FORMAL ALLIANCES, 1815&Mdash;1939

FORMAL ALLIANCES, 1815—1939 A Quantitative Description By J. DAVID SINGER and MELVI N SMALL University of Michigan 1. Introduction selves. Finally, we will describe as com- Although there are many types of rela- pletely as is possible and necessary the tionship and interaction between and coding and classifying procedures, such among nations, very few of them leave the that others might either replicate the data- sort of ’trace’ which makes them vulner- making operation, or, at least, know ex- able to systematic observation. To ’get at’ plicitly wherein their understanding and indicators of interdependence, interpene- our results differ. tration, hostility, cooperation, threats, or political distance phenomena, for example, 2. The basic sources of information, is a costly and time-consuming enterprise Since our need was for a classified cata- whose results might turn out to be either log of formal alliances that did not, to methodologically unreliable or theoreti- our knowledge, exist, the problem was to cally uninteresting. But one type of inter- identify the sources from which such in- nation relationship which leaves a rela- formation could be compiled for the 125- tively reliable trace and which is full of year period under investigation. Basically, theoretical implications is the formal alli- two types of sources are available. The ance. It is, therefore, surprising that we preferable one, because there is more rele- have seldom gone beyond the anecdotal vant information in a single volume, is treatment of a very few such relationships, the sort of compilation prepared by the or the intuitive generalization about some League of Nations Secretariat, the United larger, but indefinite, number of them.’ Nations in more recent times, and the Aware of the manageability of the prob- foreign ministries of the major powers.3 lem and interested in the theoretical The other type is the historical mono- possibilities, we have undertaken - as graph ; it may be partly dependent on the part of a larger study - to provide a above-mentioned compilations, but usu- quantitative description of written alli- ally has had to turn to the more elusive ances between 1815 and 1939. In this and fugitive archival materials. paper we attempt to identify all known For the period which concerns us here, written alliances consummated between two sources of the first type gave us a the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak fair start; one was the League of Nations’ of World War II between and among Treaty Series and the other was Great sovereign national states.2 For each, we Britain’s British and Foreign State Papers will identify the signatories, specify the series. The former, of course, was of no effective dates, and classify the type of use for the first 100 years which we covered, commitment undertaken. In addition, we and the latter turned out, therefore, to be will aggregate the results in such a fashion quite valuable. Since such listings and as to permit appraisal of their significance treaty texts are generally prepared and both to the international system and to the published shortly after the year or years diplomatic history of the nations them- to be covered, their one major failing is 2 the absence of secret treaties whose exis- analysis. That is, we had first to decide tence only comes to light years or decades on a sampling among them which assured later.4 Though these are the major omis- that we had, for any given spatio-temporal sions, other treaties do occasionally fail of setting, a representation of all relevant inclusion because - in the case of the points of view; whether the bias be gen- League or the United Nations - they erated by nationality or theoretical pre- were not formally registered with the dilection, it had to be considered. But as organization by their signatories, or - in important as representativeness might be, the case of national catalogs - the docu- our overriding concern had to be with ment was either considered insignificant accuracy and reliability. Now the social to the compiling nation or was acciden- scientist might well argue that no objec- tally overlooked by those gathering such tive criteria for such screening exist, and texts. Despite such omissions, however, in the strict operational sense the charge a large proportion of the texts of the is correct. But whatever we may think of treaties included in our study were found the historian’s craft, it values accuracy. in the British series and in the League A study may omit information whose volumes. The balance of the texts were absence the theorist deplores, and it may located either in the compilations of other often fail to provide full comparative in- national governments or in the mono- formation, but whatever ’facts’ are in- graphs and other secondary sources which cluded have a very high likelihood of we will describe in a moment. being accurate. The sociology of the The other major shortcoming, peculiar discipline, of course, sees to that; and to the nature of their task, was the absence where is the social scientist who would of regular information as to the termina- spurn data merely because their reliability tion date of any given inter-nation agree- rests on high inter-subjective agreements ment : the time at which it was either In sum, we are persuaded that almost all formally abrogated or effectively negated of the available and relevant sources (in or superseded. While dates of formal English, French, German, Italian, or termination or abrogation Were often Spanish) have been (a) consulted, found in subsequent volumes of govern- (b) screened carefully, and (c) interpreted mental or international collections, in- correctly, as to the facts of a given case. formal but equally effective terminations Those upon which we relied most heavily wex e not listed. For example, the German- are included in Appendix I, arranged Polish neutrality pact of 1934 must be according to the treaty with which they considered as void following the German are concerned. attack on ils treaty partner in 1939, and the Italian-Albanian defense pact of 1927 3. Codifying the treaties cannot be thought of as effective beyond As we intimated in the Introduction, the Italian invasion of 1939. Or, to take there were four characteristics of all formal a more ambiguous case, only a close alliances in the 1815-1939 period which scrutiny of the specialized monographs needed to be ascertained. First, were at would have revealed that the Root- least two of the alliance partners qualified, Takahira agreement of 1908 had been independent nation-members of the inter- effectively nullified within a year, as national system? Second, were the opera- America’s Far Eastern policy took a much tive clauses of the treaty such as to identi- more consciously aggressive form. fy it as a defense, neutrality, or entente Turning, then, to these crucial secon- commitment? Third, what were its effec- dary sources, it may be said that we sub- tive dates? And fourth, how ’serious’ was jected them to an informal sort of content the commitment undertaken by the signa- 3 tories ? Let us describe briefly the coding have yet devised a valid and reliable in- criteria and procedures which we used in dex of interdependence, although work on ascertaining these alliance characteristics. one is under way.6 Table I shows, therefore, not only the Political status of signatories : Inasmuch date at which each nation qualified as a as these alliance data were gathered in total system member and the date of order to test certain hypotheses regarding disappearance from the list (if prior to correlations with the occurrence of inter- World War II), but the date at which national war, and since no war was classi- it met the somewhat more stringent fied as international unless at least one requirements for membership in the cen- combatant on each side was an independ- tral system as well. Note, too, the letter ent nation-member of the international code indicating the event which led to system, there was no theoretical purpose qualification as a total system member: in identifying alliances that were not also a - crossed population threshold; b - inter-national. Though the procedure for recognized by both legitimizers; and c - identifying nations and their appearance released from de facto dependence. If no in or disappearance from the system is letter code appears, the entity had already outlined and justified elsewhere (Singer qualified by the 1815 or 1920 opening date. and Small, 1966a) we can summarize it here by noting that, to qualify as a Table 1. Composition of total (1815-1939) and central nation, a political entity not only had to (1815-1919) systems have all the traditional earmarks of nation- hood, but had to satisfy two other requirements as well: (a) a population exceeding half a million and (b) de facto diplomatic recognition from the two nations that come closest to being the international community’s legitimizers during the period under investigation: Britain and France. Actually, the procedures were slightly more complex for the post-1920 period and are reported more fully in the aforemen- tioned paper, but they need not concern us here. In Table 1, then, are shown all the political entities which meet our population and recognition criteria and hence qualify as members of the international system. Recognizing that until rather recent times, however, ’the’ system may not have been sufficiently interdependent to be treated as a single collectivity, we divided the pre-1920 system into two parts: the central or European system and the peripheral system. This selection of World War I as a watershed, after which the interdependence of the system justi- fies elimination of our distinction, is plausible enough, but neither we nor others 4 Qualification key: a - crossed population threshold b - recognized by legitimizers c - released from de facto dependence All others had qualified at, or prior to, the 1815 or 1920 dates.

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