses of overwhelming force with clear exit strategies, resisting missions with “humanitarian” or unclear operational goals. This strategy largely ignores the need for escalation controls and turned out to be better suited for the period of American primacy that followed the end of the Cold War. Nonetheless, it informed U.S. interventionism in its sphere later in the Cold War—in Grenada, for example—and in the post-Cold War period.976

4.3.4.3 “Three or four weeks”: Afghanistan, 1979

By contrast, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was widely perceived as illegitimate intervention and resulted in the imposition of serious costs on Moscow. In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan deposed Afghanistan’s ruler Mohammed Daoud, who was a Soviet aid recipient but kept his country non-aligned. The two factions within the party, Khalq (‘the masses’) and Parcham (‘the banner’), each vied for Soviet support until the latter was purged in late 1978. The two Khlaq leaders, Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin,

973 Zubok (2007, 199); Black (2015, 117–18).

974 See Zhai (2000); Nguyen (2012, 41–42).

975 Lind (2013, 263).

976 On these points see Powell (2012, 201–8); Campbell (1998); Recchia (2015); and the reading in Barkawi (2006, 109–22).

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increased ties with Moscow—including a request for public security guarantee—while an Islamist resistance developed in the countryside. On December 5, 1978, Brezhnev signed a “Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighbourliness, and Cooperation” in Moscow with Taraki, then the President and Moscow’s favourite.977 Taraki faced significant governance problems back at home, however, and Moscow recommended Taraki reduce Amin’s influence. Taraki attempted to have Amin assassinated; Amin was able to turn the tables and in September 1979, took control of Kabul and executed Taraki on October 9, despite Moscow’s protests.978

Amin’s removal of Taraki, alleged contacts with the United States, and lack of ideological orthodoxy alarmed the Politburo, who worried he might “do a Sadat” and break from Soviet control.979 In November 1979 the Politburo decided to remove Amin by force and install Babrak Kamal, the leader of Parcham, then in exile in Czechoslovakia.980 On Christmas Day 1979 75,000 Soviet troops crossed the border into Afghanistan, storming the Presidential palace and executing Amin on December 27. The ensuing occupation would last until February 1989 and cost more than a million lives. Brezhnev believed the whole intervention would take “three or four weeks.”981

The Soviet Union saw itself as defensively coming to the aid of another Soviet government— maintaining, in its own words, its sphere of influence.982 KGB chief Yuri Andropov reportedly had a “Hungarian complex” through which he saw Afghanistan as part of the “socialist community,” and thus falling under the Soviet intervention protection umbrella that prompted

977 Unlike Armin, Taraki was recruited by a Soviet agent in 1951. See Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005, 386–87).

978 I have based my account here primarily on Westad (2007, 299–330, 2017, 494–98); Dunbabin (2014, 393–96); Black (2015, 171–73); Zubok (2007, 259–64); Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005, 386–402).

979 Westad (2017, 495); Zubok (2007, 263) argues this was a plot by a KGB chief in favour of intervention. See also Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005, 268–69, 398–402).

980 Westad (2007, 316–20); Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005, 397–402).

981 Dunbabin (2014, 395); Gaddis (2005, 211).

982 Zubok (2007, 260); Matheson (1982, 93); Westad (2007, 322); Black (2015, 171).

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the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian interventions.983 The larger strategic picture also concerned them; NATO had just deployed nuclear-tipped Pershing missiles in Europe. Afghanistan’s problems could also spill into Soviet Central Asia, where instability had given Moscow the longstanding desire to “turn Afghanistan into a stable satellite firmly under Soviet tutelage.”984 The United States had not protested other Soviet-related actions in Afghanistan, such as the removal of Daoud by an openly communist party co-run by a Soviet agent.985 As Zubok writes, the Politburo agreed that ‘‘‘losing Afghanistan’ as part of the Soviet sphere of influence would be unacceptable, geopolitically, and ideologically.”986

The international response was also virtually universally negative, drawing ire from the nonaligned movement, non-Soviet communist states, and most of the Middle East.987 Publicly, the Kremlin justified its intervention as a friendly assistance maneuver. Indeed, it had the new government announce, just after executing Armin, that it had “requested the USSR to render urgently political, moral and economic assistance, including military aid, and that the Soviet government had agreed to do so.”988 An emergency meeting held at the Security Council on January 5 was denounced by the Soviet Union and Afghanistan as interfering in the domestic affairs of a state. The non-aligned Security Council members sponsored a resolution condemning the invasion which was vetoed by the Soviet Union, but later passed in the General Assembly.989

Unlike in the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian cases, the U.S. response to Afghanistan was consequential. U.S. policymakers, including President Carter, saw it as a Soviet move to enlarge its sphere of influence through force. Carter’s reasoning, shared by other U.S. officials, was the

983 Maley (2009, 30–31).

984 Zubok (2007, 259); see also Black (2015, 172).

985 Keal (1983, 223).

986 Zubok (2007, 260).

987 See Dimitrakis (2012); Braithwaite (2011, 111–15).

988 Dimitrakis (2012, 514).

989 Dimitrakis (2012, 520–21).

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invasion signaled a potential drastic change to the global balance of power, and that the Soviet Union might now be pushing toward the Persian Gulf.990 As Jeremy Black summarizes, “The Soviet invasion was regarded not as a frontier policing operation designed to ensure a pliant government, but as an act of aggression that needed to be countered.”991 Indeed, the Soviet Union had not sent troops outside of the Warsaw pact area since the end of 1945.992 National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State on Soviet Affairs Marshal Shulman both argued the invasion was a “new departure” outside of the Soviet Union’s “primary security zone.”993 Although U.S. officials had to some extent warned the Soviet Union that encroachment into Afghanistan would be intolerable, these signals were not particularly clear.994 These denunciations did not address the internal situation in Afghanistan—just that the Soviet Union had overstepped.995

The U.S. responded materially by suspending technology, transport, and profitable grain sales, stopping trade and cultural exchanges, banning Soviet fishing vessels from U.S. waters, indefinitely deferring the SALT II talks, and boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympic Games, to be held in Moscow. Apart from imposing ‘sticks’ on the Soviet Union, the U.S. also sponsored a now-infamous covert programme in which it armed jihadi insurgents in an effort turn Afghanistan “into a Soviet Vietnam.”996 The total programme cost, which included funding from Saudi Arabia, was about USD$1 billion a year vs. the Soviet Union’s entire occupation spending

990 Zubok (2007, 228).

991 Black (2015, 172).

992 Keal (1983, 222).

993 Quoted in Matheson (1982, 95); Westad (2017, 495).

994 Matheson (1982, 96).

995 Matheson (1982, 78–80).

996 Westad (2007, 329).

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of $5 billion a year.997 As Ambrose and Brinkley note, this was “generally a harder line toward the Soviets than any President since Eisenhower.” 998

4.4 Case comparison and alternative explanations

In summary, the cases conform to my expectations. The superpowers refrained from intervening in each other’s spheres, intervened in their own spheres without fearing counter-intervention, costly pushback, or the for substantial escalation control; outside their spheres they intervened much more perspicaciously.

In the extra-spherical cases examined above, the superpowers either concerned themselves greatly with the legitimacy and escalation costs of the intervention, as was the case with Lebanon, or suffered costs imposed by the other superpowers, as with the case with Afghanistan. The Vietnam case is an interesting example of a superpower facing little substantive pushback from its peer, but suffering great legitimacy costs for largely domestic reasons. In toto, the Cold War spheres system thus permitted superpower intervention within the spheres and constrained cross-spherical intervention. In this section, I briefly outline trends across the cases that both strengthen the argument and highlight its limits. I also review competing explanations for these trends.

4.4.1 Similarities across the cases

The cases show that the geopolitical bargain and spheres system strongly shaped how the superpowers expressed and justified their zones of exclusivity—i.e., how it constituted the framework in which the actors made legitimacy claims. In each of the cases the superpower employed a legitimation, rather than assurance, strategy that focused on the purpose of the intervention: a “rescue” narrative or “friendly assistance” to avoid accusations of violating nonintervention. The justifications also employed or switched to broader principles focused on the legitimatizing effects of an “international community of judgment” comprised of the

997 Rubin (1995, 29–30).

998 Ambrose and Brinkley (2011, 287); see also Westad (2017, 496); Zubok (2007, 228).

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superpower’s relevant vassals. In the U.S. cases, these included the OAS and OECS; in the Soviet cases, they included the “community of soviet states” as outlined in the October 30, 1956 and Brezhnev doctrines.

Franck and Weisband’s comparative study of the Dominican and Czechoslovakian interventions is helpful here. Both superpowers used a “friendly assistance” justification, then shifted to alternate justifications. In the Dominican case, the Soviet Union accused the United States of using the OAS as a screen for imperialism that violated the non-intervention spirit of the Charter and right to self-determination of all peoples. The United States, meanwhile, justified its intervention, as we saw above, on the basis of the primacy of the OAS in protecting hemispheric security against non-hemispheric intrusion. In the Czechoslovakia intervention, the roles flipped: the United States argued the Soviet Union violated its obligations to the UN Charter and principle of the self-determination of all peoples, while the Soviet Union argued that the community of Soviet nations was the proper judge of and protector against “external” threats to the “socialist system.”999 In the Soviet defence, the spatial category of “hemispheric” is substituted with “soviet system.”

As we saw above, the U.S. cases suggest these shifts were intended not only to articulate the principle of the U.S. hemisphere as a zone of exclusive U.S. predominance, but also to legitimize the interventions themselves using the regional organizations within that sphere. In the Dominican case, this meant legitimizing the intervention through the OAS process. In the Grenada case, it meant legitimizing the intervention through the OECS.1000 The Soviet cases are less clear on this score. Both Soviet interventions involved multilateral military coalitions, and the Politburo consulted with the Warsaw pact leaders in advance of the interventions. Existing accounts of the Cold War that have made use of the archives post-1991 have so far focused on the personal beliefs and motivations of the Politburo leaders, rather than these more institutional

999 Franck and Weisband (1971, 96–113).

1000 Without access to the internal documents surrounding the Grenada intervention, we cannot be sure the White House’s concern was with specifically hemispheric legitimacy, as was the case in the Dominican. It must suffice that in public statements the Reagan administration gave the OECS sanction a prominent role.

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concerns.1001 Without better knowledge of the Politburo’s internal decision-making vis-à-vis the legitimacy of its Soviet community, it is unclear whether the Soviet union pursued a perfunctory “Soviet community” multilateralism for exclusively military-instrumental reasons, or whether these strategies were also intended to legitimize Soviet actions to other sphere members or potential client states.

In the extra-spherical interventions, the superpowers pursued a similar set of mirrored legitimation strategies. In the Lebanon case efforts at the United Nations and the “friendly assistance” invitation paid off because they were perceived as genuine. The wide perception of illegitimacy attached to the Afghanistan intervention—its manifestly false assistance claim and expansionist profile—led to significant costs for the Soviet Union. A difference is while the United States did not make any special claims to the Middle East or Lebanon in its justifications for the intervention (as it would in the Dominican and Grenada), the Soviet Union used the same Brezhnev Doctrine justifications as it did when intervening in Czechoslovakia.

This aspect of my argument complements rather than challenges the existing escalation control/balance of power and norms approaches. The spheres allow us to “see” the balance of power with a clarity that purely structural approaches to the period do not, and predict where escalation control will be more of an issue for an intervening superpower. In the Vietnam and Korea cases, for example, the superpowers engaged in much more complicated (and in Korea risky) escalation control behaviours than they did when intervening in their spheres. Put differently, the spheres approach allows us to see where each superpower saw its acceptable limit in terms of its rival’s interventions before the interventions occur, avoiding post hoc, ergo propter arguments about risk assessment. I have hopefully improved on norms accounts by depicting the spheres system in greater detail, and showing that it was more ideologically-driven and therefore more competitive than usually depicted. The ideological competition also has consequences for the norms account’s “tacit rules” thesis, which I address in the next section.

1001 E.g. Zubok (1996); Zubok and Pleshakov (1996); Mastny (1996); and exception is Mastny (2006), though it does not focus on the cases I examine here.

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4.4.2 Dissimilarities

A Czechoslovakia-Afghanistan comparison shows the independent effects of the spheres. In both instances, similar crises prompted interventions: the Soviet Politburo worried political instability and unpredictability threatened the Soviet Union’s regional security. Leaders of both countries were seen to be “charting independent courses” dangerous to Moscow.1002 Both interventions were justified by “friendly assistance” invitations largely disbelieved by other states because the governments in place either did not issue them or were not actually governing the country.1003

Yet the international opprobrium varied significantly in the two cases. As I showed above, U.S. policymakers were very careful to signal their noninterventionist and fundamentally neutral stance toward Czechoslovakia, as they did with Hungary. In Afghanistan, the opposite happened: the United States took every measure possible—“the maximum, short of war”1004—to punish the Soviet Union. A structural balance of power account might argue that the United States couldn’t confront the Soviet Union as easily over Czechoslovakia because of the much more acute security situation: a militarized response in the Czech case might have easily provoked a war, especially one NATO might not win.1005 By contrast, Afghanistan was much more remote, away from the center of the European stasis. This made it less risky to confront the Soviet Union.

If direct confrontation was too risky, why didn’t the United States punish the Soviet Union using less risky measures—every measure possible short of war? Or make clear there would be political consequences if the Soviet Union intervened ahead of time? Paul Keal has outlined several steps the U.S. administration could have taken to signal opprobrium or perhaps deter the Soviet Union from intervening as harshly as it did. The United States could have threatened military counter-intervention, broken diplomatic relations, broken off trade deals, or used issue

1002 Allison (2013, 31).

1003 Allison (2013, 30–31).

1004 Quoted in Westad (2007, 328).

1005 See for example the discussion in Black (2015, 130).

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linkages to negotiate with the Soviet Union, tit-for-tat, on some other issue, such as arms control1006—in other words, almost any of the policies pursued by the Carter administration.

A mechanistic balance of power approach should hold that given the strategic centrality of the Soviet Union’s sphere to its overall power position, even small, low-cost steps to aid its destabilization would be worth it. Indeed, the strategic importance of the Czechoslovakia was one of the reasons Moscow intervened to put down the Dubcek regime to begin with.1007 Instead, the United States conspicuously acquiesced to the Soviet Union’s sphere and its intervention justification. Although the SALT arms control talks were delayed, they were not affected by the Czechoslovakia intervention.1008 As Vladislav Zubok notes: “Around the world, the impact of the sudden Soviet invasion was much greater than the shock of the similar invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The latter did not stop the détente process in Europe and only gave a brief setback to the U.S.-Soviet talks on strategic arms. Not so in 1979.”1009 The reason is this time the Soviet Union intervened outside of its sphere.

4.4.3 Differences between Soviet and American hegemony

There are notable differences between the Soviet and American responses to the interventions which put limits on this account and challenge the “tacit rules” thesis of norms accounts. Simply put, the Soviet Union did not engage in “conspicuous constraint” or assurance in the same way as the United States. As Paul Keal notes, the Soviet Union was much less physically present in the Western hemisphere after the Cuban missile crisis, the solution to which involved a tacit agreement to keep direct Soviet presence out of the Western hemisphere.1010 To be sure, the Soviet Union did not take any meaningful steps to punish the United States—from threats of force to the suspension of political, social, or economic exchange—after any of the U.S.

1006 Keal (1983, 148–51).

1007 Zubok (2007, 207).

1008 Keal (1983, 129)

1009 Zubok (2007, 227).

1010 Keal (1983, 149).

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interventions in Latin America. As noted, Moscow’s relationship with Havana became strained in the 1960s because Castro wanted a pro-active communist agenda in Latin America, and Moscow was worried about escalation.1011 Nonetheless, without a better picture of the Politburo’s thinking within the Kremlin, it is difficult to argue there was a conscious and intended reciprocity in the spheres arrangement, instead of one that existed as the long lesson of the Cuban crisis. The Korea and Vietnam cases suggest that where it was able to, the Soviet Union imposed costs on U.S. interventions—but where it was able to was highly geopolitically circumscribed.

A second difference between the spheres noted above is the different character of the two spheres. Although the argument used by both superpowers across the intervention cases were essentially identical, the U.S. legitimation process was much more openly accessible. Members in the U.S. hierarchy had more latitude to disagree with the United States. Many OAS members did not support the intervention in Grenada; U.S. officials encountered difficulties reconciling their preferences in the Dominican intervention with those of the OAS. The strong impression given by the cases is that intra-alliance politics and consensus-building processes were for the sake of legitimizing the hierarchy itself, and not for the sake of a specific external audience or the rival bloc.1012

4.5 Conclusion

This chapter has argued that a de facto geopolitical bargain emerged out of American and Soviet attempts to secure a de jure agreement in the immediate postwar era. The resulting geopolitical bargain structured the character of Cold War interventionism by delineating two spheres of influence in which the superpowers were predominant. This allowed the superpowers a relatively free hand to intervene in their spheres without fearing costly pushback, and restrained them from intervening outside them where they would encounter pushback. My approach has departed from

1011 See Brands (2010, 37–69).

1012 Lake (2009b, 44). The cases also suggest that the more open U.S. hierarchy actually incentivizes the United States to act alone first and legitimize later, rather than plan in concert ahead of time, as the Soviet Union did with its coalitional interventions.

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existing accounts by synthesizing insights from balance of power theories of international security with norms theories that focus on rules, norms, and institutions.

The de facto character of the spheres had a significant impact on the character of Cold War stability. Cold War leaders and policymakers did not as a rule refer to the legitimacy of the spheres system when justifying their interventions, nor did they possess a common reference point like the Vienna settlement in their contestations and negotiations. The spheres delineated the boundaries of acceptability largely tacitly, and this acceptance was reluctant. This gave the whole system an unstable character, leading to misperceptions and outright challenges about the limits of the spheres.1013

The absence of a legally legitimate geopolitical bargain also meant the Cold War had no global collective security mechanism equivalent to the Quadruple Alliance’s Article VI. The United Nations Charter was not negotiated as part of any postwar treaty, allowing it to avoid the fate of the League of Nations, which was part of the Versailles treaty ending World War 1.1014 Further, the legal norm of nonintervention, enshrined in the United Nations Charter but based on a gradually developing sovereignty norm connected to decolonization, greatly restricted what qualified as legitimate grounds for intervention to acts of national self-defence. Human rights norms and the norm of humanitarian intervention were weak and not widely considered grounds for legitimate intervention.1015 There was therefore no straightforward legal or institutional way for interveners to seek widespread, global legitimacy for their interventions outside of their spheres or assure the other power through costly signaling. This made covert intervention and escalation control—always risky—the preferred ways to interfere abroad in toto, and a near- necessity outside of the spheres, where accidental escalation was more likely.

1013 See Keal (1983).

1014 Patrick (2009, 98) Clark (2005, 145).

1015 Glanville (2013, 132–70).

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Compounding these problems, the two superpowers were ideological enemies who shared a mutual hostility and distrust that had no precedent in the Concert era’s great power rivalries.1016 The Cold War was not an ancien régime competition, but “a clash between opposite social and economic projects, a theatre of cultural and ideological warfare.”1017 This produced a paradoxical situation in which the two superpowers competed with one another for the “hearts and minds” of the world, but were constrained by the prospect of nuclear war in the means they could use to gain advantage over the other.1018 Lacking a way of clearly legitimizing their interventions outside their spheres, and fearing that some interventions might escalate into direct superpower conflict, the superpowers interfered outside their spheres in clandestine ways. Only rarely did they overtly intervene across borders with conventional military forces. 1019

In toto, these differences gave the Cold War intervention record a dual character quite different from the Concert period. Intervention outside of the spheres—in the Third World—were as a rule covert, risky, and complex. Overt military interventions inside the superpower spheres, however, mirrored their Concert equivalents.1020 The Cold War geopolitical bargain thus aided systemic stability by freeing each superpower intervene in its sphere without precipitation major confrontation with the other. It left the acceptability of interventions outside those spheres underspecified, however, producing covert superpower interference rather than over intervention.

Did this system amount to an international society of shared norms? I am inclined to agree with Paul Keal and Roy Allison: there was no sense of reciprocal obligation, no “we-feelings,” and to

1016 This was true of both the American and Soviet perspectives; see Westad (2007, 4–7); Nigel Gould-Davies (1999); Pechatnov (2013, 20).

1017 Zubok (2007, 163).

1018 Finnemore (2004, 125).

1019 See Andrew and Mitrokhin (2005); Westad (2007, esp. 8-72). This has led to the term “intervention” being used to cover non-coercive support for violent non-state actors in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. While my study focusses on overt interventions, clandestine or non-overt superpower involvement in regional and civil conflicts is an important element of the Cold War landscape.

1020 See for example Finnemore (2004, 130–33).

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a great extent the superpowers could do what they wanted. They acquiesced to each other’s spheres not “out of need for reciprocity in itself but rather in the common interest each superpower has in avoiding nuclear war.”1021 At the root of their international disagreement was a more fundamental disagreement about the meaning of the mystery of history and the role of human activity in bringing about the happiness of the world. Thus Raymond Aron was correct when he wrote, in 1966:

There will be no appeasement as long as the three principal causes of what it has been agreed to call the cold war remain: the partition of Europe, the arms race, the fate of the third world…. Allaying hostility would necessitate an accepted delimitation of zones of influence incompatible with the universal pretensions of both ideologies. The socialist bloc, by its very being, aside from all the subversive action, offers the third world a model of development. The West cannot avoid fearing the influence of the Soviet example, since those converted to automatically become its enemies. … It would appear that each of the duopolists has become increasingly reassured as to the other’s intentions while each is at the same time terrified by the means of destruction which it possess and which the other therefore possesses or will possess. The major fact…remains the balance of terror, and the desire of the two super powers not to start the war for which they are preparing. A major but negative fact: the giants are paralyzed but paralyzed in relation to each other.1022

After the Cold War, Paul Schroeder summed this up as such:

…the judgments both sides made that the other’s moves represented threats to their own interests were substantially correct. […] The conflicts and crises of the Cold War arose precisely from moves and countermoves on both sides to define the terms and conditions for peaceful coexistence in areas and over issues left dangerously undefined by the war and the failure to reach a real peace settlement… the concern not to go too far, the desire to achieve one’s own goals but at the same time to keep the outcome minimally tolerable to

1021 Keal (1983, 156); Allison (2013, 25–26).

1022 Aron (2017, 569–70).

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the other side, controlled the conflict on both sides and kept it from issuing in overt war, though the margin was sometimes dangerously close. The Cold War was not a va banque struggle and spiral descent into the maelstrom like events before and during the Thirty Years War, the revolutionary-Napoleonic wars, or the two world wars….. It meant a break with the politics of the previous era.1023

1023 Schroeder (2004, 260–61).

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Chapter 5 After the Cold War

“Let’s also be clear where we stand. Just as we refused to accept smaller European nations being dominated by bigger neighbors in the last century, we reject any talk of spheres of influence today.” —Barack Obama1024

David Ignatius: “There has been, from one U.S. administration to the next, a desire to push NATO outward to include the former republics of the Soviet Union. … The proposal to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine in particular seems to have really upset the Russians. In a sense that shouldn’t surprise us. If the United States was facing a potential adversary that was expanding its alliance to include Canada and Mexico, we’d be pretty concerned.”

Brent Scowcroft: “We would invoke the Monroe Doctrine.”1025

The last two chapters have examined two prominent de jure and de facto geopolitical bargains, showing how they structured intervention legitimacy and contributed—or not—to the systemic balance. Did the post-Cold War era have a geopolitical bargain? By all conventional accounts, no. The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 transformed the global balance of power, creating the first unipolar international system in modern political history—“something new in the world.”1026 Unimpeded by bipolar competition, the United States used the Soviet absence to further spread and entrench an order its leaders describe as liberal, open, international,

1024 Quoted from Obama (2014c).

1025 Brzezinski et al. (2008, 172).

1026 Wohlforth (1999, 37).

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and “rules-based.”1027 By this account, the death of the Soviet empire allowed, after a fifty-year interregnum, the first world politics without geopolitics. As Charles Kupchan put it in 2002, “if geopolitical fault lines are between poles of power, and there is today only one such pole, then it follows that there is no fault line.”1028 Ostensibly free of spheres of influence, world politics after the Cold War therefore represent a “hard case,” the hardest case, for my argument.

During this period, the United States and its allies intervened in four strategic theatres and employed a wide range of coalition sizes and legitimacy strategies across them. The United States employed small coalitions when it intervened in Panama, Haiti, and Afghanistan, and did not expend significant resources or time seeking Security Council authorization or legitimizing these interventions to a wider public. U.S. interventions in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Libya, by contrast, featured larger coalitions and more robust attempts by the United States and its allies to argue these were legitimate. This was particularly true in the two Iraq interventions. In some of these cases, the United States also faced substantial political contestation, particularly from regional powers that understood these interventions to be revisionist.

Existing accounts explain this record by looking at U.S. calculations about military utility and domestic politics, or contestations about intervention purpose and norms.1029 Here, I focus on the effects of the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain, or bargains, on this intervention record. In the previous two chapters geopolitical bargains helped great power bypass costly assurance and legitimacy strategies when they intervened in their spheres, helping them avoid costly pushback or escalation to great power war. In the post-Cold War era, the United States faces no military peers, however, giving it few reasons to believe an intervention might precipitate a global conflict. As many scholars have shown, however, a systemic hegemon still can be (and likely must be) concerned about credibly signaling “hegemonic restraint.1030” Geopolitical bargains thus

1027 See Deudney and Ikenberry (1999); for critiques of this appellation, Acharya (2014) and Allison (2018); for post-Soviet views, see Tsygankov (2004).

1028 Kupchan (2002, 28).

1029 Kreps (2011); Recchia (2015); Finnemore (2004); Thompson (2009).

1030 Finnemore (2009); Ikenberry (2011).

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operate in the post-Cold War era by spatially structuring restraint and overreach: when the United States intervenes outside or beyond a given geopolitical bargain, it must signal its restraint using costly legitimacy strategies. Within the boundaries of the geopolitical bargains, it is more relatively free to intervene at lower cost, and can thus focus its efforts on military utility.

I use the term geopolitical bargains because the post-Cold War order is better understood at the level of its multiple local geopolitical bargains, rather than any overarching systemic one. These bargains are structured by the United States’ international hegemony, or primacy—what I call here its “sphere of primacy.” Although U.S. primacy is geopolitical, it is only a bargain in the sense that the United States, possessing unparalleled military power and global presence, made an offer no other states in the post-Cold War system could refuse. Because Washington did not have to negotiate with any peer competitors or settle, through a duel of equal wills, on a systemic de jure or de facto geopolitical bargain, its primacy is the nearest equivalent. Since 1989 Washington has extend its sphere past its Cold War alliances into regions where it was previously too costly to do so. Because these regions vary in terms of their regional polarities— some feature strong regional powers, some do not—the limits they place on U.S. primacy vary. Hence the focus here on the local bargains.

Like their Cold War and Concert era counterparts, geopolitical bargains after the Cold War represent relational understandings about where a system’s great powers can acceptably intervene. I follow Nuno Monteiro and others in considering the United States the only great power in the 1989-2008 period.1031 Although there is a case to be made that China and to a lesser extent Russia are now (again) great powers, I consider them “regional” or “major” powers in the analysis below: their power projection capabilities matter at a regional level, where they can impose material and legitimacy costs on great powers, but they are not recognized by the United States as peers.1032

1031 Monteiro (2014, 54, 48) focusses on relative capabilities—the United States’ power projection capabilities grossly outmatches all others, allowing it to engage “in prolonged large-scale politico-military operations in regions beyond its own.”

1032 See Larson and Shevchenko (2010); Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, 48–72)

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Because of the difficulties of showing the independent effects of the bargains, the argument I make here is provisional, for several reasons. Unlike the geopolitical bargains described in the last two chapters, the post-Cold War bargain was neither negotiated nor tacitly accepted by great powers of relatively equal strength or status. It is also not openly spoken about: U.S. leaders since the end of the Cold War have denied possessing a sphere of influence or engaging in sphere of influence politics, which they construe as the inhuman practices of a less civilized age.1033 Indeed, the “spatial” talk of the Cold War is replaced by a temporal distinction between the “forward-looking” liberal future and the “backwards” geopolitical past.1034 This presents challenges to my research design, which has so far relied on showing that the self-understanding of leaders, and their intervention justifications, have been geopolitically conceived. This is compounded by the problem that none of the internal papers from this period are yet available.

Second, although the intervention behavior of the period conforms to my theory, the small number of cases of U.S. interventions within its traditional sphere in this period—two—makes it difficult to determine whether the Western hemisphere is still viewed as a zone of exclusive influence in the American geographical imaginary. Although the United States pursued regime change in the Western Hemisphere in this period, these interventions were not comparable in size, scope, and preemption to the 2003 war in Iraq, making direct comparisons difficult. There is evidence the United States continues to conceive of the Western Hemisphere as a zone of

1033 See for example Obama (2014a, 2014b, 2014d, 2014c, 2009): “And there is a 19th century view that we are destined to vie for spheres of influence, and that great powers must forge competing blocs to balance one another. These assumptions are wrong”; Biden (2009, 2015a, 2015b): “I said, we will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence”; Merkel (2014): “Outdated thinking in terms of spheres of influence which tramples international law underfoot must not be allowed to prevail”; Kerry (2014)Medvedev (2011); May (2017): “We should not jeopardise the freedoms that President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher brought to Eastern Europe by accepting President Putin's claim that it is now in his sphere of influence.” See also Ferguson and Hast (2018, 277–78).

1034 Representative of this turn is Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) End of History, which divides the world into “historical” and “post-historical” spheres. As Kupchan (2002, 46) notes, “the top priority of U.S. grand strategy, according to Fukuyama, should be to enlarge democracy, thereby erasing the world’s only remaining fault line and completing the process of bringing history to an end.” The work of G. John Ikenberry (e.g. 2010, 2011, 2014, 2017) also repeatedly makes this distinction.

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exclusive preponderance, despite renouncing the Monroe Doctrine in 2013 and appearing to genuinely want to restructure its hierarchical relations with Latin America.1035 It is difficult to imagine the United States would not impose heavy costs or outright block a Chinese or Russian intervention in Latin America. (If the Trump administration has any virtues it may be that it has been more transparent about this exclusivity than previous administrations.)

Third, the U.S. sphere during this period was in motion. This makes cleanly separating spheres from interventions, already tricky in my previous two cases, increasingly difficult. As we will see in the Yugoslavian interventions, the United States publicly presented the former Yugoslavian space as contiguous with its national interest when it justified intervening there. Russia, by contrast, understood especially the Kosovo intervention as an encroachment in its sphere. While there is evidence that the contestation over the geopolitical bargain existed independently of the intervention—Russian complaints about NATO expansion long predate the Kosovo intervention—the U.S. intervention also clearly intensified it.

For the above reasons, in this chapter I shift argumentation strategies from the previous chapters. In those, I concentrated on showing assurance behaviour—where the great powers respected one another’s hegemonies and signaled as much—and illustrated how powers negotiated intervention legitimacy, assurance, and escalation control outside their spheres where possible. Here, I concentrate my analysis on the dynamics of contestation, especially political contestation, paying special attention to where this contestation has taken place. Between 1991 and 2015 states neither possessed nor employed many coercive tools in their efforts to contest the United States’ interventions or negotiate their geopolitical bargains. Instead, they have used words—political contestation—to voice displeasure with the United States and impose on it legitimacy costs.

To show the effects of the geopolitical bargain on post-Cold War intervention dynamics, I examine where regional powers identified the acceptable limits on that sphere before an intervention occurred, and then track their public contestation. Some of this contestation

1035 As of the time of writing, the Trump administration appears to have reversed this policy. See Gramer and Johnson (2018).

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arose before any interventions—as is the case in Eastern Europe—but sometimes it arose only as an intervention was being planned, as was the case with Iraq in 2003. This chapter therefore adopts an argumentation strategy similar to my treatment of Russia’s attempts to extend a de jure sphere over the Porte in Chapter 3, where the co-constitutive effects of geopolitical bargains, intervention legitimation, and intervention contestation are closely interconnected.

Broadly, I find the United States engaged in three kinds of intervention behaviour that map on to the regions in which it intervened. I focus the bulk of the analysis below on the U.S. interventions in the former Yugoslavia in 1995 and 1999. In these, the United States was primarily concerned with consolidating and repurposing its European hierarchy in the absence of an existential threat. The United States faced serious contestation from Russia, however, which perceived NATO expansion as moving beyond the acceptable limits of the U.S. sphere. While the interventions themselves played a role in intensifying these objections, they preceded the interventions.

A second group of interventions I examine are the two U.S.-led intervention in Iraq and its 2011 intervention in Libya. Here, intervention purpose, legitimation, contestation, and the geopolitical bargain are all more closely interconnected. The United States undertook costly legitimation strategies in these interventions, constructing multilateral coalitions and expending time and resources securing Security Council approval. I focus on how contestation of the two U.S. interventions in Iraq varied greatly between 1990 and 2003. The United States legitimacy strategy in 1990 was able to credibly signal its restorative intentions, whereas the 2003 intervention was understood as revisionist.

To be sure, purpose here played a decisive role: in the second intervention, U.S. policymakers aimed to preemptively overthrow Saddam Hussein, and attempts to legitimize the regime change largely fell flat. What I emphasize is not that the 2003 intervention was simply aimed at regime change—so were the U.S.’s Latin American interventions—but that regime change in this instance was understood as revisionist rather than restorative in part because it sought to structurally alter the geopolitical status quo in the Middle East. Thus purpose and geopolitics were blurred. A similar pattern of contestation emerges in the Libya intervention when the aim of the NATO airstrikes shifted from the enforcement of no-fly zone to regime change.

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Last, I briefly examine the United States interventions in its own sphere. The United States restored or replaced regimes in the Central America and Caribbean region twice, in Panama and Haiti, largely without pursuing a costly legitimacy strategies or facing contestation.

Three other interventions—in Somalia, Liberia, and Afghanistan—are only briefly treated here. In the first two, the United States deployed troops as part of uncontroversial Security Council resolutions. The Afghanistan intervention was broadly understood as a response to a direct attack—arguably the most powerful intervention legitimizer in international politics for the last century—and a Security Council resolution legitimized the NATO occupation. Although the Somalia and Afghanistan missions suffered legitimacy costs after their initial interventions, they were both considered legitimate at the time for these reasons.

My focus in these examinations is the geopolitical element of each interventions and its contestations—where the United States is perceived by regional rivals or other states more broadly to be overstepping its sphere, and where it is not. Existing analyses have focused on contestation of U.S. interventions at the level of legal principles—whether, for example, regime change can be justified under the United Nations Charter. Although an important part of the post- Cold War narrative, this focus denudes the United States’ interventions of their geopolitical characteristics. My argument here is not that purpose doesn’t matter, but that it interacts with geopolitical understandings.

An important theme that emerges below is that serious contestation of U.S. interventions takes place not only when it intervenes outside or on the margins of its sphere, but when others perceive it to be revising the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain of a particular region—NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, for example, or revisionist regime change in the Middle East. Further, there is some evidence that the mechanisms through which the United States legitimized its zone of exclusivity in the Western Hemisphere, established in the 19th Century and enjoyed for much of the 20th, appears to have shifted to broader appeals liberal international principles. Last, the increasing levels of contestation the United States has faced from Russia and China, especially after NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, indicate there are sharp limits on the United States geopolitical authority.

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A note on the periodization. The “Long Peace,” the period from 1945 to present and in which there has been no direct great power war, is not yet over. Since Russia’s 2008 annexation of Crimea, however, scholars and policy writers have speculated that a period of renewed great power competition is now replacing the immediate post-Cold War one.1036 American primacists, once confident the order could integrate emerging powers without fundamentally changing, are now less certain.1037 It may be that American primacy is now rapidly declining.1038 Taking into account the growing sense global order is or has shifted, and for the pressing practical reason that I cannot endlessly update the chapter, I stop my analysis with the 2011 Libya intervention.

5.1 Order and intervention after the Cold War: existing accounts

Roughly two groups of theories have offered explanations of the post-Cold War intervention record: one focuses on military utility and domestic politics, while the other focuses on hegemonic legitimacy. The first group encapsulates several sophisticated treatments of the “Rumsfeld Rule” the coalition ought to fit the mission.1039 Focusing on cost-sharing and military needs, Sarah E. Kreps argues that when policymakers anticipate a long occupation, they will construct a large coalition that can share the burden. when 1040 This argument has the advantage of explaining coherently much of the intervention record insofar as coalition size varies across Kreps’ four cases—Haiti, Afghanistan, and the two interventions in Iraq.1041 In a similar vein, Stefano Recchia has argued that U.S. policymakers seek multilateral legitimacy as a “domestic

1036 As Robert Litwak (2000, 19) summarizes, “It is a telling sign of our collective confusion about the ‘post-Cold War era’ that we are able to characterize the current period of international relations only in terms of what preceded it.”

1037 E.g. Ikenberry (2017); see also the January/February 2017, May/June 2017, and July/August 2018 issues of Foreign Affairs.

1038 This is hotly debated in the literature; see Monteiro (2014) and Brooks and Wohlforth (2016b); contrast Layne (2012); Kupchan (2014); Acharya (2017).

1039 Rumsfeld (2013, 227).

1040 Kreps (2011, 40–41).

1041 Kreps (2011, 24–48).

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insurance” strategy: burden sharing abroad means missions are more likely to be supported at home. This, he argues, disconfirms norms arguments that focus on norms internalization because it shows that U.S. policymakers strategically deploy legitimacy arguments to secure “material” outcomes—support for their missions—through mechanisms like United Nations handoffs.1042

The military utility theories do not necessarily contradict my argument here, which focusses on how legitimacy concerns shape actor behaviours and, via geopolitical bargains, constitute the context in which legitimacy claims are made and strategies deployed. By dichotomizing legitimacy-as-internalized versus legitimacy-as-strategic, however, these approaches tend to conflate “legitimacy” with one set of norms (liberal multilateralism or humanitarianism) and construe strategic decision-making as its normless opposite.1043 By doing so, they leave out how certain legitimacy concerns—e.g., multilateral legitimacy—might interact with other norms or forms of legitimacy (e.g. geopolitical ones) that either mediate strategic concerns or indeed constitute them (e.g. protecting a sphere of influence).

The second approach argues that the intervention record is generated by the United States’ legitimacy concerns. Emphasizing the distinction between distributions of capability and kinds of international rule, this account argues the post-Cold War order has been stable because the United States maintains an institutional apparatus, based on liberal principles and norms indigenous to U.S. political culture, which is global in scope but restrains its power.1044 The United States thus makes its unipolarity “acceptable”—legitimizes its rule—through these restraining institutions, hence its “hegemonic restraint.”1045 According to hegemonic logic, the

1042 Recchia (2015, 16–33)

1043 See for example Recchia (2015, 18–19); Kreps (2011, 8, 36–37).

1044 See for example Ikenberry (2008), which focusses on these effects on China.

1045 The fullest account is Ikenberry (2011, esp. 66-77, 102-117). See also Deudney and Ikenberry (1993, 1999, 2009); Tucker and Hendrickson (2004); Reus-Smit (2004); Clark (2005, 227–43); Ikenberry (2006, 2009, 163–256); Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 171–78); Finnemore (2009); Legro (2011). For issue specific treatments, see Norrlof (2010, esp. 247-252); and Goh (2013, esp. 28-34). I use the term “primacy” to refer to United States dominance— hegemony’s Latinate near-equivalent—because of hegemony’s contemporary imprecision. One common problem is the equation of hegemony with either a structural descriptor akin to unipolarity or a behavioural one, consistent with

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unipole has a strong incentive to pursue costly legitimacy strategies by building multilateral coalitions and seeking legal (i.e. Security Council) authorization. The fundamental legitimacy problem faced by a hegemonic unipole is that it will abuse its power, undermining its system of rule and increasing the costs of system maintenance.1046 Whereas in other polarities intervening powers faced potential counterbalancing from their peers and thus had power political incentives to legitimize their uses of force, a unipole faces fewer constraints, possesses more discretionary power, and is thus more likely to overreach.1047 If its overreach delegitimizes its rule and begins to provoke more crises, the unipole may have to resort to brute (illegitimate) force to maintain its position, further delegitimizing its rule in a legitimacy spiral.1048 It therefore must be vigilant in legitimizing its interventions lest the illegitimacy of its interventions erode its systemic position by also delegitimizing its rule.

This account explains why the United States has sought broad international consensus for and participation in some of its interventions, particularly in ways that stretch the credibility of a military instrumentality-focused explanations. Because it is concerned with legitimizing its rule, a hegemonic state that possesses asymmetric power advantages and discretionary resources should have a strong incentive to pursue a costly legitimacy strategy every time it intervenes,

the Greek, akin to leadership. For a brief discussion and example of this problem in action, see Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, 128 note iv, 156 note i and the authors’ use of “hegemonic leadership” on 156-170). Gilpin (1983, 29, 116 note 6) uses both: “The first structure is imperial or hegemonic: a single powerful state controls or dominates the lesser states in the system. […] Hegemony, from the Greek, refers to leadership of one state (the hegemon) over other states in the system.” See also the discussion in Nye (2015, 8–15).

1046 Finnemore (2009, 77–79). As Ikenberry (2011, 139) notes, “the legitimacy of the lead state is less self-evident” under unipolarity, its power “less obviously good for the other states within the order.”

1047 At least without immediate consequences. Ikenberry (2011, 70–73, 81, 104–7, 117, 138–39, 148–51).

1048 My term; the end stage of this spiral is “rule without right.” See Reus-Smit (2007, 163). A number of scholars argue the 2003 Iraq intervention deeply delegitimized U.S. hegemony. See Hurd (2007, esp. 198-201); Finnemore (2009, 62); Ikenberry (2011, 268–77).

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however. This expectation does not adequately explain the wide variation in the empirical record, however—why does the United States sometimes forgo these costly strategies?

5.2 Geopolitical bargains

I argue the intervention variation is in part shaped by a set of post-Cold War geopolitical bargains that are coterminous with the American sphere of primacy (henceforth ‘primacy’) and regionally-specific. The post-Cold War geopolitical bargains shape intervention acceptability much like the other two bargains discussed in this dissertation. Overt military interventions in some places are a priori more acceptable and less contested than in others. Specifically, U.S. interventions are more acceptable a priori when they take place within the bargains’ boundaries, and less acceptable when they take place beyond those boundaries or at its margins.

U.S. interventions are contested on the margins because they appear revisionist. Revisionism and purpose should not be conflated: different intervention purposes can be either revisionist or status-quo oriented. Regime change can maintain a system, or revise it—as can defensive war. What is important here is how geopolitics and purpose interact to generate perceptions of revision and overreach. A key dynamic of the post-Cold War intervention record that I focus on here is thus how contestation of U.S. primacy takes place on a geopolitical level in addition to purpose.

Because the number of interventions in the post-Cold War era is small, the independent effect of the geopolitical bargain is difficult to “see.” In this chapter, I try to demonstrate that the American sphere had an independent impact on intervention legitimacy by focusing on the content of the legitimacy strategies employed by the United States and the contestation it faced, with particular attention to where this dynamic unfolded. I make my argument in four sections. First, I show how U.S. primacy is fundamentally geopolitical: spatially organized and thus not homogeneously “global,” a feature not usually emphasized in the primacy literature.1049 Second, I map the U.S. sphere of primacy and its corresponding geopolitical bargains, as they stood in

1049 U.S. primacy is most often conceived by its supporters as fundamentally non-geopolitical, e.g. Deudney and Ikenberry (2018).

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1991, as best as we know them. Third, I outline other intervention norms of the period that interact with geopolitical ones and the legitimacy strategies open to states that want to signal restraint.

5.2.1 Getting to the sphere

Existing accounts describe United States hegemony as comprising two overlapping but conceptually distinct components: a “global” institutional arrangement based on liberal norms that ensures the United States’ material prosperity and legitimizes its rule; and a forward- deployed security infrastructure that ensures U.S. military dominance in key regions outside of the North American continent. Both have their origins in the interrelated postwar settlements, or “dual settlement,” that emerged after 1945 and which was described in the previous chapter.

The end of the Cold War allowed U.S. leaders to publicly recommit to the liberal international principles first announced in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and expand them beyond Cold War bipolarity—“a new Atlanticism for a new era.”1050 According to accounts that focus on the liberal end of American primacy, U.S. policymakers dropped the half of the “dual” postwar settlement at containing Soviet expansion in 1991.1051 Consistent with Atlanticist principles, leaders in the United States and Western Europe renounced spheres of influence at key historical junctures. U.S. leaders tied these renunciations not only to American foreign policy objectives but broader articulations of legitimate and illegitimate principles of order. Spheres of influence, whether possessed by the United States or anyone else, were illegitimate and illiberal. Insofar as the United States upheld a rules-based order based on liberal internationalism, it could not engage in

1050 Baker (1995, 172); quoted in Ikenberry (2011, 233). As Davis notes, the Atlantic Charter principles were “generally accepted as the basis for the postwar peace and would later guide American policy toward Eastern Europe.” For the influence of the Charter’s principles on subsequent liberal internationalism, see Borgwardt (2005) and Ikenberry (2009, 163–214, 2010, 545–46, 2011, 159–219); see also Davis (1974); Gardner (1993, 91–116); and Brinkley and Facey-Crowther (1994).

1051 Dueck (2006, 127–28); Ikenberry (2011, 213); Clark (2005, 149–51).

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geopolitical arrangements as a basis for that order. 1052 The post-Cold War order would be the first modern international order premised on the explicit rejection of geopolitical phenomena: “geopolitics no longer applied” in the post-Cold War environment.1053

Despite its leaders’ rejection of geopolitical categories, U.S. primacy remained geopolitical during this period in three ways connected to the grand strategy the United States has pursued since 1989. The geopolitical nature of U.S. primacy is often analyzed in security-focused works, but rarely connected with the body of research on America’s global legitimacy.1054 First, the United States maintains an overseas alliance network made up of basing agreements and security guarantees in a strategic posture that Christopher Layne calls “offshore balancing.”1055 This network is an extended version of the Cold War sphere of influence. In 1989 many commentators expected that without bipolar competition to justify extensive offshore presence, U.S. forces would “pull back” to the Western hemisphere. Organizations like NATO, no longer having a reason to exist, would disband; the forward presence in the Pacific could be withdrawn.1056

1052 See for example Ikenberry (2011, 18, 31). Explicit repudiations of spheres of influence politics span from Cordell Hull and FDR, as we saw in Chapter 4, to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Angela Merkel, and Theresa May (e.g. Biden 2015a; Obama 2014c, 2014d; Traynor 2014; May 2017). See also the detailed account of the 2008 and 2014 condemnations in Toal (2017).

1053 Trenin (2016, 12).

1054 See for example Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a); Layne (2006); Posen (2014); Brands (2014).

1055 Layne (2006).

1056 Ambrose and Brinkley (2011, 369); Green (2017, 445); see also Dueck (2006, 114–46); Ikenberry (2011, 222– 23, 234–39); Sestanovich (2014, 244–72); Brands (2016, 322–25); Green (2017, 427–52).

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Despite facing “no major contests of territory or ideology” from global challengers, however, the United States maintained its offshore footprint into the 1990s.1057 The main post-Cold War articulations of U.S. defence posture, though calling for troop drawdowns, recommended the United States reorganize its force to respond to emerging security threats in regions of interest, and to do so early.1058 This multiregional postwar security posture continued the United States’ Cold War ability to shape outcomes in regions far from its territory, or what is called its “command of the commons.”1059 A forward U.S. security perimeter would moderate or eliminate would-be regional challengers by credibly deterring them in their own regions, satisfy the security concerns of U.S. allies threatened by these challengers, and bind the alliance’s members to the United States’ interests and aims.1060

Second, the United States has combined its forward military posture with a bipartisan “democratic enlargement” agenda that connected acceptable statehood to regime type.1061 Described in its major defence posture documents and promoted by its leaders, this agenda justified the use of instruments of state, up to and including intervention, to help spread

1057 Lennon and Kozlowki (2008, vii). Since 1989 the only major threats the United States has faced to its homeland are global terrorism and (as of writing) recalcitrant states—“rogue states”—that have sponsored global terrorism or sought intercontinental nuclear weapons capacity. See Art (2003, 15–19, 47–55); Litwak (2000); and Monteiro (2014, 144–78, 193–204).

1058 These include the 1990 and 1991 National Security Strategies, the “Base Force concept,” the “New Defence Strategy” (1990), the National Military Strategy (1992), the Defence Planning Guidance and its controversial final version, Defence Strategy for the 1990s: Regional Defence Strategy (1993), these last two penned by Dick Cheney. As Sestanovich (2014, 258) summarizes, the various security strategies articulated by U.S. policymakers in the early 1990s “sounded the same notes. Vital U.S. interests could be jeopardized even in a world in which America faced no real peer competitor…. To limit conflict in the post-Cold War world, the United States had to remain the principal source of global security.” See also Litwak (2000, 26–33); Layne (2006, 25–38); Brands (2008, 96–100, 2016, 322– 35); Sestanovich (2014, 244–45, 258, 269–70); Carvin and Williams (2015, 151–56); Green (2017, 429–34).

1059 Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, 19–22, 111, 116); for the term “command of the commons,” see Posen (2003).

1060 See Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, esp. 88-121); Cha (2016); Weitsman (2014).

1061 For early expositions see Anthony Lake (1993); and Brinkley (1997).

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democratic regimes.1062 It has also sought to revise the status quo along its periphery in what Robert Jervis has called “hegemonic revisionism.”1063 Under democratic enlargement, the United States has “consolidated and expanded” its security perimeter deeper into and beyond the core Cold War regions of Western Europe and East Asia.1064 U.S. hostility toward certain regimes, especially recalcitrant powers whose domestic pathologies are connected in U.S. statements to their international hostility, is the sharp end of this agenda.1065

Third, despite its global power projection capabilities and attempts to revise the status quo along its periphery, U.S. primacy is not homogeneously global as often construed.1066 Ostensibly global elements of U.S. primacy—its provision of public goods—are only available to members of its hierarchy and sometimes have adverse effects on outsiders.1067 Participation in the United States’ alliance structure is still concentrated among its Cold War allies: economically advanced democratic states in Western and Central Europe, under the aegis of NATO, and among democracies in East Asia.1068

1062 Posen (2014, 5–11, 50); Brands (2016, 325–26); Jervis (2006) and Hurd (2007) argue this agenda was largely status-quo until 2003, when it became revisionist.

1063 See also Jervis (2006, 9, see also 2009, 199–200); Ikenberry (2011, 244); Dueck (2006, 119); Brands (2016, 317–35).

1064 Ikenberry (2011, 222–23); see also Dueck (2006, 114); Monteiro (2014, 66–68).

1065 See Litwak (2000, 2012); Nincic (2005) calls these “deviant regimes.” Like “enlargement,” the “rogue state” policy was first outlined by Anthony Lake (1994). Posen (2013, 6–7) extends this to include “failed states, rogue states, and illiberal peer competitors.” I use Monteiro’s (2014, 154–55) more neutral term “recalcitrant power.”

1066 This is true even of analyses that focus on “geopolitical” factors (e.g. Brzezinski 1997, 10; Posen 2014, xii; Brooks and Wohlforth 2016a, 73–74). See also Ikenberry’s discussion of poles as hubs (2011, 132–37). Exceptions include Nye (2015, e.g. 8-15); Acharya (2014, esp. 36-39). As Joseph Nye (2015, 11) has remarked, however, U.S. primacy “was never really a global order, but more a group of like-minded states centered primarily in the Americas and Western Europe.”

1067 Nye (2015, 13–14); Acharya (2014, 33–58).

1068 Cha (2016); Ikenberry (2011, 130, 185–90, 296–99).

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Although many studies depict U.S. grand strategy as uniformly revisionist, U.S. revisionism, has been pronounced in some regions and not others.1069 America’s revisionism hews closely to Nicholas Spykman’s “Rimland,” a geopolitical space surrounding Eurasia that includes key strategic corridors and sits in close proximity to regional powers that might threaten U.S. control of the commons.1070 Many states in these regions, including those regional powers, remain unevenly integrated into U.S.-led institutions, or resisted them after 1989.1071 America’s post- Cold War presence in the Middle East, bound up with its strategic alliances with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia and significant post-Cold War interventionism, is highly contested.1072 Further afield, many states in Africa are only precariously integrated into U.S. economic institutions, and U.S. policymakers have shown little strategic interest in the continent since 1994.

The status of the United States’ chief potential rivals in Eurasia, Russia and China, underscore these geopolitical limits. Russia has reproached the United States “for its refusal to treat Russia as a great power in its own right, complete with a sphere of interests around its borders, and immune from Western interference.”1073 A we will see in the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions, Russian contestation of U.S. interventionism in the former Yugoslavia directly connected with Russians’ sense that the United States is revising its “near abroad.” While China participates much more actively in the postwar order’s economic institutions, it has also exhibited revisionist tendencies in its region, which I examine further in the dissertation’s conclusion. Both Russia

1069 Posen’s (2014, 67) blunt assessment is representative: “Liberal Hegemony… is inherently expansionist and seems destoned to drift regularly into military action. … The United States has expanded its alliances, taking on new responsibilities in the former Warsaw Pact states invited into NATO. The geographic scope of U.S. security interests now encompasses most of the globe.” See also Jervis (2006); Hurd (2007); and Legro (2011). Monteiro (2011, 2014) separates stability from peacefulness: post-Cold War unipolarity, though stable because nuclear weapons prevent major powers from revising the system, is not necessarily peaceful because the unipole may pursue revisionist in regions with minor powers. I take up Monteiro’s helpful regional distinctions below.

1070 Grygiel and Mitchell (2017, 1–5).

1071 See for example Acharya (2014, 38–58).

1072 See for example Trenin (2018, 39–40); on the consequences, Ahmad (esp. 2017, 199–201).

1073 Trenin (2016, 9).

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and China take restrictionist stances toward military intervention and its authorization under the United Nations Charter, appearing with some regularity in the intervention cases I discuss below.1074

5.2.2 Mapping the post-Cold War geopolitical bargains

Two issues concerning the American sphere warrant discussion before I proceed to mapping it. As was the case in the Cold War, the American sphere is not formally connected or articulated in a widely-shared international agreement such as the United Nations Charter. Conventional accounts of international authority argue the United Nations, and in particular the Security Council, acts as the post-Cold War’s premier legitimizing agent.1075 Yet U.S. primacy exists independent of the United Nations system, and of any major international agreement that might imbue it with global legitimacy. If the U.S. sphere exists independently of any widely shared international document, how does it act as legitimizing mechanism?

One way to answer this question would be to reverse this dissertation’s variables and use U.S. intervention variation to explain the sphere’s legitimacy.1076 To avoid introducing this circularity, I define U.S. primacy as being comprised by its immediate post-Cold War formal alliance structure.1077 Although interventions may have been used to extend the sphere during this period—the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, is sometimes understood to have done so1078— U.S. policies are formulated and clearly observable independent of them in its various security posture statements and alliance agreements. This also includes areas outside the U.S. sphere but where it has attempted to revise the status quo in its favour through the peaceful expansion of

1074 Berryman (2012); Garwood-Gowers (2016).

1075 See for example Hurd (2008, 5, 12–14); Ikenberry (2011, 246–54).

1076 Analysts often argue that the 2003 Iraq war eroded U.S. primacy. See for example Ikenberry (2011, 255–77); Hurd (2007).

1077 Here I have relied on Lake (2009a, 63–92); and Kang (2017).

1078 Trenin (2018, 1, 39–42).

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these alliances. NATO’s expansion into Central and Eastern Europe, for example, has taken place outside of direct military intervention.

I also draw on the hierarchies literature. Hierarchy is “a rank ordering of units from high to low”—a dominant state or pole ruling over subordinates, a rule that can be imposed or accepted.1079 An important component of hierarchy is legitimacy: “whether its constituent members see it as acceptable or better than any possible alternative—the way things must be.”1080 By legitimizing its rule over subordinates, a dominant state reduces the costs of its domination. As Lake summarizes,

Authority is typically more efficient in producing compliance than coercion, and especially coercive threats. Every state in history has sought to convert domination into authority to legitimate its power. It is far easier to rule society when subjects accept the power of the ruler as rightful or legitimate, and acknowledge their obligation or duty to comply with legitimate commands.1081

Scholars of U.S. hegemony note that it shares more features with hierarchy than it does anarchy.1082 As we noted in Chapter 4, United States policymakers invested resources into legitimatizing their hemispheric interventions within this hierarchy. As my description of U.S. primacy above shows, a major empirical component of post-Cold War U.S. hegemony is its legitimacy: the United States spends time and energy making its power “acceptable” to other states in its hierarchy by using, and maintaining, its institutional order.1083 On this view, U.S.

1079 Kang (2010, 23, 17); see also Lake (2009a).

1080 Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 173). For legitimacy in hierarchy, see Lake (2009a, 8–9, 41–42, 164–78, 2017, 359–66); Kang (2010, 17–24, 2012); see also Barkey (2008, esp. 98-108).

1081 Lake (2017, 365–66).

1082 Jervis (2009, 194); Ikenberry (2011, 55–77); see also Lake (2009a). For a strident account of U.S.-led hierarchy as a tributary regime, see Khong (2013).

1083 E.g. Kang (2010, 22): “crafting a set of norms and rules that are viewed as legitimate by secondary states is an integral task for the dominant state.”

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hegemony is a kind of hierarchy that is legitimate.1084 The legitimacy of the hierarchy, because representative of deep or complete participation in U.S.-led international order, also helps legitimize the United States’ overall systemic position. It is unlikely, for example, that former Soviet satellites would have joined NATO if the U.S. hierarchy was especially exploitative.1085

The legitimacy of the hierarchy thus imbues the dominant state with a symbolic authority as rightful ruler while allowing it to maintain a forward security presence through partnerships with states that might otherwise bandwagon with regional competitors or fall prey to them.1086 While hierarchical relationships are often internally contested by subordinates, more important for my study is contestation by potential rivals to the dominant state. As Lee notes, hegemonic authority is a “kind of power that draws the boundaries of social acceptable behaviors while constituting the ‘unspoken realities’ of who gets to shape the realm of ‘this is how things are.’”1087 I take the non-contestation of a hierarchy by another power as evidence of its acceptability to that power.1088 As we noted in Chapter 3, France sometimes contested Austria’s hegemony over Italy, and Russia’s hegemony over the Porte was widely contested by the other Powers as overreach. For the most part, however, each great power’s hierarchy was recognized by the others. In the Cold War, the superpowers’ conspicuous silence toward each other’s spheres signaled the acceptance of a tacit rule or principle. In the post-Cold War era, China and Russia have not contested the U.S. presence in the Caribbean, its dominant position in the Western hemisphere,

1084 Donnelly (2006); Clark (2009); Kang (2010, 22–23); Lee (2016, 56–66); contrast Monteiro (2014, 40): “If the unipole’s power augments to the point at which it can control all external behaviours of all other states, then hegemony has replaced unipolarity.”

1085 Thus the United States-led Cold War hierarchy had to be “inviting” to new states after the Cold War not just in principle (i.e. because liberal) but for reasons of legitimacy. For an approach to NATO expansion along these lines but which focusses on state socialization, see Schimmelfennig (1998).

1086 For the U.S. bargains in East Asia of this type, see Kang (2017); Goh (2013); on symbols and legitimacy, see Hurd (2008, 49–60); Lee (2016, 56–78).

1087 Lee (2016, 56).

1088 As I have noted, the existence and acceptance of multiple hierarchies by opposing dominant states is under- theorized. See Lake (2017, 372, 2010, 609).

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or even most of its Cold War alliance structure. Where contestation has occurred is only at the periphery of U.S. primacy, where the expansion of these networks is perceived to infringe on their regional areas of influence.1089

I map American primacy and its local bargains broadly following Lake’s analysis of “regional security clusters,” which measures hierarchy by the presence of the dominant state’s military forces on the territory of the subordinate, and the number of independent alliances possessed by the subordinate state.1090 The first geopolitical bargain encompasses the Western Hemisphere. Canada and Mexico are connected to the United States through NORAD and, in Canada’s case, through NATO. In effect Canada and Mexico have almost no ability to be meaningfully independent of the United States in the sense they cannot ally with competitors, and all three states share close cultural, political, and economic ties, current U.S. Presidential politics notwithstanding.1091

States in Central America and the Caribbean are “locked into an exclusive American-led sphere” through American security guarantees and regional organizations, including the OAS.1092 U.S. primacy also arguably includes South America, long considered a zone of exclusive American intervention.1093 As David Lake shows, the United States “possesses at least a measure of hierarchy over nearly every country in its hemisphere.”1094 It should be noted here that the United

1089 This contestation is both political (i.e., though statements and diplomatic protests) and material. Both China and Russia have, for example, engaged in probing behaviour ostensibly to test U.S. commitment to states on the periphery of its primacy. See Grygiel and Mitchell (2017, 42–76); Wright (2017, 33, 67–98).

1090 Lake (2009b, 45–46).

1091 For the construction of the North American security community, see Shore (1998); Gonzalez and Haggard (1998).

1092 Lake (2010, 600).

1093 For the history of the Monroe Doctrine up to the 20th Century, see Sexton (2011); Mariano (2011); and Gilderhus (2006), who follows Smith (1995a, 1995b) in arguing that the Monroe Doctrine ceased to exist after 1991 largely because Latin America became less strategically unimportant to the United States.

1094 Lake (2009b, 47)

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States has since 1989 attempted to reset its relationship with Latin America, culminating in John Kerry’s 2013 renunciation of the Monroe Doctrine.1095 Recent moves by the Obama administration to “end” the Monroe Doctrine may have also challenged this primacy, but can also be read as an attempt by the United States to renegotiate its hierarchical relations with Latin American states.1096 Nonetheless, like Canada and Mexico, Latin American governments would have a difficult time shifting their security relationships to a regional power that is not the United States or a major power in their own region.

Further afield, second and third geopolitical bargains encompass the United States’ Cold War alliance networks in Europe and East Asia, respectively. Although together these constitute a “democratic ‘zone of peace’ bound together by a web of political, economic, and security ties,”1097 the geopolitical dynamic in each region differs from the other. The United States’ presence in Western Europe centres on NATO, whereas in East Asia its primacy is structured through bilateral “hub-and-spoke” security alliances. The primary regional rivals in either case— Russia in Europe and China in East Asia—have different profiles and geopolitical concerns, although they often object to U.S. interventionism is similar ways. In both East Asia and Europe, however, levels of security hierarchy and U.S. legitimacy are high.1098

Unlike the previous two periods, where the spheres were relatively static (the status of Cuba notwithstanding), the European zone in the post-Cold War era has been in motion since 1990. NATO expanded in three primary phases: in 1990 to include former Soviet satellites Poland,

1095 See Jensen (2013).

1096 See Keck (2013). Studies show that Chinese investment in the region has replaced U.S. investment; see Urdinez et al (2016), but others highlight how Latin America remains firmly in the U.S. sphere; see Roett and Paz (2008, 62– 63).

1097 Cheney (1993, 1).

1098 Lake (2009b, 50–51); Kang (2017). See also Jervis (2009, 201), who emphasizes the hierarchical element; see also Goh (2013) and Cha (2016) for U.S. hierarchy in East Asia. As Wright (2017, 33–34) notes, “the most important piece of the liberal order is not the United Nations or international financial institutions, important as they are. It is healthy regional orders. America’s greatest success after World War II was to create a system in Western Europe and Northeast Asia… if those orders fall apart, so will the global order.”

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Hungary, and the Czech Republic; in 2004 to include former Soviet satellites Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia and the Baltic States, which were constituent republics of the Soviet Union; and in 2009 to include Albania and Croatia, both former constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).1099

Amidst these expansions, NATO also experienced a crisis concerning its future as a security instrument. NATO was designed to prevent German expansion and balance against the Soviet Union; neither of these purposes obtained in the immediate post-Cold War era. NATO expansion has had significant consequences on the geopolitical bargain in Europe, as we will see in the Yugoslavia intervention cases below, in large part because Russia understood the bargain to exclude NATO expansion from the former Soviet space.1100

Finally, there is less consensus that the United States maintains an unchallenged position in the Middle East or Africa, and it possesses no formal security alliances with any nations in either region. The United States has constructed an informal geopolitical bargain in the Middle East through its support of Egypt and Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and containment of Iran. This grand strategy is usually understood as having been status-quo oriented until 2003—as maintaining the Middle East’s balance of power.1101 As Nuno Monteiro notes, the United States largely disengaged from Africa—the only region from which it did so post-1989—after its mission in Somalia produced a number of American casualties in the infamous “Black Hawk Down” raid.1102 A survey of recent high-profile arguments about U.S. grand strategy confirms this peripheral status.1103

1099 In 2017 Montenegro, also a former SFRY constituent republic, joined NATO, though this after the time period I cover here.

1100 See Shifrinson (2016); Tsygankov (2018).

1101 See Simon and Stevenson (2015). For the U.S.-Israel relationship understood in terms of a client state or proxy state, see Bar-Siman-Tov (1998)

1102 Monteiro (2014, 70–71, 184, 202n86).

1103 Africa is mentioned only once (in a list) in Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, 117), and barely at all in Posen (2014, 84–85, 97) or Ikenberry (e.g. 2011, 16, 55, 89, 355), where it usually appears in lists. Wight (2017, 46, 76, 101, 172)

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5.2.3 Intervention purpose

As we saw in the Cold War chapter, the United Nations Charter restricts the use of force without Security Council authorization to self-defence under the general norm of sovereign nonintervention.1104 Its Chapter VII provisions, specifically articles 39 through 42, outline a last- resort process by which the Security Council can authorize United Nations members to use force against another state.1105 The United Nations Charter generally prohibits the use of force and delegates both responsibility for system stability and authority for exceptions to that prohibition to the victors of World War 2, it sets up a system in which only the great powers (also a pentarchy) can authorize uses of force to maintain the stability of the international system.1106

Three kinds of events can provoke legitimate intervention responses: (1) direct or imminent attack, (2) attack on an ally, or (3) humanitarian crises.1107 The first two are carry-overs from the Cold War, and are interpreted to cover collective interventions authorized by the Security Council and the protection of overseas nationals, but rule out preventive interventions, interventions that disrupt the status quo by facilitating breakaway secessionism, and territorial conquests.1108

has only five in-text mentions of Africa, including South Africa, and only one occurs outside of a list of regions or states (‘North Africa’); Patrick (2017, 92, 134, 231, 239, 250) has five, only twice outside a list (‘West Africa’). Scholars have paid more attention lately to China’s search for resource extraction partnerships in Africa, e.g. Carmody and Owusu (2007).

1104 Chesterman (2001, 46–87); Gray (2010, 92–94).

1105 Chesterman (2001, 45); Bjola (2009, 45–63); Gray (2008, chapters 2, 7).

1106 See Hehir (2013a, 145–67).

1107 Finnemore (2004, 129–30).

1108 For a compact summary, see Bjola (2008, 58). As mentioned above, the United Nations Charter limits the use of force to self-defence and defence of an ally. For discussions of self-defence as a legal intervention norm, see Doyle (2008, 7–42); Bjola (2009, 41–63); for the history of the norms more broadly, see Johnson (2014).

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The study of humanitarian justifications of uses of force is a large and growing research programme.1109 These studies emphasize how humanitarian crises have joined national and extended defense norms as possible legitimate reasons for the use of force. Humanitarian norms justify the use of force by connecting the purpose of an intervention to “saving strangers”—“to protect human beings trapped in the throes of wars.”1110 Although the legality of humanitarian intervention is unclear, most scholars of intervention argue that humanitarian justifications have been employed, sometimes prominently, by intervening powers in the post-Cold War era.1111 New studies locate the rise of humanitarian intervention norms in the early to mid-19th Century or earlier, but the deliberate use of humanitarian crises to justify military interventions is new in post-Cold War era politics.1112

5.2.4 Assurance strategies

Interventions after 1989 can be legitimized in formal institutional settings that emphasize procedural and legal multilateralism and consensus.1113 Two procedural use-of-force norms have emerged in the post-Cold War environment. First, interveners can engage in robust multilateralism when they use force abroad, both procedurally through coalitions and through seeking wide international or relevant regional consensus.1114 Second, their interventions can be

1109 Influential here are Wheeler (2000); Chesterman (2001); and Finnemore (2004). Much if not most of the vast humanitarian intervention literature emphasizes normative rather than explanatory analysis; see for example Moore (1998); Welsh (2004); Holzgrefe and Keohane (2003); Nardin and Williams (2006); Evans (2008); Newman (2009); Weiss (2016); Hehir (2012, 2013a); Scheid (2014); Bellamy (2009, 2014); Doyle (2015); Menon (2016). I count almost 50 book-length treatments of this character published since 2010 on the Responsibility to Protect alone.

1110 Weiss (2016, 1). For debates about contemporary humanitarian practice, see; Barnett and Weiss (2011); Barnett (2011). At the root of humanitarianism and humanitarian norms is the Hippocratic view that all human beings are liable to physical suffering and harm, and this suffering can be alleviated through medical, political, and/or military intervention by fortunates. See Finkielkraut (2000); Boltanski (1999); Stamatov (2013).

1111 See Chesterman (2001); Hurd (2011).

1112 See Bass (2009); Simms and Trim (2011); Rodogno (2012); Recchia and Welsh (2013); and Glanville (2013).

1113 For a detailed discussion of these norms, see Clark (2005, 155–243).

1114 In the language of the concert, through material or moral support.

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legally authorized, usually by an active United Nations Security Council resolution or, failing that, through the prosecution of a standing one. Multilateral legitimacy is thus ideally signaled through the construction of large multinational intervention coalitions and legal legitimacy is granted by United Nations Security Council resolutions, the highest legal authority in international law.1115

As noted, in the post-Cold War era the United States be less concerned about escalation control and assurance against costly pushback because it faces no peers in strictly power projection terms. Legitimation strategies have two potential benefits for intervening powers in the post- Cold War era, however.1116 First, like in the Concert period, they help legitimize particular interventions by making that use of force acceptable to other relevant audiences in the system— be these other powers, domestic audiences, or members of a hierarchy. An intervener can show commitment to use-of-force norms by spending resources to bring its intervention conduct in line with those norms. As the literature on legitimacy shows, this has the instrumental effect of reducing costly contestation that might arise to block the intervention or make its prosecution more difficult.1117

Second, related to the first, costly adherence to formal and substantive multilateralism credibly signal an intervener’s commitment to the order and therefore its great power (or “hegemonic”) restraint. This has the added effect in the post-Cold War of buttressing that order if these signals are undertaken by the unipole, or what Brooks and Wohlforth call “general” as opposed to “specific” legitimation.1118 Because the post-Cold War order is comparatively more intertwined with the actions of the unipole than the Concert of Europe order with actions of any one of its powers, it is especially important the unipole maintain the legitimacy of its rule.

1115 See for example Chesterman (2001); MacFarlane (2002, 61ff); Finnemore (2004, 134); Cronin and Hurd (2008, 16–17); Hurd (2008, 12–19, 124–36); Gray (2008); Newman (2009, 42–44); Orford (2011, 164–67); Badescu (2011, 48–60); Glanville (2013, 171–212).

1116 Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 176).

1117 See for example Kreps (2011, 4–9); c.f. Finnemore (2004, 16–17).

1118 Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 176).

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5.3 Military intervention after the Cold War

The United States, along with its allies, militarily intervened overtly ten times in the 1989-2014 period: in Panama (1989); twice in Iraq (1991, 2003); in Somalia (1993); in Haiti (1994); twice in the former Yugoslavia (1996, 1998); in Afghanistan (2001); in Liberia (2003); and in Libya (2011).

Overall, these interventions show behaviour consistent with my expectations, with some caveats that I unpack below. In its interventions outside of the U.S. sphere—Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Libya—the United States tended to pursue costly legitimacy strategies or scale its strategy down only when it enjoyed a priori legitimacy from some other mechanism (e.g. Afghanistan). At the margins of its sphere, the U.S. employed legitimacy strategies somewhere between perfunctory and costly. As I will show below, these interventions—both in Yugoslavia—were mostly aimed at repurposing NATO than signaling non-revisionist intentions to Russia, its key regional rival. This corresponded to significant Russian objection. Inside its sphere, the United States intervened unilaterally (Panama) and semi-multilaterally (Haiti). As I show below, the Haiti intervention was operationally unilateral; the checklist multilateralism the United States secured can be understood as U.S. policymakers’ attempts to gain regional legitimacy and global partners for the purposes of burden-sharing in an intervention that had a long subsequent occupation (unlike Panama).

5.3.1 Interventions in the spheres: Panama and Haiti

The United States intervened twice in its sphere in this period: in 1989 in Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, and again in Haiti in 1993 to reinstall Jean Baptiste Aristide as President. In both instances the United States pursued perfunctory to nonexistent assurance strategies, operating unilaterally in the precise sense of the term, although in the Haiti case it secured broad Security Council authorization, which I investigate below. Major power contestation was limited to diplomatic condemnations and materially nonexistent.

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5.3.1.1 Operation Just Cause, 1989

On December 20, 1989, some 26,000 United States troops deposed Panama’s dictator, Manuel Noriega. The intervention, named “Operation Just Cause,”1119 followed on months of American diplomatic attempts to remove Noriega from power, who they publicly accused of aiding money laundering, drug trafficking, and ignoring the results of Panama’s May 1989 elections (which he lost). Largely controlled by Colin Powell according to his overwhelming force doctrine, was the largest American military operation since Vietnam and the largest paratrooper airdrop since World War 2.1120

As was the case with other U.S. interventions in Latin America, the White House’s primary justification for the intervention was the protection of the 35,000 U.S. citizens in Panama. This was supplemented with arguments about combatting drug trafficking, defending democracy in Panama, and protecting the Torrijos-Carter treaty that governed the Panama Canal. President George H.W. Bush was furthermore concerned that Noriega would be able to appoint the head of the Panama Canal commission once Panama took full sovereignty of the canal in 1990.1121 The United States quickly installed the previously-elected Guillermo Endara as President; though he would later lose in 1994 elections, his installation may have provided the mission with “limited political cover from Latin American aversion to the United States’ meddling in countries within the Southern Hemisphere.”1122

1119 This was the first non-randomly named U.S. military operation. Its original name was “Operation Blue Spoon.” The commander in chief of Special Operations Command called Chief of Staff John Kelly, “Do you want your grandchildren to say you were in Blue Spoon?” Deputy for Current Operations Joe Lopez then suggested “Just Cause.” Quoted in Woodward (2013, 173).

1120 Grow (2008, 182–83); Henriksen (2007, 29); Crandall (2006, 171, 201). For the background and general details of the intervention, I have relied on Hamilton (2008, 26–27); Grow (2008, 159–84); Brands (2008, 41–46); Crandall (2006, 171–224); Henriksen (2007, 23–34); Hippell (2000, 27–54).

1121 Henriksen (2007, 25).

1122 Henriksen (2007, 31); see also Hippel (2000, 50); Grow (2008, 182).

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The Panama intervention broke with the precedent set in the Cold War, explored in the previous chapter. Unlike those, the United States could not use arguments about the hemispheric defence of extra-hemispheric influences such as international communism, or associate Noriega with Castro’s Cuba. As Michael Grow notes, Manuel Noriega was “precisely the kind of Latin American leader the United States had so often accepted as an ally in the struggle against international communism.”1123 In his televised address, George H.W. Bush used only one line of hemispheric language: “I am committed to strengthening our relationship with the democratic nations in this hemisphere.”1124 Cynthia Weber argues that the U.S. strategy was to “domesticate” Panama through the “discourse of the War on Drugs.”1125 Others have noted that the intervention may have been caused by the Bush administration’s desire to look tough in the United States’ region; Colin Powell said of the intervention that it reaffirmed “the superpower lives here.”1126

International contestation of the intervention, which proceeded with no regional or United Nations resolution, was muted. On December 22, the Organization for American States (OAS) voted 20 to 1, with 6 abstentions, to condemn the intervention and call for a complete U.S. withdrawal; in private, many OAS members were appreciative Noriega was gone.1127 A Security Council resolution sponsored by Colombia condemning the intervention and calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops was vetoed the next day by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the debate, the United States justified its “unilateral” intervention on the basis of the self-defence provisions contained in UN Charter Article 51 and OAS Charter Article 21 and “defence of the Panama Canal Treaties.”1128 U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas

1123 Grow (2008, 160).

1124 Bush (1989).

1125 Weber (1995, 115).

1126 Quoted in Brands (2010, 245); see also Grow (2008, 174, 178, 183); Henriksen (2007, 25).

1127 Hippel (2000, 46–47); Henriksen (2007, 31).

1128 United Nations (1989, 8–10).

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Pickering exhorted the OAS to “deal collectively with this hemisphere’s number one problem and outlaw.”1129

The Soviet Union, which had virtually no connections to Noriega, explained it supported the resolution because U.S. actions violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Panama, and were thus “incompatible with the positive trends now being consolidated in world politics.”1130 It called for the Security Council to monitor the situation, and for the United States to withdraw its troops.1131 The United Nations General Assembly voted 75 to 20, with 40 abstentions, to condemn the intervention as a violation of international law on December 29.1132 Apart from these diplomatic overtures, no state suggested imposing costs on the United States, and the intervention was relatively popular in both the United States and Panama.1133

In all, the United States made very little effort to justify the intervention abroad; it intervened unilaterally in the precise sense, and did not consult relevant regional or international institutions. Almost the only notable contestation came from OAS—Henriksen calls its “censorious judgment” a “landmark in the OAS’ 42-year history”—reflecting the lack of care the United States took to secure the intervention’s legitimacy within its own region. Nonetheless, the Operation demonstrated the U.S.’s ability to “determine outcomes” in its region—its “hegemony in Central America and the Caribbean.”1134 Just Cause thus sits on the extreme end of legitimacy strategies, featuring even less multilateralism than the U.S.’s Cold War Latin American interventions.

1129 United Nations (1989, 11).

1130 United Nations (1989, 23).

1131 United Nations (1989, 26). China’s representative appears not to have spoken.

1132 Hamilton (2008, 28); Lewis (1989); Henriksen (2007, 31).

1133 Hippell (2008, 45–46); Crandall (2006, 208–10).

1134 Crandall (2006, 172).

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5.3.1.2 Operation Uphold Democracy, 1994

A few years later, the United States intervened in Haiti to reinstall Jean Baptiste Aristide, a charismatic Catholic priest elected in December 1990 and overthrown by a military junta in 1991. Although it refused to recognize the new regime, the Bush (41) administration did little to return to Aristide to power and imposed a policy of turning Haitian refugees away. During the 1992 Presidential election, Bill Clinton promised to take action and “buttress democratic forces in Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and throughout the Western Hemisphere.”1135

Once President, Clinton in fact tightened the refugee returns policy and instituted a naval blockade.1136 In July 1993, the military junta agreed to the Governors Island Accord, under which Aristide would return, the junta would leave under amnesty. This accord was endorsed by the OAS and United Nations Security Council, which in September established the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH) through resolutions 862 and 867. After the mission’s first ship, the USS Harlan County, was turned back by protestors in October, the Clinton administration tightened sanctions with Security Council-approved embargo in May 1994. After Security Council resolution 940 authorized “all means necessary,” the United States enlisted nineteen coalition partners, including several OAS states, Canada, and France, in a multinational force (MNF); stationed two aircraft carriers off of Haiti’s coast; and prepared to oust Haiti’s junta with 20,000 troops. Under pressure from the Black National Congress and “fed up” with the junta, President Clinton sent Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn in a last minute bid to convince the military leaders to stand down before the intervention took place.1137 The diplomatic intervention was successful; when U.S. troops landed in Haiti on September 19, they faced no resistance. Aristide returned from U.S.-subsidized exile in Washington to take power in Porte-au-Prince on October 15, 1994.1138

1135 Quoted in Henriksen (2007, 71).

1136 For Clinton’s defence of this policy reversal, see Clinton (2004, 463–67).

1137 Clinton (2004, 616–18).

1138 For this case I have relied on Hippel (2000, 91–126); Henriksen (2007, 70–77); Kreps (2007); Recchia (2015, 66–106); Clinton (2004, 586–87)

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The Clinton administration’s justifications for the intervention made recourse to familiar Cold War hemispheric themes: democracy had been denied in a Western hemisphere state, U.S. citizens were in danger, and the military junta was committing human right atrocities.1139 Importantly, Clinton deployed “mirroring” language by comparing U.S.-Haiti relations with those of Russia to Georgia, and traded a Soviet vote on resolution 904 for U.S. support for a CIS- sponsored peacekeeping force in Georgia.1140 This deal was criticized as a “revival of classic spheres-of-influence diplomacy” and may have harmed U.S. standing in the region.1141

Why did the United States operate through the United Nations and MNF if an intervention in its sphere should be only marginally contested and there was no strategic rationale for a burden- sharing coalition?1142 Some scholars consider the Haiti operation a harbinger of the post-Cold War multilateral norm or a deviation from the U.S.’s usual Western hemisphere unilateralism.1143 The United States has a history of unilaterally intervening in Haiti—like Panama, Grenada, and the Dominican Republic—under Monroe Doctrine or neo-Monroeist pretenses, and occupied Haiti between from 1915 until Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour policy.1144 As we saw in the last chapter, U.S. legitimacy strategies in during the Cold War were oriented toward satisfying regional governments and securing regional solidarity with the U.S.’s hemispheric rule. The intervention in Haiti thus appears to mark a break with the United States’ previously Monroeist policies. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, “For the first time in history, the [Security] council had specifically authorized the United States to use force to intervene in another country in our hemisphere.”1145

1139 Hippel (2000, 101–3).

1140 Hehir (2013b, 143); Hippel (2000, 101); Kreps (2011, 81, 84).

1141 Recchia (2015, 76).

1142 Kreps (2007, 451, 455–56).

1143 Hippel (2000, 117).

1144 Kreps (2007, 457–58); Henriksen (2007, 70).

1145 Albright (2003, 160).

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To be sure, the Haiti intervention was more multilateral at the global level than previous U.S. interventions in its sphere. It operated from beginning to end under a set of Security Council authorizations and was formally conducted by a coalition of twenty to thirty members at different stages. In these regards, intervention was both a “typical case of ‘regional power projection’ by the US government in its area of influence” and a harbinger of the strategy the United States would employ in other Security Council-authorized interventions such as Somalia, Bosnia, and Liberia.1146 Although not costly in the same sense as the Iraq or Libya interventions discussed below, the Haiti intervention was not equivalent to Panama.

Sarah Kreps has shown that at the operational level, the intervention was almost entirely unilaterally planned and executed, however, with only a few Caribbean countries scattering troops around Haiti’s borders. In July 1994, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the intervention planners to seek nominal support from “as many flags as possible” from Caribbean countries, as opposed to actual participation.1147 The State Department followed this up by enlisting support from a small group of states—either NATO members or Latin American states—to form an observer group at the Haiti-Dominican Republic border.1148 Virtually none of these countries participated in the July intervention, however, having been excluded from American planning. The extra-regional coalition participation from states such as France was limited to agreements concerning post-intervention stabilization, which Colin Powell worried, even though the U.S. could “take over the place in afternoon,” would lead to mission creep.1149 By October 1994, 97 percent of the troops in Haiti were still American.1150

In effect, the United States engaged in checklist multilateralism to build limited legitimacy for an intervention it was reluctant to undertake, lacking “vital interests” that could have mollified

1146 Hippel (2000, 117).

1147 Kreps (2011, 78).

1148 Kreps (2007, 461).

1149 Quoted in Kreps (2011, 82).

1150 Kreps (2011, 79).

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domestic support around a more visibly unilateral strike.1151 By building a coalition-in-waiting around its intervention, the United States could ensure burden-sharing once initial military operations were over and state-building activities began.1152 Like its Cold War interventions, the United States’ regional legitimacy strategy centred on the nominal inclusion of OAS and Caribbean states, linking economic aid to support for its Haiti mission.1153 It had little success here and was “emphatically” opposed by the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil.1154 It also did not have to worry about major power contestation. Although Russia horse-traded recognition of its troops in Georgia for a Security Council vote, “the Russians didn’t much care about what we did in Haiti.”1155

U.S. participation at the United Nations, where policymakers “log-rolled” Security Council votes, was similarly of low cost—and had the added benefit of shoring up the United States’ post-Cold War role as hegemon over a “rules-based” order, although critics noted that the United States had made the United Nations legitimate the “realpolitik tradition… known as the Monroe doctrine.”1156 Secretary of State Madeline Albright supported a military solution against the wishes of the U.S. ambassador in Haiti—who argued military intervention “would be opposed in the hemisphere”—because the United Nations and OAS had already signaled support for an intervention.1157 Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s main objection to a military

1151 Recchia (2015, 67–68); Kreps (2011, 81) quotes a New York Times report: “The decision [to seek UN authorization] reflects a sense of diminished urgency within the Administration now that the flood of refugees has dwindled to a trickle.”

1152 Kreps (2011, 74–75).

1153 Recchia (2015, 74).

1154 Recchia (2015, 100).

1155 Albright (2003, 158).

1156 Kreps (2011, 84–85).

1157 Albright (2003, 157–58).

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intervention was that he did not want the United Nations, cash-strapped from Somalia, to bear the costs.1158

As Kreps summarizes, although the U.S. “was clearly interested in being seen as multilateral,” it put only perfunctory efforts into multilateralism at the diplomatic level or any real multilateralism at the operational level. The United States “co-opted the participation of small Caribbean states, referred to by one military planner as ‘window dressing’ since these states did not influence combat plans, contributed few of the initial troops, and did not have a leadership role in the intervention.”1159 And it used the United Nations because doing so had a good cost-to- benefit ratio: it could secure Security Council legitimacy and future burden-sharing by working with existing United Nations resolutions rather than outside or against them. Despite arguing that the United States constrained itself by working with the United Nations, Stefano Recchia’s analysis largely confirms this narrative: U.S. policymakers sought Security Council approval because military officials would oppose “any deployment of U.S. combat troops in the absence of an exit strategy” and demanded assurances “ahead of intervention” that coalition partners would bear the long-term burdens of stabilizing Haiti.1160

In toto, the Haiti intervention is probably best understood in the context of a new post-Cold War geopolitical bargain for the Western Hemisphere. In that bargain, the United States enjoys unrivalled hegemony in its neighbourhood, but also seeks to secure global legitimacy for itself and the newly revived Security Council mechanism by pursuing formal multilateralism when convenient—and so long as this can be done relatively painlessly. Absent Soviet competition in its sphere, furthermore, the United States need worry less about hemispheric defections and more about its global position outside its sphere. Unfortunately, what I have been able to find from the two cases here, clustered at the beginning of the period, do not yet admit this level of determinacy.

1158 Albright (2003, 157–58).

1159 Kreps (2011, 84).

1160 Recchia (2015, 66). I thus disagree, however, with Recchia’s assessment that the United States made “an all-out diplomatic effort to secure UN approval,” especially compared with the Iraq and Kosovo cases.

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5.3.2 Interventions outside of the sphere: Iraq (x2), Somalia, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Libya

The United States intervened outside of its sphere five times—in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, in Somalia in 1992-1993, in Afghanistan in 2001, and Libya in 2011. With some variation, all the cases except Afghanistan broadly match my expectations: the United States where the United States secured or attempted to secure Security Council authorization and intervened alongside robust, multinational coalitions.1161

On the smaller end of the spectrum, the 1992 and 2003 interventions in Somalia and Liberia involved a relatively lean military forces (~25,000 in Somalia, less than 300 in Liberia) deployed under Security Council-authorized humanitarian missions and were not preceded by large or costly legitimation campaigns. As I discuss below, owing to their size, strategic remoteness, and UN authorization, these interventions enjoyed a priori legitimacy that obviated the United States’ need to employ costly legitimacy strategies.

The 2001 Afghanistan intervention had a smaller profile than the other interventions despite featuring a large number of troops and a substantial state-building mission. Initially, the United States initially intervened virtually unilaterally and without engaging in any meaningfully in any legitimacy strategies, shifting to multilateralism and adopting a legitimacy strategy after it entered into a protracted occupation of Afghanistan. Below, I show that its intervention profile was the result of a priori legitimacy generated by the 9/11 attacks, which obviated the need for the United States to engage in costly legitimacy strategies. It thus fits the logic highlighted by Kreps, allowing Donald Rumsfeld’s rule to obtain: “the mission must determine the coalition. The coalition ought not determine the mission.”1162

The two interventions in Iraq involved the largest military coalitions assembled during the period. Although standard accounts attribute this to a difference between preemptive and

1161 See Weitsman (2014) for the Iraq and Libya interventions profiles.

1162 Rumsfeld (2013, 227).

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preventative intervention, my analysis here shows that fears that the United States sought to revise the Middle East by installing a subordinate state in Iraq contributed to the contestation.

Last, the 2011 Libya intervention featured a robust multilateral intervening coalition in both of its stages and wide institutional legitimacy from the United Nations and several regional organizations. Although it is often understood as a U.S. intervention, it was undertaken by Britain and France and prosecuted by NATO, and thus does not technically qualify as a great power intervention.1163 Nonetheless, the United States played a large role in the intervening coalition. Below, I note the intervention lost its legitimacy when NATO abandoned its UN- authorized aims and actively pursuing regime change.

5.3.2.1 Interventions in Africa I: Operation Restore Hope (1992) and Joint Task Force Liberia (2003)

The small profiles of the Somalia and Liberia interventions were due to their a priori legitimacy and lack of contestation from other relevant powers. In 1992, Operation Restore Hope deployed 25,000 U.S. troops as part of a multinational “Unified Task Force” (UNITAF). The UNITAF mission was unanimously authorized by Security Council resolution 794 to defend humanitarian aid delivery from Somali warlords, bridging the gap between the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM I) and its sequel, UNOSOM II.1164

The mission enjoyed widespread legitimacy despite one infamous incident in which 18 U.S. soldiers died when an attempt to stop killing Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a Somali warlord held responsible for sacking aid convoys, went awry.1165 Legitimizing factors included its remoteness (at the time, Somalia was not considered a space of strategic competition); the unanimous consent of the Security Council; and the fact no recognized government existed in Somalia at the

1163 Weitsman (2014, 172).

1164 See Chesterman (2001, 140–43); Talentino (2005, 111–12); Wheeler (2000, 172–207).

1165 For a general background, see Talentino (2005, 95–108).

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time.1166 Andrea Talentino notes that Somalia held strategic interest for the United States because of its ports and potential access to the Middle East, but at the time no other regional or major powers appear to have been interested in attracting it as a client state or countering potential American influence.1167 The White House made public statements before committing troops that it would not act without Security Council authorization, and justifications by China and Russia for their approval of the resolution noted the mission’s “exceptional” and “unique” nature.1168

In 2003, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked the United States to intervene in Liberia to arrest an ongoing civil war between two rebel groups and the Liberian government, then led by Charles Taylor. The civil war had produced hundreds of thousands of refugees, and in 2003 tens of thousands of them converged on Monrovia, the capital, which lacked the resources to provide for them. Owing to its abilities and historical ties to Liberia, Annan argued, the United States should take a lead role in solving the crisis. About 300 U.S. troops landed in Liberia in early August and secured the airport and seaport. A West African occupation force operating under the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) replaced them in, and subsequently by a United Nations mission.1169

Several factors contributed to Joint Task Force Liberia’s legitimacy, allowing the United States to forgo a costly legitimacy strategy without suffering legitimacy costs. First, the United Nations Secretary-General explicitly solicited the mission, which was authorized by Security Council

1166 See United Nations (1989); Secretary General of the United Nations (Secretary General of the United Nations 1992); Wheeler (2000, 173–87); Krieg (2012, 72–77, esp. 75); Hehir (2013b, 145).

1167 Talentino (2005, 112); cf. Krieg (2012, 75): “US geo-strategic interests in Somalia were hard to find in 1992/93.”

1168 Wheeler (2000, 182). The Russian delegation said it was “convinced that at the present juncture, resolution of the crisis requires the use of international armed forces under the auspices of the Security Council… The Russian Federation will therefore vote in favour of the draft resolution.” The Chinese delegation supported the “exceptional action in view of the unique situation in Somalia.” Quoted from United Nations (1989, 26–27, 17); see also Chesterman (2001, 142).

1169 Kuperman (2015); Recchia (2015, 231–34); Weiner (2003).

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resolution 1497 on August 1, 2003.1170 This allowed U.S. troops to handoff care for the country to peacekeeping forces organized under ECOWAS the United Nations, appeasing domestic constituents in the United States concerned about mission creep.1171 Further, because a ceasefire agreement was reached in June and Charles Taylor stepped down before the marines entered the country, U.S. troops did not have to use force against the government or overtly violate sovereign nonintervention norms. Last, the intervention was endorsed by ECOWAS and had wide regional legitimacy. This plus the absence of any competing major power interests –neither China nor Russia expressed concerns about resolution 1497—arguably contributed to the mission’s legitimacy. 1172

5.3.2.2 Intervention in Asia: Operation Enduring Freedom (2001)

Afghanistan likewise had a small legitimacy profile because its a priori legitimacy allowed the United States to tailor its coalition for military effectiveness. Afghanistan thus fits Sarah Kreps’ argument about coalition size.1173 The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. were widely interpreted as direct attacks on the territorial integrity of the United States. When Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, was located in Afghanistan and negotiations with the Taliban leadership broke down, the United States launched an invasion of Afghanistan, “Operation Enduring Freedom,” on October 7, 2001. By early December the Taliban leadership had abandoned Kandahar, their last stronghold and the birthplace of the Taliban movement.1174

1170 See United Nations (2003h).

1171 Recchia (2015, 232).

1172 United Nations (2003g); Recchia (2015, 233).

1173 Kreps (2011).

1174 For the failed negotiations with the Taliban, see Ahmad (2017, 146–52).

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Although the Security Council did not explicitly authorize Enduring Freedom, the operation was viewed as a legitimate exercise of self-defence.1175 Indeed, it came after a wellspring of support and empathy for the United States. As Sarah Kreps puts it, “from the now-famous ‘nous sommes tous americains’ headline in Le Monde to the unprecedented Article V invocation by NATO to the unanimous condemnation of the attacks within the Security Council, the United States enjoyed a rare respite in anti-Americanism and resistance to U.S. policies abroad.”1176 Security Council resolution 1368, passed on September 12, “recognized the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the Charter” in its preamble.1177

The wellspring of sympathy effectively removed constraints on the United States’ legitimacy strategy by painting the intervention with the broad brush of self-defence. The United States “swiftly sought and received Security Council endorsement of its position” that 9/11 constituted an attack on the United States and as such any “action taken in self-defence was justified,” allowing it to forgo formally tabling a Security Council resolution that might constrain it future operability and instead notifying the Security Council, on October 8, 2001, that it was “exercising its right to self-defence” by intervening.1178 It was also able to intervene by building a flexible, non-constraining coalition; once the costly occupation was underway, it transferred the mission to NATO under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).1179 As Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld put it, “the historic pattern in the United States had emphasized the need to build the largest coalition possible, even if that meant allowing the coalition to determine

1175 Chesterman (2004, 164ff); for a detailed discussion of the legal right to self-defence in the context of 9/11, see Gray (2008, 193–216).

1176 Kreps (2011, 92, 94–97); see also Weitsman (2014, 124–29); Chesterman and Hall and Ross (2015, 191).

1177 See United Nations (2001).

1178 Chesterman (2004, 174, 164–65).

1179 Kreps (2011, 92–113); for Operation Enduring Force, see Weitsman (2014, 99–131); for ISAF, Auerswald and Saideman (2014).

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American objectives. ….America would best not be bound by a single large coalition that would able to determine what missions would be in our country’s best interests.”1180

Although Afghanistan lay far afield, then, geopolitically speaking the United States did not have to pursue a costly legitimacy strategy to generate support for Operation Enduring Freedom. It should be noted that initial justifications for the intervention did not indicate that the United States planned to quasi-permanently occupy, or annex, Afghanistan. In his autobiography, George W. Bush notes that the Administration took care to ensure the United States would not look like a “conqueror or occupier” by working with the Northern Alliance.1181 Donald Rumsfeld likewise emphasizes that “in all more than sixty-nine nations” contributed to the mission.”1182 As the occupation progressed, U.S. officials shifted to a costly legitimacy strategy that emphasized the multilateral, legal, and humanitarian characteristics of the occupation, arguably because the initial justification—capturing Osama bin Laden—no longer held muster.1183

The closest regional power, Russia, supported the September 12 resolution and future resolutions bringing the occupation under United Nation oversight, initially offering broad intelligence assistance, the use of Russian airspace, aiding in search-and-rescue missions, inducing Central Asian states to cooperate with Washington, and arming warlords in Afghanistan against the Taliban.1184 It would not commit troops to Afghanistan, however, because of the lack of an

1180 Rumsfeld (2013, 228, 2011, 354–55). This narrative is broadly confirmed by Bush (2011, 183–221); and see also Cheney (2011, 331): “We had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America, and we needed coalition partners who would sign on for that. The mission should define the coalition, not the other way around. The president made clear that he’d prefer to have allies with us, but we were at war, and if America had to stand alone, she would.” Rumsfeld (2011, 355) also notes the “the unilateralism accusation against Bush was a preposterous charge…. No senior administration official ever suggested that the United States would be better off responding to 9/11 alone…. The truth was that we solicited and eventually gained the assistance of more than ninety countries in the global coalition against terrorism.”

1181 Bush (2011, 187, 207).

1182 Rumsfeld (2011, 374).

1183 See Ayub and Kuovo (2008); Chesterman (2004).

1184 See Gerleman et al. (2001, 8); Tsygankov (2016, 147, 149–51).

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explicit Security Council resolution. It furthermore refused to allow NATO military operations “on the territory of Central Asian nations,” thereby forcing the United States to bribe Central Asian governments for logistical access it needed along Afghanistan’s border.1185

5.3.2.3 Interventions in Iraq: Operations Desert Storm (1990) and Iraqi Freedom (2003)

The two Iraq interventions were the largest interventions of the post-Cold War era. In both the United States pursued high-profile, costly legitimacy strategies, building coalitions of dozens of countries.1186 The dominant narrative concerning these interventions holds that the first Gulf War was legitimate because of its retroactive and multilateral nature, while the second was illegitimate because of its preventative, unilateral nature. Here, I argue that a central point of contention in 2003 was the Bush (43) White House’s openly revisionist intentions. In 1991, by contrast, the Bush (41) administration was able to signal restraint, and its respect for the Middle East status quo, through its Security Council activities.

The first Gulf War removed Iraqi troops from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein illegally invaded it. This activated the United Nations’ collective security mechanism.1187 Despite the immense size of the intervening coalition force, the United States did not make plans to “march on Baghdad” and exhausted diplomatic efforts before building wide international support for the intervention. 1188 China, France, and the Soviet Union inserted language into the various Security Council resolutions that bound the United States to the limited goal of restoring the status-quo, set longer “pauses for peace,” and sought concrete withdrawal deadlines. Even the “very idea of an

1185 Tsygankov (2004, 116); Kreps (2011, 110).

1186 For account of either that covers these bases, see Weitsman (2014, 48–73, 132–63); Kreps (2011, 49–73, 114– 48). Note that I disagree with Kreps’ assessment that the 2003 invasion was deliberately unilateral.

1187 Weitsman (2014, 68–71).

1188 Walzer (2006, xii); Weitsman (2014, 70–71). Secretary of State James Baker has said the main arguments against overthrowing Hussein in 1991 centred on the challenges of revisionism: regime change would turn the mission to liberate Kuwait into a “war of conquest,” require a lengthy occupation, generate a strong insurgency, and break down regional security. See Bert (2011, 164–65).

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‘announced’ war” was a constraint on U.S. efforts.1189 Indeed, the United States’ use of the United Nations to authorize the intervention allowed Gorbachev to support the intervention without appearing at the same to support Washington.1190 The administration also placed a high premium on Soviet support, buying out Moscow’s Security Council veto on resolution 678, which authorized the intervention, to the tune of US$4 billion.1191 As Thomas Henriksen summarizes, resolution 678 “constrained American power by limiting Washington’s objectives to merely expelling Hussein’s army from the Gulf sheikdom.”1192 In toto, United States officials in the first Gulf War could signal restraint, and the restorative aims of the operation, to other powers by pursuing a costly legitimacy strategy.

The second Gulf War, however, was widely perceived as illegitimate, and was supported by only a fraction of the number of states that contributed to the first Gulf War.1193 Conventional explanations of this lack of support focus on the illegitimacy of preventive and unilateral uses of force and their use as justifications by Washington. 1194 As Scott Silverstone notes, although the White House attempted to construe Iraq as an imminent threat, “supporters of war acknowledged that there was no evidence of an impending attack on the United States, its interests, or its allies. … U.S. military action against Iraq was in fact a preventive use of force.”1195 Others castigate the Bush 43 administration for unilaterally disregarding international law and institutions, especially the United Nations, and construe the intervention as a prime example of unipolar overreach.1196

1189 Thompson (2009, 60, 62, 70–71). These included Resolutions 665 and 678; the latter authorized the use of force.

1190 Thompson (2009, 72).

1191 Kreps (2011, 69–70); Thompson (2009, 80–82).

1192 Henriksen (2007, 43).

1193 Thompson (2009, 181–83); Weitsman (2014, 134–35, 156–61); Recchia (2015, 224–26).

1194 See Crawford (2003); Silverstone (2007, 171–97); Brunnée and Toupe (2004); for the distinction between preemptive and preventative war see Walzer (2006, 74–85) and Reichberg (2007).

1195 Silverstone (2007, 174).

1196 Litwak (2007, 139–48); Ikenberry (2011, 254–75); Deudney and Ikenberry (2017).

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As Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry recently put it, the Iraq war “was straightforwardly the result of the pursuit of American hegemonic primacy.”1197

Analyses that focus on Operation Iraqi Freedom’s military instrumentality or unilateralism overlook the Bush administration’s efforts to secure widespread international legitimacy for the mission, and the resources and time its chief policymakers put into this effort.1198 The key figures in the administration viewed international support as essential to launching the intervention, and found their subsequent reputation for “unilateralism” unfair and inaccurate.1199 Condoleezza Rice summarized these efforts in her memoirs: “We would take on Saddam Hussein with a coalition or not at all.”1200 Even the official most resistant to the UN process, Vice President Dick Cheney, was particularly proud of the fact the White House had “assembled a coalition of several dozen countries. Many made small contributions, to be sure, but the historical significance was immense of having not only long-standing allies like the United Kingdom and Australia with us, but also countries such as the Czech Republic, from the former Soviet bloc.”1201 There is little evidence that Bush needed a large international coalition or a Security Council resolution to gain

1197 Deudney and Ikenberry (2017, 8).

1198 E.g. Kreps (2011, 134): “There is little evidence to suggest that the United State felt constrained by shared international beliefs about how to use force in the years after 9/11 and leading up to the Iraq war.” See also Recchia (2015, 215ff). As I will note throughout, a problem with these instrumental approaches is they argue the strategic deployment of legitimacy is evidence against norms approaches or the power of legitimacy to shape actor behaviour.

1199 See for example Bush (2011, 238–54); Rice (2011, 148–224); Cheney (2011, 364–401); Rumsfeld (2011, 440– 58); Powell (2012, 205ff). For the mission’s legitimacy problems, see Weitsman (2014, 156–61); for an overview of their efforts, see Thompson (2009, 135–202).

1200 Rice (2011, 203).

1201 Cheney (2011, 387–98); for Cheney’s resistance to the UN process, see Thompson (2009, 137–42, 168–69); Recchia (2015, 199–200, 215–17).

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domestic approval prior to the intervention, which was already high in Congress and the population at large.1202

As with Afghanistan, American officials were also concerned with not appearing as “occupiers,” although this gave fuel to Rumsfeld’s insistence that large military footprints in either Afghanistan or Iraq would lead to this perception.1203 This insistence is usually understood only in military instrumental terms.1204 Colin Powell especially warned the administration it would need broad international support, noting that once Iraq was invaded, the United States would “own” Iraq—“the Pottery Barn Rule” at the level of geopolitics.1205 In his study of U.S. efforts to secure UN legitimacy for the Iraq intervention, Alexander Thompson argues the White House officials

worried about the international political costs of intervening in Iraq—and the Middle East more generally—without a sound legal basis or at least a multilateral stamp of approval. …working through the Council would demonstrate to the international community that the United States was willing to be constrained and to accommodate the interests of others. This would diminish the threat posed by a U.S. intervention in the region to the interests of various politically important government.1206

1202 Thompson (2009, 156–57); Recchia (2015, 207–8). Kreps (2011, 138–44) and Weitsman (2014, 158) note that public opinion favoured multilateralism, but not in any sense that a U.S. failure to act multilaterally would decisively erode support for the mission. This story obviously changed over the course of the occupation.

1203 Rumsfeld (2011, 377, 661–67, 674); Bush (2011, 268, 356): “Over time, we would move toward a smaller military footprint, countering the perception that we were occupiers and boosting the legitimacy of Iraq’s leaders. I summed up the strategy: ‘As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down’; Rice (2011, 241): “But I didn’t expect the United States to be thought of as an occupier, either. We’d gone to great length to avoid having a heavy military footprint in the country.”

1204 E.g. Recchia (2015, 201–2); Kreps (2011, 130–32).

1205 Powell (2012, 210–13); Bush (2011, 238); see also the summary in Recchia (2015, 207–9). For an account of the U.S. decision to forgo submitting a resolution after 1441, see Thompson (2009, 163–203) and Recchia (2015, 215– 24).

1206 Thompson (2009, 161).

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Although states opposed to the intervention gave various reasons for their opposition, they consistently disapproved of U.S. revisionism in the Middle East. From the Cold War to 2001, American grand strategy in the Middle East centred on maintaining the region’s balance of power through a set of informal security alliances, particularly those with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and containing Iran. After 9/11, the Bush sought to revise the region though an aggressive democratization strategy and the overthrow of Saddam’s regime.1207

Russia and China both objected to the intervention at the Security Council, following France and Germany’s lead.1208 China’s objections emphasized the need for a peaceful solution to Iraqi disarmament in accordance with resolution 1441.1209 Russia’s objections mirrored those of China but also reflected its sense that American unipolarity was eroding the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain.1210 Alexander Tsygankov argues Russia’s concerns with the intervention pivoted around three issues: the US$7 billion debt Iraq owed it; Russian companies’ desire to invest in the Iraqi resource market; and Moscow’s growing objection to United States unipolarity and its attendant unilateralism.1211 While the first two issues have been explored in conjunction with France and China’s business interests in Iraq, the last is important.1212 Russian cooperation in the “War on

1207 On this shift, see Gaddis (2002); Nye (2003); Monteiro (2014, 70–71, 184, 193–97); Brooks and Wohlforth (2016a, 118–19); and Simon and Stevenson (2015, 2–3), who summarize: “Between World War II and the 9/11 attacks, the United States was the quintessential status quo power in the Middle East, undertaking military intervention in the region only in exception circumstances. Direct U.S. military involvement was nonexistent, perfunctory, or indirect in the 1948-Arab Israeli war, the 1956 Suez crisis, the Six-Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.”

1208 See Thompson (2009, 133–62); Macfarlane (2008, 45–46); Brooks and Wohlforth (2008, 83–95).

1209 See for example United Nations (2003b, 15, 2003c, 21–22, 2003e, 18).

1210 Stepanova (2006, 254).

1211 Tsygankov (2016, 110–11); see also the reviews in Ambrosio (2005).

1212 France, Russia, and China were Iraq’s three largest trading partners; see Pauly and Lansford (2005, 74, 99–100); Harvey (2004, 68–81); Stepanova (2006, 254–56); Coicaud et al. (2006, 240–41); Congressional Research Service (2003). This connection was noted by senior officials in the White House, including President Bush (2011, 233); and Donald Rumsfeld (2011, 440–41).

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Terror” improved relations between the White House and the Kremlin for a limited time after 9/11.1213 As we have noted, Russia cooperated, to an extent, with the Operation. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, emphasized Russia’s commitment to combatting global terrorism in all his statements against the U.S. plans to invade Iraq. Unlike Germany and France, Lavrov did not rule out using force against Iraq, preferring instead the Council give the weapons inspectors more time to fulfill resolutions 1284 and 1441.1214

Although Russia’s objections to the Iraq invasion focused on these resolutions, they also included arguments about the deleterious effects such an invasion would have on revising security in the region.1215 For this reason, President Vladimir Putin and Lavrov explicitly rejected the notion of regime change on several occasions.1216 As Roy Allison notes, Russia’s main objections to regime change in Iraq “was its underlying transformative agenda, its relationship to a strategy or doctrinal commitment to spreading democracy and liberal reforms in the Middle East and beyond.”1217 As S. Neil MacFarlane and others have noted, Russia’s defence of nonintervention is not only linked to its internal concerns with separatism—primarily Chechnya—but also U.S.-backed NATO encroachment into post-Soviet spaces, a topic I turn to in section 3.3 below.1218 For Russia, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was thus “another powerful argument—after the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia in 1999 to treat the United States as a dangerous nation.”1219

1213 For an overview, see Tsygankov (2012, 118–33).

1214 See for example statements made in the 4688th, 4702st , 4707th, and 4714th, and 4721st meetings of the Security Council in United Nations (2003g, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d).

1215 See for example United Nations (2003c, 18, 2003d, 8, 2003e, 26–27, 2003f, 26–27); see also Trenin (2018, 38– 40).

1216 Allison (2013, 109–11).

1217 Allison (2013, 110).

1218 Macfarlane (2008).

1219 Trenin (2018, 39).

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More broadly, French, German, Russian, and Chinese objections were not only “directly related to the merits of the war itself but to what it meant in terms of the wider rules and principles of world order”—including its geopolitical bargains.1220 Major power objections to Operation Iraqi Freedom can therefore be understood in a general geopolitical context of U.S. overextension, rather than as a specific rebuttal of preemptive or preventative war.1221 Accounts of the 2003 intervention written from Middle East perspectives also reflect this concern: regional opposition focused on the intervention’s revision of the regional balance of power, and in particular the perception that America intended to turn Iraq into a client state.1222

5.3.2.4 Intervention in Africa II: Operation Unified Protector (2011)

In spring 2011 a multinational force led by NATO intervened in the Libyan civil war between Muammar Gaddafi and the National Transitional Council. The initial intervening coalition included the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Spain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Security Council resolution 1973, passed on March 17, 2011, authorized this coalition to enforce a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, impose an arms embargo, and use “all necessary measures,” short of foreign occupation, to protect Libyan civilians from harm.1223 On March 23, the mission expanded to include additional NATO members, Jordan, and Sweden, under Operation Unified Protector, a formally NATO-led mission.1224

1220 Ikenberry (2011, 274). I thus agree to an extent with Patrick Porter’s (Porter 2018a, 336) assessment that Deudney and Ikenberry (2017), in protecting liberal internationalism from the war and construing its motivations as “realist,” falsely dichotomize “hegemonic ambitions and liberalism”; rather, “The Bush administration’s forceful reassertion of American primacy was not an amoral exercise in power maximisation. It was infused with an idealism that has deep historical roots.”

1221 For Russia’s openness to preemptive warfare, see Allison (2013, 98–119).

1222 See for example Latif (2006, 111); Göl (2006, 115–16); Telhami (2003); and the review of opposition in Thompson (2009, 183–87).

1223 United Nations (2011, 3).

1224 Weitsman (2014, 165, 172).

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The initial phase of the intervention matches the costly legitimacy profile. The intervening coalition had Security Council authorization under resolutions 1970 and 1973, broad regional consent, and multinational participation. Unlike the other cases considered here, however, the United States did not take the initiative for the intervention, instead assuming a central role only after France and the United Kingdom sponsored the Security Council resolutions in February and March.1225 Regional requests and consent for an intervention preceded the mission. The League of Arab States, Gulf Cooperation Council, Organization of the Islamic Conference, and (to a mixed degree) African Union all demanded or supported the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya in early March, before resolution 1973 was passed.1226 As Weitsman summarizes, “The legitimacy of the Libyan operation largely derived from the sense of the agenda setters in the international community that action needed to be taken, and decisions were made in the context of the global organizations of the international system.”1227

Obama staffer Ben Rhodes notes that given the high degree of international support and participation for the mission, the issue in the White House was how they might “explain to the world why we weren’t acting in Libya if chose not to.”1228 Internally, the White House was divided between two camps: interventionists such as Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and much of the National Security Council, including special assistant Samantha Power, read the Libya crisis through the prism of Rwanda and other humanitarian catastrophes. Noninterventionists such as Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Michael Mullen were concerned about mission creep, the lack of

1225 Recchia (2015, 234–35); Weitsman (2014, 164–65).

1226 Hehir (2013b, 138); Weitsman (2014, 183); Recchia (2015, 237).

1227 Weitsman (2014, 184); Recchia (2015, 238–39). As Obama put it in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg (2016): “So what I said at that point was, we should act as part of an international coalition. But because this is not at the core of our interests, we need to get a UN mandate; we need Europeans and Gulf countries to be actively involved in the coalition; we will apply the military capabilities that are unique to us, but we expect others to carry their weight. And we worked with our defense teams to ensure that we could execute a strategy without putting boots on the ground and without a long-term military commitment in Libya.”

1228 Rhodes (2018, 114).

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national security interests, and potential costs. Other key figures, such as Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama himself, were initially undecided.1229

It is unclear whether President Obama would have invested time and resources into an American-led, costly legitimacy strategy had it been needed, despite taking a lead on expanding resolution 1973 beyond a no-fly zone to “all necessary measures” humanitarian protection.1230 Security Council authorization, a NATO or UN handoff, and “explicit regional participation” appear to have been prerequisites for U.S. involvement among the noninterventionists and with the President, suggesting the United States would not have military intervened without them.1231 This was reflected in the intervention coalition’s burden-sharing profile: although weighted toward the United States, the mission was less asymmetric than the other interventions considered here, with Washington contributing about one-third of total military expenditures, less than one-third to the total military personnel deployment, and flying about a quarter of the sorties.1232 The “leading from behind” role established by the Obama presidency in the Libya intervention appears to have been important for securing domestic approval.1233

Regional consent also mollified Moscow and Beijing’s early on, as the Obama administration hoped; both abstained from resolution 1793.1234 On March 17 Clinton reassured Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov that the mission was essentially humanitarian and would involve no revisionist military occupation of Libya—“this would not be like Iraq or Afghanistan” and would not involve “boots on the ground.”1235 In his March 28, 2011 address to the nation concerning the

1229 For synopses of the White House debate, see Blomdahl (2016, 147–52); Goldberg (2016); Recchia (2015, 235– 38); see also Rhodes (2018, 109–24); Gates (2014, chaps. 13 and 14); Clinton (2014, 363–81).

1230 Blomdahl (2016, 149); see also Clinton (2014, 366–71); Rhodes (2018, 115).

1231 Clinton (2014, 370–71); Recchia (2015, 235–36).

1232 Weitsman (2014, 172–77).

1233 Recchia (2015, 234–38); Weitsman (2014, 172).

1234 Hehir (2013b, 153–54); Allison (2013, 190); Averre and Davies (2015, 818); see also Clinton (2014, 371–72).

1235 Recchia (2015, 237) and Clinton (2014, 370–72); note that Clinton’s (2014, 372) additional comments are ambiguous about whether she implied regime change could be an option: “In later discussions, especially about

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intervention, President Obama likewise said that while Libya would be “better off with Qaddafi out of power … broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.”1236 Resolution 1973 itself ruled out the occupation of Libya, authorizing “all necessary measures…. While excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.”1237

Russia did not vote for resolution 1973, however, because it could not get a straight answer from intervention proponents about the resolution’s rules of engagement or limits on its “all necessary measures” clause—a “dimensionless formulation,” according to Lavrov. 1238 These concerns were echoed by other regional powers, including the other BRICS and Germany.1239 White House discussions from March 2011 reveal that most U.S. officials thought a no-fly zone would be inadequate to the task, despite supporting this option in meetings, however.1240 Initially, military officials recognized regime change was the political, but not military, goal of the administration.1241 But as the mission progressed, NATO’s strategy changed tracks: Gaddafi’s removal became either a necessary step in enforcing resolution 1793 or a goal in itself.1242

Initially supportive of the humanitarian aspects of the intervention—well outside their historic sphere, it should be noted—Russia and China both soured once the Libyan mission appeared to

Syria, Lavrov claimed he had been misled about our intentions. That struck me as disingenuous since Lavrov, as a former Ambassador to the UN, knew as well as anyone what ‘all necessary measures’ meant.”

1236 Obama (2011).

1237 United Nations (2011, 3).

1238 Quoted in Allison (2013, 193).

1239 Allison (2013, 193, 196–97).

1240 Clinton (2014, 366–71); Rhodes (2018, 111–15).

1241 Recchia (2015, 236).

1242 For the argument NATO sought regime change as a specific end, see Kuperman (2013, 113–16).

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be have regime change as an end goal.1243 At a May 2011 meeting between Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Medvedev argued U.S. leaders “started the war in Libya to protect civilians but were now trying to install a new regime.”1244 The core of their objections to Libya was regime change—especially forced democratization—and state collapse, possibly leading to contagion wherein other rebellions appeal to NATO for support.1245 Russia in particular feared the intervention might establish a “new axis of NATO influence in Northern Africa.”1246 The Libya intervention was understood by Russian military leaders as the “first field test” of the New Strategic Concept launched alongside the Kosovo intervention, and as a model for NATO operations in Russia’s traditional sphere.1247

In toto, Russian and Chinese objections, though couched in the language of sovereign nonintervention, territorial integrity, and states’ rights, also concerned U.S. revision of the Middle East, or indeed the post-Cold War geopolitical bargains in their regions. Because they associated U.S. interventionism with liberal-democratic or ideological revisionism, and because they faced security concerns on their peripheries where U.S. action could theoretically take place, Russian and Chinese arguments about principle on one hand and concerns about geopolitical revisionism on the other cannot be easily separated. Beijing and Moscow’s experiences with resolution 1973 now inform their current Syria policies, under which they have vetoed four Security Council resolutions that might threaten the Assad regime.1248 As Derek Averre and Lance Davies note, Russia’s arguments against humanitarian principles “escalating

1243 Allison (2013, 194–95).

1244 Rhodes (2018, 151–52). Rhodes suggests that Medvedev supported regime change, but Putin did not. See also Gates (2014, 530): “The Russians later firmly believed they had been deceived on Libya. …as the list of bombing targets grew, it became clear that very few targets were off-limits and that NATO was intent on getting rid of Qaddafi.”

1245 Averre and Davies (2015); Tsygankov (2016, 216–22); Allison (R. Allison 2013, 199–200).

1246 Allison (2013, 172).

1247 Allison (2013, 198).

1248 Gowers (2016, 89–90); Morris (2013, 1274ff); Allison (2013, 199–201)

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into forceful intervention have thus become bound up with ‘realist’ narratives of geopolitical rivalry.”1249

5.3.3 Interventions on the margin of the sphere: Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999)

My final two intervention cases occurred on the edge of American primacy, in the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain in Europe. Many of the recurring contestations above, especially Russia’s concerns about American geopolitical revisionism, are exemplified in the Yugoslav interventions. The United States and its allies overtly intervened twice in the former Yugoslavia: Operation Deliberate Force (1995) aimed to stop Bosnian Serb militias from mass murdering Bosniaks in Eastern Bosnia, and Operation Allied Force (1999) aimed to stop Serbian forces from ethnically cleansing Kosovar Albanians. The United States’ legitimacy strategies in both interventions lie somewhere between perfunctory and costly: NATO alone conducted both air operations. NATO officials argued that Operation Deliberate Force, though not directly authorized by the Security Council, took place legally under the auspices of Security Council resolution 836 (this argument was accepted by Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali).1250 Allied Force was famously not authorized by the Security Council, making it, in the words of the Kosovo Report, “illegal but legitimate.”1251 In both instances Russia, China, India and others protested the uses of force. This contestation was especially acute during Allied Force, where Russia was able to impose real, though minor, costs on NATO by threatening the peace process and briefly occupying Pristina airport.1252

Much more important than Pristina, however, was the impact on Russia’s relations with NATO and the geopolitical bargain in Europe. The interventions marked the first break in Russia’s post-

1249 Averre and Davies (2015, 826–27).

1250 Wheeler (2000, 256).

1251 Independent International Commission on Kosovo (2000, 4). For a critical appraisal, see Rieff (2003, 197–229). The Kosovo intervention has also been criticized on the grounds that its reliance on airpower led to inhumanitarian outcomes; see Ignatieff (2001); McInnes (2002).

1252 Henriksen (2007, 117–19); Pouliot (2010, 201–2).

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Cold War relations with the West, beginning a path toward Russia’s 2008 intervention in Georgia and 2014 annexation of Crimea. As Vincent Pouliot notes, Russia-NATO relations in the Kosovo crisis hit “rock bottom”: “resurging Great Power dispositions came to drive [Russian] foreign policy practices more than at any time since the end of the Cold War.”1253 The admission of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland to NATO in the mist of Operation Allied force, and the operation itself constituting “the first attempt by NATO to exert its new collective security mandate” placed the Yugoslav crisis “at the confluence of the key tensions in post-Cold War Russian–Atlantic dealings.”1254

Studies of post-Cold War intervention often present Kosovo as a paradigmatic case of the use of force for humanitarian purposes.1255 This includes the Independent Commission on Kosovo and the Responsibility to Protect’s founding document.1256 American and British policymakers publicly and privately justified the interventions as humanitarian operations aimed at preventing Serbian forces from killing civilians.1257 On this account, Russia objected to the Yugoslav interventions because it disagreed with humanitarian justifications for a Chapter VI use of force.

1253 Pouliot (2010, 195).

1254 Pouliot (2010, 195).

1255 Hehir (2012, 223).

1256 International Independent Commission on Kosovo (2000).

1257 Clinton (1995; 1999): “And we clearly have a humanitarian interest in helping to prevent the strangulation of Sarajevo and the continuing slaughter of innocents in Bosnia”; Blair (1999): “Britain stands ready with our NATO allies to take military action. We do so for very clear reasons. We do so primarily to avert what would otherwise be a humanitarian disaster in Kosovo.” Although the United States had little strategic interest in Yugoslavia, Clinton and Albright were personally motivated to intervene, especially after their experiences with Bosnia and Rwanda: Albright (2003, 363–431); Clinton (2004, 849): “I “was determined not to allow Kosovo to become another Bosnia. So was Madeleine Albright.” See also Weitsman (2014, 87–88); Blair (2011, chapter 8).

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The subsequent decline in post-Cold War Russo-American relations stemmed from “controversy over the legality of the intervention.”1258

Studies of U.S.-Russia relations and Russian foreign policy present a different picture. Moscow objected to the interventions because NATO was expanding into its former sphere. NATO’s new mission enlargement sanctioned it to intervene on Russia’s doorstep—and perhaps, in the future, in Russia itself.1259 In the language of this dissertation, Russia objected to the interventions because the United States was revising the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain. The NATO interventions did not constitute this overextension, but underscored them. In toto, the Yugoslav interventions and their contestations show how disagreement over a geopolitical bargain can lead to crisis and antagonistic great power relations.1260 I follow analyses that have understood the Yugoslavian interventions in the context of NATO enlargement, but emphasize the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain rather than their elements of focus, such as honour or habitus.1261

Below, I survey the historical narrative of NATO’s Yugoslavian interventions. Second, I outline the post-Cold War bargain, and sketch NATO’s search for a post-Cold War purpose. Third, I survey Russia’s perception of the post-Cold War European geopolitical bargain. In toto, a full account of these themes explains NATO’s legitimacy strategy and Russian contestation.

1258 Talentino (2005, 242); Chesterman (2001, 215–18). See for example Rieff (1996, 2003); Wheeler (2000, 242– 84); Power (2002, 247–327, 391–516); Morris (2004); Talentino (2005, 158–99, 239–75); Hudson (2009, 126–57); Bjola (2009, 90–121); Grey (2008, 31–50); Hehir (2013a, 223–43).

1259 See for example Allison (2013, chapter 3); Tsygankov (2012, chapter 11); Pouliot (2010); Trenin

1260 My analysis thus differs from those of critical geographers, who emphasize the spread of capitalism and often construe the Western powers as covering sinister, imperialist motives in a humanitarian dressing. For variations on this theme, see the essays in Ali (2000); see also the thoughtful analysis by Tuathail (1999).

1261 These are, who focusses to a large degree on Russia’s legal arguments;, who focusses on Russia’s sense of status; and, who focusses on honour.

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5.3.3.1 “A problem from Hell”: NATO’s Yugoslavian interventions

The 1994-1995 NATO intervention, “Operation Deliberate Force,” was preceded by substantial and complex United Nations involvement in the crisis over Bosnian separation. A constituent republic of the SFYR, Bosnia’s population was a mixture of Bosnian Muslims (‘Bosniaks’), Croats, Bosnian Serbs, and other minorities. Following popular referenda, Slovenian and Croatian republics declared independence from Yugoslavia in June 1991, beginning a process wherein the state’s ethnic groups, usually led by ethno-nationalist leaders, attempted to create ethnically-homogenous breakaway states in their respective republics. Slobodan Milošević, who won the Serbian election in 1987, inherited the largest and most powerful SFRY republic, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), a union of the former Yugoslavian republics of Serbia and Montenegro. Milošević and his followers imagined a “Greater Serbia” that would combine the FRY with Serb-dominated areas in Kosovo, Vojvodina, Croatia, and Bosnia.1262

By 1992, Croatia and the FRY were at war, owing to a combination of Belgrade’s irredentism and the newly-formed Croatian republic’s dismissal of its Serbian minority. In March 1992, a 99% independence referendum result in Bosnia was boycotted by Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb nationalist and leader of its Serbian Democratic Party. Karadzic declared the existence of a Serbian Republic—the Republica Srpska—and, with Belgrade’s help, began a campaign to ethnically cleanse Eastern Bosnia of Bosniaks. This campaign culminated in the July 1995 mass murder of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys by Serb paramilitary forces in the UN-declared safe zone Srebrenica, an act later ruled a genocide.1263

The United Nations Security Council passed twenty-four resolutions on the Yugoslav crisis between 1991 and 1992, imposing an arms embargo on the whole of former Yugoslavia and

1262 For a general background of the Balkan peninsula with the Yugoslav wars in mind, see Judt (2005, 665–85); Henriksen (2007, 79–82).

1263 For these points, see Wheeler (2000, 242–84); see also Power (2002, 247–327); Chesterman (2002, 133–34).

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authorizing UN-delivered humanitarian aid in Bosnia.1264 Resolution 770, passed in August 1993, “crossed the Rubicon” on the use of force in Bosnia, authorizing Security Council members to “use all means” to enforce the United Nation’s humanitarian mission, UNPROFOR.1265 Throughout this period, NATO states were reluctant to get involved directly, however, missing many opportunities to punish Milošević’s irredentism and insisting any ground troops in-theatre remain neutral.1266 Disagreements between the NATO allies and the prevailing sense that Yugoslavia’s problems were the result of intractable ethnic hatreds led Clinton’s first term Secretary of State Warren Christopher to call the crisis “a problem from hell.”1267

In spring 1993 General Ratko Mladic, the leader of the Republica Srpska’s armed forces, began shelling Muslim-majority towns in Eastern Bosnia and denying UN relief convoys access to the area. These shellings and the siege of Sarajevo catalyzed an armed international response. The Security Council declared Srebrenica, Gorazde, Sarajevo and several other locations UN- protected safe areas and authorized its peacekeepers and Security Council members to use “all necessary measures” to deter attacks.1268 NATO began conducting airstrikes under this authorization through 1994, targeting larger and larger segments of the Serbian army. After the August 1995 shelling of the Markale market in Sarajevo, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, a month-long bombing campaign that led to the December 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, ending the Bosnian theatre of the wars.1269

1264 UNSC Resolutions 713 and 770, passed September 25, 1991 and August 13, 1992. None abstained for 713; China, India, Zimbabwe abstained from 770. See United Nations (1992, 1431–32, 1468–70). Chesterman (2001, 133) notes 713 was not vetoed by China because the Yugoslavian government consented.

1265 “United Nations Protection Force.” See Wheeler (2000, 252); Henriksen (2007, 84).

1266 Wheeler (2000, 245–47, 250, 252); Judt (2005, 683–84); for an account that focusses on decision-making in Washington, see Power (2002, 247–327).

1267 Judt (2005, 684).

1268 Security Council resolutions 816, 819, 824, and 836, passed between March and June 1993. See Morris (2004, 107–8); Chesterman (2001, 133–34); Wheeler (2000, 253–54).

1269 Wheeler (2000, 253–57); Recchia (2015, 128–31).

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Two years later, fears that FRY-backed Serbian forces would mass murder Kosovar Albanians prompted another NATO-led air campaign, “Operation Allied Force.” In 1989, Milošević stripped Kosovo of the autonomy it enjoyed under Tito, purged its civil service and police, and integrated the province into the FRY. Kosovar Albanians, the targets of the purges, made up 90% of Kosovo’s population.1270 Kosovo occupies a central place in the Greater Serbia geopolitical imaginary as the center of the medieval Serbian Kingdom and site of the last holdout of its Prince Lazar against the Ottoman Empire in 1389.1271 In 1990, ethnic Albanian politicians declared independence and established parallel institutions within Kosovo, unrecognized by the FRY. Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia meanwhile founded the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which began a campaign of violence against Serbian targets in Kosovo. This gave an “opportunity to condemn all Albanian resistance as ‘terrorist’ and authorize a campaign of increasing violence.”1272

By March 1998, violent outbreaks between the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serb police reached levels high enough to prompt the Security Council to pass resolutions 1160 and 1199, which identified the violence as “a threat to peace and security in the region” under Chapter VII. After reports of two massacres of Kosovar peasants, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced on 8 October 1998 that NATO would use military force against Serbia if it did not stop the violence.1273 FRY, NATO, and OSCE officials signed an agreement on 15 October establishing verification flyovers over Kosovar airspace. The Security Council approved the agreement in resolution 1203; China and Russia abstained, making it clear “they did not see the resolution as authorizing military intervention.”1274

1270 Talentino (2005, 243–242).

1271 Judt (2005, 670); Talentino (2005, 241).

1272 Judt (2005, 680).

1273 Chesterman (2001, 208).

1274 Chesterman (2001, 210); Wheeler (2000, 257–64).

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A fresh round of massacres in January 1999 prompted a round of negotiations Rambouillet and Paris in February. Milošević refused to sign NATO’s offered agreement, which allowed it free movement throughout the FRY and committed Kosovo to an independence referendum by 2001. Operation Allied Force began on March 24, 1999 and ended on June 9 the same year when Belgrade agreed to remove its troops from Kosovo, paving the way for occupation by the Security Council-authorized Kosovo Force (KFOR). After a narrow election loss in September, Milošević stepped down in October and was a prisoner in The Hague by May 2000. Throughout the intervention 865,000 refugees fled to neighbouring countries.1275

5.3.3.2 “Not one inch forward”: the post-Soviet geopolitical bargain

Although the specifics have been mired in controversy for some time, U.S. officials likely made informal promises to Russian policymakers during the end of the Cold War that NATO would not expand past its existing membership, or engaged in diplomacy of one manner or another that led Moscow to believe this to be the case.1276 Joshua Shifrinson summarizes this bargain: “NATO would halt in place, and Europe’s security architecture would include the Soviet Union.”1277 Russian officials repeatedly made clear that Moscow’s participation in the post-Cold War order was premised on NATO remaining outside of post-Soviet space—“not one inch forward”—and they increased their criticisms of NATO enlargement from 1993 onward.1278

Simultaneously, NATO struggled to find a new identity in the post-Soviet geopolitical landscape. Most scholars argue that in the 1990s NATO reimagined itself as a “standard-bearer of

1275 Chesterman (2001, 206–18); Judt (2005, 669–85); Wheeler (2000, 265–75).

1276 See Shifrinson (2016); for countervailing views, see Rühle (2014); Kramer (2009). For my purposes it is enough to note that even if no assurances were actually made, Russia publicly presents them as having been made.

1277 Shifrinson (2016, 11). This bargain, because not formal de jure, could also be renegotiated. In the May 1997 Founding Act, for example, NATO tried to alter the bargain to include its enlarged membership while at the same time satisfying Russia’s security concerns by encouraging Russia-NATO cooperation. See Hanson (1998) for an argument that Russia remained uneasy about the Founding Act and preferred to work through the OSCE; see also the analyses by Pouliot (2010, 182–91); Tsygankov (2012, 172–91).

1278 See Trenin (2009, 7–9); Tsygankov (2018); Shifrinson (2016, 12–13).

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democracy and human rights.”1279 This meant opening its membership to other democratic nations, especially new democracies in the post-Soviet space, and conducting missions “out of area.” This combination of ideological mission and geopolitical expansion was bound to alarm Russian policymakers insofar as they understood the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain. The interventions in Yugoslavia, where NATO’s new identity was inaugurated, thus lay “at the confluence of the key tensions in post-Cold War Russian–Atlantic dealings.”1280

From the beginning, NATO members understood the breakdown of Yugoslavia not only as a “humanitarian” crisis but as geopolitical crisis in southern Europe that was spilling over into adjacent areas.1281 As Weitsman notes, “above all, the strategic concern of turmoil in NATO’s immediate sphere of influence was at issue.”1282 Although humanitarian justifications took a prominent position in American and British legitimacy strategies, as we saw above, the United States justification in particular depicted Europe as zone of special American national interest and NATO as the organization needed to maintain European stability. U.S. policymakers furthermore tied this geography to NATO expansion, credibility, and democratic enlargement.1283

This narrative was not internal but instead was a prominent theme in the Clinton administration’s justifications of the interventions. In October 1993, NATO Secretary General Manfred Worner outlined the logic of an expanded NATO in a press club speech titled “A New NATO for a New Era.”1284 In the February 9, 1993 announcing NATO airstrikes in Bosnia, Clinton said that

Our Nation has clear interests at stake in this conflict. We have an interest in helping to prevent a broader conflict in Europe that is most compelling. We have an interest in

1279 Pouliot (2010, 153); see also Pond (1999); Bert (2011, 103ff); Kroenig (2015, 51–53); Williams and Neumann (2000); Adler (2008).

1280 Pouliot (2010, 195).

1281 See for example Henriksen (2007, chapters 5, 6).

1282 Weitsman (2014, 74).

1283 See Weitsman (2014, 74–98); Steele (2008, 119–20); Krieg (2012, 90–91); Albright (2009).

1284 Worner (1993).

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showing that NATO, history’s greatest military alliance, remains a credible force for peace in post-cold war Europe.1285

In his March 24, 1999 address ahead of the NATO bombing campaign, Clinton likewise said:

…that if America is going to be prosperous and secure, we need a Europe that is prosperous, secure, undivided, and free. We need a Europe that is coming together, not falling apart, a Europe that shares our values and shares the burdens of leadership. That is the foundation on which the security of our children will depend.

That is why I have supported the political and economic unification of Europe. That is why we brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO, and redefined its missions, and reached out to Russia and Ukraine for new partnerships.1286

Just before the Kosovo bombings, former National Security Advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake laid out a similar logic in The New York Times, arguing NATO should expand into Central European spaces to enlarge democracy, widen the “scope of the American-European security connection”: “expansion will place the alliance, and the United States, at the center of a wider regional security system to which Russia is related.”1287 In a March 25, 1999 White House press conference, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger explained why NATO would take action with a Security Council resolution:

We always prefer to operate pursuant to a U.N. resolution. But we've also always taken the position that NATO has the authority in situations it considers to be threats to the stability and security of its area to act by consensus without explicit U.N. authority. [...]

1285 Quoted from Clinton (1994).

1286 Quote from Clinton (1999); as Chesterman (2001, 211) summarizes, “Clinton emphasized US interests in preventing a potentially wider war if action were not taken now.”

1287 Lake and Brzezinski (1997); see also Allison (2013, 46–48) for other statements.

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And I think the President has said many times that it depends upon whether America's national interests are involved, as well as our values. I think in this case, both our values and our interests are involved. Our values are involved in preventing what I believe would be a humanitarian catastrophe. Our interests are involved in avoiding a wider conflict in Southeastern Europe, which I think would most likely involve us at some later point with far greater cost and with far greater risk.1288

Madeleine Albright, State of State during the Kosovo crisis, likewise emphasized Kosovo’s central role in renewing NATO’s purpose. When the British considered tabling a Security Council motion ahead of the airstrikes, Albright scolded the British representative, Robin Cook, telling him that if it passed, it would set a precedent that independent NATO action requires a Security Council resolution. This would allow Russia and China to veto NATO operations, or allow them to pass “but only after having its teeth extracted to gain Russian acquiescence.”1289 As she put it in a 2009 interview, Allied Force

showed the validity of the new mission for NATO… it is part of the same post-Cold War story, when an alliance that was setup to be anti-Soviet was in fact relevant and the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st, to deal with the problems of that time.1290

In toto, the United States used the Yugoslav interventions to renew NATO, justify its existence, and confirm its new agenda in the 1999 “New Strategic Concept.”1291 Nuno Monteiro describes this overall strategy as one of “offensive accommodation aimed at changing the international

1288 Quoted from Berger (1999). Emphasis added.

1289 Albright (2003, 387); see also Chesterman (2001, 216). For his part, President Clinton told French President Jacques Chirac that NATO should not push for a Security Council resolution because doing so would put Yeltsin in “the word all positions,” needing to either block the resolution and appear inhumanitarian, or approve it and aid his hardline enemies in the Duma. See Memorandum of Telephone Conversation with French President Chirac, 8 August, 1998 in National Security Council and NSC Records Management System (2018a, Collection No. 2009- 1291-M, 10).

1290 Quoted from Albright (2009).

1291 See NATO (1999).

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political alignments of former Soviet satellites and bringing them into the U.S. sphere of influence.”1292

From a Russian perspective, NATO expansion unacceptably extended the U.S. sphere past the post-Cold War bargain; the interventions underscored this unacceptable extension. The link between NATO expansion and its widening operations was a constant theme in Russian communications from the early 1990s onward.1293 As Nicholas Wheeler notes, Bosnia “opened up a worrying split” with Russia that would increase until 1999.1294 Recently declassified records of conversations between Clinton White House and top Russia officials, including President Yeltsin, show that the former repeatedly brought up NATO expansion and framed it as the paramount security issue between the two countries—long before the Kosovo airstrikes. In January 1994 Ministry of Defence Pavel Grachev told the U.S. Secretary of Defence that NATO expansion was “bloc mentality” and “European security should be collective, not bloc- oriented.”1295 Later in May 1995, Yeltsin asked Clinton to postpone NATO expansion to after at least 2000, and told Clinton that he needed

a clear understanding of your idea of NATO expansion because now I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed. How do you think it looks to us if one bloc continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia.1296

1292 Monteiro (2014, 70, 189).

1293 Trenin (2009, 8) dates the split to Fall 1993; Pouliot (2010, 191–92) to NATO’s 1994 double enlargement policy.

1294 Wheeler (2000, 256).

1295 Memorandum of a conversation between U.S. President Clinton and Russian President Yeltsin for their meeting in Moscow on May 10, 1995 in National Security Council and NSC Records Management System (2018b, Collection No. 2014-0904-M, 6).

1296 Memorandum of a conversation between President Clinton and President Yeltsin for their meeting in Moscow on May 10, 1995 in National Security Council and NSC Records Management System (2018b, 6). Statements like

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In 1995 Russia argued NATO airstrikes exceeded the bounds of Security Council resolution 836; on September 9, 1995 President Yeltsin said “this was the first sign of how an enlarged NATO would act.”1297 He repeated these criticisms in a General Assembly speech given on October 23. Throughout the Bosnian crisis Russia threatened to withdraw from the Contact Group, or “help the Serbs in a unilateral way.” As Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke notes, Russia’s relations with NATO was “a volatile issue” from the moment Clinton announced the intention to enlarge the alliance in 1993.1298

Russian politicians and writers renewed these criticisms in 1999. Alexei Pushkov, a former speechwriter for Gorbachev and prominent figure in Russian policy analysis, took to The National Interest in 1997 to lay out Russia’s concerns, noting there was “wide consensus within the Russian political establishment that NATO expansion contradicts basic Russian national interests.”1299 The Security Council introduced “deliberate ambiguity” into resolution 1199 concerning the use of force to secure Russian support for the resolution. Between March 24 and 26, Russian ambassador to the United Nations Sergei Lavrov opposed the NATO bombing campaign and supported a draft resolution calling for its end.1300 Recently released documents of the Clinton-Yeltsin show that the Russian President was consistently alarmed by NATO expansion. In a 1997 meeting he told Clinton “it remains a mistake for NATO to move eastward,” later pressing Clinton for a secret “verbal, gentlemen’s agreement – we would not write it down” that Clinton would not allow any former Soviet republic to enter NATO.1301 In

this one are rife throughout the documents; see also National Security Council and NSC Records Management System (2018c, 290–94, 326, 345–46, 356–57).

1297 Wheeler (2000, 256).

1298 Holbrooke (1999, 144–45, 212).

1299 Pushkov (1997, 58).

1300 Chesterman (2001, 208, 211–13); Wheeler (2000, 275–81).

1301 See Memorandum of Conversation during a Morning Meeting with Russian President Yeltsin, March 21, 1997, Helsinki in National Security Council and NSC Records Management System (2018d, 106–7).

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June 1998 he told Clinton that “any use of force by NATO” in the Kosovo crisis “is inadmissible.” Any NATO action without a Security Council sanction would be “a blow to cooperation between Russia and NATO.”1302

Although in these instances the Russian objection (as well as those of China) focused on the “primary institutions of international society”—the principle of sovereign nonintervention and the lack of precedent in international law for unilateral uses of force—Russia’s critiques can also be understood in the context of NATO expansion and its increasingly sense that the post-Cold War geopolitical bargain had been broken.1303 Sergei Tsygankov notes that “it was the expansion of NATO,” not the Kosovar ethnic conflict, “that shaped Russia’s perception of the intervention in Yugoslavia.”1304 Thomas Henriksen likewise argued that NATO expansion “towards the Russian border” made Moscow “especially anxious about a Western military intervention” and deepened Yeltsin’s “distrust of the United States, which was leading the charge for NATO enlargement as means to entrench European stability through wider membership in the alliance.”1305 Stefano Recchia reports that former State Department officials involved in the postwar negotiations understood that Russian objections to Kosovo were moored to NATO expansion: “NATO was expanding at the time into their former sphere of influence. They would certainly have liked NATO to fail in its effort over Kosovo.”1306

The United States could openly revise Eastern Europe in large part because Russia had few tools at its disposal to counterbalance U.S. expansion. As Recchia notes, U.S. policymakers were more concerned with NATO’s legitimacy and cost-sharing than Russian reactions to the interventions.

1302 See Memorandum of Telephone Conversation with Russian President Yeltsin, June 15, 1998 in National Security Council and NSC Records Management System (2018d, 343). See also National Security Council and NSC Records Management System (2018d, 436, 439–42).

1303 Allison (2013, 49–51); Henriksen (2007, 106).

1304 Tsygankov (2012, 175).

1305 Henriksen (2007, 106).

1306 Quoted in Recchia (2015, 186).

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Nonetheless, Russian participation in the postwar process was needed.1307 Nonetheless, Russia responded to the crisis with dangerous political moves: the Duma nearly passed a resolution to include Yugoslavia in the Russia-Belarus Union, which would have embroiled it in the crisis as a participant; it suspended participation in 1997 Founding Act, cancelled March 1999 IMF negotiations; and, as noted, occupied Pristina airport.1308 Indeed, U.S. officials were alarmed at Russian hostility to the interventions.1309

When NATO relied on Russian pressure to end the war and devise a peace settlement, Moscow was able to play a larger role in the postwar process than it could in the Dayton Accords.1310 The episode nevertheless eroded trust between NATO and Russia, helping turn Moscow into “an insubordinate player of the post-Cold War rules of the game” and leading it to fear NATO’s geopolitical encroachment could make it the next target.1311 As Roy Allison summarizes,

The virulent Russian criticism of the OAF campaign, of NATO’s violation of legal principles and the UN Charter framework, expressed its pluralist world view. But it can only properly be understood by taking account of the wider structural context. Moscow feared its declining influence in the shaping of the European security environment… [in which] Moscow perceived NATO as an organization both dominated by the US and intent on expanding its strategic remit in new undefined geographic zones.1312

1307 Recchia (2015, 183–87).

1308 Tsygankov (2012, 174–75, 2016, 112).

1309 E.g. Albright (2003, 416): “We talked to them through many channels, but whether it was Clinton-Yeltsin, Gore- Primakov, or Ivanov and I, the Russian message to us was the same, even if the decibel levels varied: we had screwed up big time.”

1310 Monteiro (2014, 192); Posen (2000, 66–71).

1311 Pouliot (2010, 207, 203–8); Henriksen (2007, 106, 114–16).

1312 Allison (2013, 45).

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5.4 Case comparison and competing arguments

As I have noted throughout the cases, norms-based and military utility approaches explain some but not all of the cases. The great strength of norms-based approaches is to show how historically-contextual concerns about legitimacy shape and shove state action. In the post-Cold War environment, even militarily powerful interveners like the United States spend resources and time making their actions as acceptable as possible to broad international audiences.1313

In her analysis of the Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya interventions, Patricia Wiseman argues that the legitimacy of an intervention has more to do with its mission than the number of states in its intervening coalition. A unilateral U.S. intervention to prevent the Rwandan genocide is prima facie more legitimate than multilateral regime change in the Middle East. 1314 What I have tried to show here is the kind of “mission” depends in part of the geopolitical bargain. A “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo was widely perceived as NATO adventuring, not altruistic rescuing, because of the background geopolitical context of NATO enlargement. Likewise, a key difference between the Iraq interventions was the fact regime removal also implied profound regional revision to the Middle East geopolitical arrangement—unlike its Western Hemispheric equivalents, where regime change was not geopolitically understood or opposed in the same way.

Military utility or instrumental approaches that focus on the Rumsfeld Rule—“the coalition fits the mission”—convincingly explain the intervention profiles of a number of cases: Afghanistan, Panama, and Haiti. In these interventions, the United States was able to intervene efficiently using only a small number of intervention partners, shifting to a broader coalition when it needed to defray costs or perform “UN handoffs.”1315 Hence, as Kreps predicts, even though “states

1313 Finnemore (2004, 129–37).

1314 Weitsman (2014, 43).

1315 Recchia (2015, 66).

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would rather have more legitimacy than less,” in these instances “the expediency of unilateralism” was more attractive.1316

Even these interventions cannot be understood independently of the geopolitical bargains in which they took place, however. The Panama and Haiti interventions, taking place in America’s traditional sphere of influence, were not widely contested despite breaking several important post-Cold War norms. In Afghanistan, Liberia, and Somalia, a priori legitimacy and the lack of regional power objections to a U.S. presence allowed U.S. policymakers to pursue the Rumsfeld principle. In Afghanistan, this allowed the U.S. to largely ignore existing norms concerning legal authorization and multilateralism. Frankly speaking, 9/11 generated the legitimacy the United States needed to invade Afghanistan. This argument does not contradict those of instrumental approaches—“states would rather have more legitimacy than less when they use force abroad”— but clarifies the role legitimacy/illegitimacy plays, especially geopolitically-generated legitimacy, in constraining state action.1317

In the first and second Gulf Wars, U.S. policymakers pursued costly legitimacy strategies in an attempt to signal fundamentally restorative, or system-maintaining intentions in an area of the world where they possessed no special geopolitical privileges. This strategy worked in 1991 but had only limited success in 2003, likely because of the mission’s preventative nature.1318 The size of the Iraq coalitions here cannot be easily connected to military instrumentality. Kreps discounts the multilateralism of the 2003 intervention as “anemic” because not participatory, and argues 1991’s multilateralism was the result of U.S. assessments of Iraq’s military.1319 Although the evidence for the latter claim is compelling, as I showed above, U.S. policymakers did in fact care about appearing revisionist in 2003, and pursued a costly legitimacy strategy in part in an effort to avoid this branding. Operation Iraqi Freedom’s small coalition was consequently a result of the failure of the U.S. campaign to build a coalition, not necessarily a strategic design. Here it is

1316 Kreps (2011, 8).

1317 Kreps (2011, 5).

1318 Weitsman (2014, 161) .

1319 Kreps (2011, 19, 50–73).

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important to note that small occupying force in toto is not the same as an intervening coalition with little multinational support or participation.1320

By the same stroke, Stefano Recchia is correct to note that the United States could intervene without worrying about a substantive balancing coalition forming against it.1321 But in cases where U.S. policymakers acted outside a geopolitical bargain, they nonetheless sought broad international support for both cost-sharing and legitimacy reasons, investing time and resources in these efforts where they had to, even though they constrained the U.S.’s freedom of action. As I showed above, this was also partially true of the Haiti intervention, where the United States was able to shore up broader global legitimacy and seek focused regional legitimacy without much cost.

I thus disagree with Recchia’s assessments that there is no evidence U.S. policymakers were concerned about “negative issue linkage.”1322 A key differentiator here is the particular geopolitical bargain in which the U.S. intervened. I have argued the United States was more concerned about legitimizing NATO after the Cold War in its Yugoslavia interventions than signaling non-revisionism to weakened post-Cold War Russia—an argument with which Recchia agrees.1323 In the Iraq cases, however, U.S. officials were also concerned about appearing nonrevisionist, both regionally and globally. Indeed, Recchia uses the lack of U.S. policymakers’ concerns the Iraq issue would be negatively linked by others to global counter-terrorism to discount this argument, rather than concerns about Middle East revisionism or imperialism.1324

Conversely, U.S. efforts to construct a multilateral coalition in 1990-1991 cannot be reduced to only military instrumentality, either. Kreps’ discussion of legitimacy in the first Gulf War revolves around whether White House officials were genuinely motivated by “some pursuit of

1320 Kreps (2011, 146–47); Recchia (2015, 201–2); contrast Weitsman (2014, 156–61).

1321 Recchia (2015, 20–23, 99–103, 142–46, 183–87, 208–9).

1322 Recchia (2015, 22–23).

1323 Recchia (2015, 146, 181–83).

1324 Recchia (2015, 208–9).

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elevated collective security principles,” or spoke about commitment to those principles as part of a calculated rhetoric.1325 In focusing on inner motivations, this argument passes over legitimacy’s possible effects on an intervention coalition regardless of the motivations of the intervening state’s leaders. Here I follow Alexander Thompson and Patricia Weitsman in emphasizing U.S. officials’ desires to signal restraint, and make costly concessions to do so, in both cases—the true inner motivations of Bush officials notwithstanding.1326 As Weitsman puts it, the Security Council resolution reflected “the legitimacy of the mission of expelling Saddam Hussein from Iraq for violating Kuwaiti sovereignty, and augmented legitimacy by signaling limited intentions on the part of the United States in regard to the Gulf War and its hegemony.”1327

Finally, Operations Deliberate Force and Allied Force acted as a kind of debutante’s ball for post-Cold War NATO. Despite having few direct interests in the former Yugoslavian space, the United States intervened through NATO as part of its broader attempts to expand NATO and encourage democratic enlargement in former Soviet spaces. As Stefano Recchia notes, the United States’ use of NATO in both interventions “came at considerable cost, “limiting U.S. freedom of action, emboldening local warring factions, and harming the Clinton administration’s domestic and international standing.” But by “channeling the use of force through NATO, the United States was able to link the alliance’s future credibility to success in Bosnia.”1328 This explains why these interventions had only a touch-and-go relationship with the United Nations: they were primarily meant to consolidate the U.S.-led hierarchy, and its new mission, in Europe.

5.5 Conclusion

In his book-length critique of American primacy, Barry Posen notes that three major events led him to conclude post-Cold War U.S. grand strategy “works poorly”: NATO’s enlargement to

1325 Kreps (2008, 60–64). Kreps’ (2011, 154–62) assessment of the second Iraq intervention likewise argues the administration only pursued multilateralism there instrumentally, but did not intend to construct a large coalition.

1326 Thompson (2009, 161); Weitsman (2014, 48–49, 68–71, 159–61).

1327 Weitsman (2014, 70).

1328 Recchia (2015, 146, 154–57); see also Weitsman (2014, 75, 89–98).

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“include the former vassal states of the Soviet Union,” the Kosovo air campaign, and the 2003 Iraq invasion.1329 In this chapter, I have argued each of these events either followed an alteration or directly altered a post-Cold War geopolitical bargain. In Europe, the United States altered the geopolitical bargain by expanding NATO into the post-Soviet space. The United States sought to legitimize its Middle Eastern interventions in the broadest way possible, but faced higher levels of contestation when it openly aimed to revise the region in 2003.

U.S. relations within Latin America changed during this period. Although the Trump administration appears to have renewed neo-Monroeism in its National Security Strategy and other statements, U.S. leaders from Clinton to Obama did not emphasize the tough hemispheric exclusivity in their public rhetoric common the U.S. Presidents from John Quincy Adams to George Herbert Walker Bush. Unfortunately, the two cases clustered at the beginning of the period—1989 and 1993—do not allow for a determinate analysis of America’s new relations with its sphere. I have attempted to show through what evidence is available that although the United States may restrain itself through the United Nations even in its own sphere, as it did in Haiti, it could likely “go it alone” without fearing costly reprisal from regional rivals.

1329 Posen (2014, xi).

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Chapter 6 Conclusion

“And certaine it is, that Nothing destroieth Authority so much, as the unequall and untimely Enterchange of Power Pressed too farre, and Relaxed too much.” —Francis Bacon, “Of Empire”1330

This dissertation argues that geopolitical bargains structured international political authority in the great power politics of the last two centuries. These bargains gave the great powers the freedom to intervene in their spheres without being opposed by other powers. They did so by making them acceptable to rivals in a world of competition. When the great powers intervened outside of their spheres, they had to resort to other ways to assure their peers. Briefly put, geopolitical bargains determined who could acceptably intervene where.

In the Concert of Europe, a de jure geopolitical bargain built into the Vienna settlement established spheres of influence that allowed the great powers to intervene in their spheres without agitating their peers. In this way the great powers could use force across borders in their efforts to suppress revolutionary movements and maintain the overall balance.

In the Cold War, a de facto geopolitical bargain divided the world into spheres based on each superpower’s geographic preponderance and ideological predilection. Although largely tacit, the spheres demarcated where each could intervene without provoking counterbalancing, and possible escalation to a nuclear exchange, from the other. This allowed the superpowers to intervene to arrange the political structures of subordinate states to their preferences. In this way the spheres helped maintain the balance of power by placing geographic limits on the superpowers’ struggle for planetary dominance.

1330 Bacon (1985, 59).

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After the Cold War, a heterogeneous set of geopolitical bargains shaped U.S. interactions with regional powers by roughly demarcating the acceptable limits of American primacy. In 2003 and 2011, the United States overstepped informal geopolitical bargains in North Africa and the Middle East when it overthrew Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. And it challenged the geopolitical bargain in Europe by enlarging NATO into the post-Soviet space and prosecuting two air campaigns against Serbia. These actions eroded American primacy and alienated Russia from Western integration. Elsewhere—the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Haiti—the United States used multilateralism and Security Council authorization to legitimize its interventions, signal status-quo intentions, and reduce contestation.

The rest of this conclusion considers my dissertation’s findings in light of several relevant concepts and debates in international relations research. First, I outline the relevance of my research to the balance of power, one of the perennial concepts in world politics. Second, I place my thesis in the ongoing debates about paradigmatic, or post-paradigmatic, international relations research. Finally, I consider my dissertation’s argument in light of the emerging consensus that the liberal world order is being replaced by a “geopolitical” multipolarity.

6.1 The Balance of Power

Geopolitical bargains played an important role in the balances of power of the period I discuss. One of the “most enduring” and cited concepts in the field, international relations theorists forward two different concepts of the balance of power.1331 As noted in Chapter 3, one of these views balances of power as mechanistic—the unintended outcomes of raisons d’états. Another, forwarded mostly by English School and constructivist theorists, argues that balances of power are designed or intentional.1332

My cases show that whether the balance of power is mechanistic or not is historically variable. The Concert period’s balance was consciously contrived to prevent another hegemonic war on

1331 Little (2007, 3).

1332 See Mitzen (2013, 12–23); Paul et al. (2004, esp. 4-9, 29-51); and the discussion in Chapter 3 section 3.2.

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the continent—the “balance of rights.”1333 This was the well-studied overriding concern of the Vienna Congress, which designed the resulting territorial settlement.1334 No reading of the Concert period has closely or systematically examined the role played its spheres of influence in maintaining the resulting balance, however. While the territorial settlement might have preserved a balance by satisfying the Powers and placing buffer zones between them, the great powers’ need to intervene to suppress rebellions endangered the settlement.1335

I showed how the Concert’s geopolitical bargain allowed its great powers to intervene in continental crises without upsetting the balance by sticking to their spheres. This had the effect of making clear the status-quo intentions of the intervention to the other powers. Where the geopolitical bargain was unclear, great power competition was left unchecked and the Powers went to war over Crimea. The Concert geopolitical bargain thus played a central role in stabilizing what is perhaps modern history’s most important example of cooperative great power relations and multipolar stability.

Although it was the afterbirth of a failed attempt to arrive at a de jure agreement, the Cold War’s de facto geopolitical bargain also helped moderate the intense superpower competition between the United States and Soviet Union. At first glance the Cold War dynamic appears to be a mechanistic balance in which “close competition subordinates ideology to interest.”1336 The ideological competition imposed on both superpowers the need to intervene in their spheres and indirectly intervene everywhere else.1337 The primary role of the spheres here may have been to simply articulate which areas were under each superpower’s predominance, to underline that

1333 See Chapter 3, section 3.4.1.

1334 Gulick (1965); Jarrett (2013).

1335 Slantchev (2005) outlines the territorial settlement’s role in the balance, but does not examine the intervention record.

1336 Waltz (1979, 205).

1337 Westad (2007, 397).

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these areas were exclusive, and to prevent confrontation through “mutual recognition.”1338 As Hedley Bull summarized in 1977,

It is clear also that the Soviet-American spheres-of-influence understandings have so far been negative in content rather than positive. In these understandings each power seeks to secure for itself the exclusion of the other from its own spheres, and the function of agreement is to confirm each power in its position of local preponderance and to avoid collisions or minimize their consequences.1339

This effect is underscored by the superpower instability that emerged when the bargain was overstepped during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to a lesser extent when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.1340 In their overt interventions, both sides protested only verbally and neither was “actively challenged by the rival power.”1341

After the Cold War, a unipolar world order explicitly predicated on the end of geopolitics nonetheless featured some elements of a geopolitical, now located in regions and mediated by U.S. primacy. Here, I focused on U.S. overreach, arguing that contestation of U.S. interventionism is not just about principles but is geopolitical, too. Geopolitical contestation was especially acute in Eastern Europe, where Russia read NATO’s Open Door through a geopolitical lens—but also in Iraq, where the Bush administration sought to revise the Middle East status quo, and when an “out-of-area” NATO intervened in North Africa, producing fears that the geopolitically-rooted organization was “going global.”1342 Throughout this postwar “Long Peace,” the geopolitical bargain held against countervailing factors that should have greatly reduced the effects of a geopolitical bargain: intense ideological and power-political

1338 Macfarlane (2002, 38); Finnemore (2004, 128).

1339 Bull ([1977] 2012, 217); Waltz (1979, 208): “Now the control of East European affairs by one great power is tolerated by the other precisely because their competing interventions would pose undue dangers.”

1340 Bull ([1977] 2012, 218);

1341 Vincent (1974, 324).

1342 Allison (2013, 180–83); Toal (2017, 17–54); Shifrinson (2016, 36–44).

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competition in the Cold War, and the anti-geopolitical liberalism of U.S. primacy after the Cold War.

6.2 Paradigm wars

This dissertation has also attempted to avoid aligning itself too strongly with any of international relations’ competing research traditions or “paradigms.” My attempts here follow the “post- paradigmatic” spirit recently forwarded by international relations scholars that encourages scholars to “de-center” the “isms.”1343

Nonetheless, this dissertation has forwarded a relational or “social” account of traditionally realist themes such as geopolitics and great power competition. Part of my effort here has been to show that norms need not be liberal or “good”: spheres of influence and their domination of others are by definition just as relational, “normative,” or norm-laden, as humanitarian intervention or environmental activism. Indeed, the central premise of the constructivist critique of “neorealism” is that even strategic calculations about material interests are normative: actors must view material survival in some sense as desirable to act upon it.1344

To accept that international life is norm-laden then is not to say that parts of it are not also driven by strategic calculation, great power competition, realpolitik, and assertions about (e.g.) space and geography, as Samuel Barkin has argued.1345 Accepting these as context-laden, historically changeable characteristics of world politics does, however, ask whether they are necessary or timeless—naturally given by the human condition and its propensity to arrange us in groups that are necessarily egoist or “immoral.”1346

1343 See Jackson and Nexon (2013); Sil and Katzenstein (2010, 2011).

1344 See for example Mitzen (2006).

1345 Barkin (2003).

1346 Niebuhr ([1932] 2013); Carr ([1961] 2001, 21–22).

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Elsewhere I have argued that international relations’ paradigms presuppose, or make assumptions about, the nature of history.1347 These assumptions turn on articulation of humankind’s relationship to nature, and whether the human arts can emancipate humankind from nature—“mastery of the universe” for “the relief of man’s estate”—because human “nature” is historically plastic rather than naturally given.1348 International relations’ paradigms thus differ not only terms of their competing “research assumptions” narrowly construed, but also in the deeper and more decisive terms of their competing articulations of humankind’s relationship to nature.

I obviously cannot adjudicate this question here. If there is a coherent assumption about history operating in this dissertation, it is that certain geopolitical problems, e.g. the domination of weak states by the strong, and the strong’s desire to justify that domination to itself and others, have been around for at least two centuries. Their relationship to historical change is ambiguous, however. The enlargement or expansion of complex human relations on a global scale that has also occurred over the last two centuries is not coeval with the fundamental transformation of political problems.1349 “History cumulates, rather than solves, the essential problems of human existence… History does not solve the basic problems of human existence but reveals them on progressively new levels.”1350

I hope this dissertation has shown how one element of world politics—geopolitical bargains— has both changed and remained constant over the last two hundred years. Great powers make geopolitical assertions, and those assertion matter. The content, scale, and details of these assertions change with history.

1347 See Mackay and LaRoche (2017, 2018).

1348 Kennington (2004).

1349 Niebuhr (1941, 301–21); contrast Carr ([1961] 2001, 103–27).

1350 Niebuhr (1941, 318, 320).

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6.3 Resurgent powers and spheres of influence

A major theme in this dissertation is Russia’s Eurasian and then global projection. Even in the periods I left out—the Bismarck system, the lead up to World War 1, and the interwar period— Russia was an important, decisively global power. The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of not just the Cold War, but a sustained period of Eurasian imperial primacy spanning from Alexander I’s occupation of Paris in 1815, to Stalin reaching Berlin in 1945, to General Boris Gromov’s 1989 retreat across the Soviet-Afghan ‘Bridge of Friendship’ on a chilly February morning.1351 A Vladislav Zubok notes, after the Cold War “triumphalism surged in the West … The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance. The United States, the last superpower, became the hub of the international order.”1352

At the time of writing there is a growing sense that the triumphalism is over, the unipolar moment is fading, and new era of great power competition, multipolarity, and “geopolitics” has begun.1353 Almost two-hundred years to the day after the Eastern crowns signed the Holy Alliance agreement, Russian SU-24 Sukhoi strike aircraft inaugurated Russia’s intervention in Syria by bombing locations near Homs and Hama.1354 Capping off a period of eroding Russia- West relations that began with the 2008 Georgia intervention and worsened when Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, the Syria intervention is Moscow’s first overt military operation outside of its sphere since 1979 and ever in the Middle East. Dmitri Trenin writes, the Syria intervention “did away with the U.S. monopoly on political and military action in the Middle East” and signaled that Russia “is returning to the global stage as a major independent player.”1355

1351 Westad (2007, 377); Trenin (2011; 2009, 4–6); Toal (2017, 58–64); Kotkin (2008, 6).

1352 Zubok (2007, ix).

1353 The list grows by the week; see for example Mead (2014); Kupchan (2014); Patrick and Bennett (2015); Walt (2016); Kagan (2017); Acharya (2017); Lake (2018); Allison (2018); Porter (2018b); Kotkin (2018); Deudney and Ikenberry (2018); Haass (2018); Layne (2018).

1354 McDonnell et al. (2015); Oliphant (2015).

1355 Trenin (2018, 84, 3).

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Russia’s recent interventionism is the most direct but not the most serious international challenge to U.S. primacy. The People’s Republic of China under Xi Jinping has slowly grown more assertive in its region. China cooperates on some global issues, such as counter-terrorism, nonproliferation, and increasingly, the environment. But its participation in and support for other postwar principles—democratic and liberal institutions and humanitarian intervention—remain uneven, noncommittal, or in some cases oppositional.1356 Although it has not military intervened outside of its sovereign borders, Beijing is much less cooperative regionally, testing U.S. commitment to the status in quo in geographically proximal areas, such as the South China Sea, by launching “probes” that gradually expand its influence over these areas without provoking U.S. retaliation.1357 It may also eventually seek to replace or set up parallel regional-global institutions, such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, that would challenge U.S. primacy in the Asia-Pacific region.1358

Finally, U.S. primacy has been challenged from within, in domestic political movements across its sphere that have had strong foreign policy ramifications. A growing set of middle powers have increasingly broken from the U.S. sphere to court new patrons or pursue nonaligned foreign policies. Hungary’s Victor Orban has spearheaded a movement of Eastern European states that objects to the European Union’s immigration policies, and which has warmed relations with Putin and Xi as a result. Recep Erdogan’s Turkey has likewise pursued an independent foreign policy, imagining itself as a Middle East hegemon. Under Barack Obama Israel-U.S. relations appeared to reach a nadir. The growth of nationalist, populist, and authoritarian movements across the U.S. alliance system—movements which often identify “globalism” as their main enemy—culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, an unorthodox Republican who ran a campaign predicated on, among other things, aggressively reasserting a protectionist vision of

1356 China has contested Western applications the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, for example. See Garwood- Gowers (2012, 2016); Liu and Chang (2014); Chen (2016); Kozyrev (2016).

1357 See Grygiel and Mitchell (2017, 42–76); Deudney and Ikenberry (2009, 41).

1358 For a summary of these moves, see Goh (2013) and Kang (2017, 175–86).

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American sovereignty and dismantling the bipartisan consensus that has sustained American primacy since the end of the Cold War.

In their combination these events have provoked a wide and increasingly passionate debate about the future of the U.S.-led liberal or “postwar” order. Foreign Affairs has published a sequence of issues speculating about the liberal world order’s end.1359 Prominent academic supporters of the postwar order—Robert Keohane, Daniel Deudney, G. John Ikenberry, Richard Haass, Joseph Nye, and Anne Marie-Slaughter—have weighed in on its demise (or resilience).1360 In July 2018 the New York Times published an advertisement signed by 43 international relations professors titled “Why We Should Preserve International Institutions and Order,” emulating a similar ad published in 2002 in which 33 “realists” protested the looming Iraq war.1361 Deudney and Ikenberry have summarized these views, writing: “Decades after they were supposedly banished from the West, the dark forces of world politics—illiberalism, autocracy, nationalism, protectionism, spheres of influence, territorial revisionism—have reasserted themselves.” These commentaries join a longer list of studies about rising powers and multipolarity.1362

A conclusion of this dissertation is that the “liberal world order” is not and cannot truly be the opposite of geopolitics. The choice presented by liberal internationalism’s defenders between an open world and geopolitical world is a false dichotomy. The international system built by the United States and its allies has been geopolitical or spatially arranged, forwarded, and contested. It likely will be into the future. Accepting the fact the United States possesses a sphere of influence—even an open one—does not mean accepting as morally coeval Soviet rule over Hungary or the Tsars’ domination of Congress Poland. As Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin recently put it: “the West is the greatest sphere of influence that has ever been constituted… and

1359 See also the issues from January/February 2017, May/June 2017, March/April 2018, and July/August 2018.

1360 See Ikenberry (2018); Deudney and Ikenberry (2018); Colgan and Keohane (2017); Haas (2018); Slaughter (2017, 2018); Nye (2018); see also Allison (2018); Lake (2018); Porter (2018b).

1361 See Wertheim (2018).

1362 Deudney and Ikenberry (2018, 16).

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we forgot that. We forgot to talk about it that way, and defend it against others who would undo it.”1363

This study suggests that the absence of a clear post-Cold War geopolitical bargain, de jure or de facto, may be contributing to current tensions between the United States and China and Russia. Their geographical ambitions increasingly alarm proponents of a liberal world order— proponents who in turn do not set limits on their designs or openly acknowledge them as such.1364 Thus the absence of a geopolitical bargain is compounded by the problem that the United States refuses to play ball, so to speak—to recognize its international influence is geopolitically structured, and to consider the geopolitical claims of others. This refusal makes the United States and its allies susceptible to the old but easy criticism that it maintains or seeks a global sphere of influence under the hypocritical guise of liberal altruism.1365

In 1944, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that “a sober approach the world situation must begin with the assumption that the initial basis of unity for the world must be laid in a stable accord between the great powers.”1366 A new model of great power relations need not partition the world in closed spheres of influence, but it may need to recognize the geopolitical ambitions of today’s resurgent powers. It will at least certainly require their cooperation. This study, though not exhaustive in this regard, suggests that great powers cooperate best when the geopolitical stakes are clear. Today’s supporters of liberal internationalism should on this view recognize that their projects are based on power and geopolitically projected. The alternative, a liberal internationalism unmoderated by “a sober approach to the world situation,” risks becoming precisely what it seeks to destroy—a cruel tyranny “practiced in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice.”1367

1363 Kotkin (“Sphere of Influence I - The Gift of Geopolitics: How Worlds Are Made, and Unmade” 2017, 33:49).

1364 See Lind (2017).

1365 Schmitt (2008, 53–58).

1366 Niebuhr ([1944] 2011, 177); see also Carr (1945, 54, 61).

1367 Montesquieu ([1734] 1999, XIV/130) .

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