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The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance Author(S): William C

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The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance Author(S): William C Trustees of Princeton University The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance Author(s): William C. Wohlforth Reviewed work(s): Source: World Politics, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Apr., 1987), pp. 353-381 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2010224 . Accessed: 17/02/2012 03:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press and Trustees of Princeton University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Politics. http://www.jstor.org THE PERCEPTION OF POWER: Russia in thePre- 1 9 14 Balance By WILLIAM C. WOHLFORTH* INTRODUCTION INTERNATIONAL relationsscholars do notagree on theconnection between the balance of power and war. They question whetheror not an equal distributionof power among statesor alliances leads to stability, whether the preponderance of power in favor of one actor or alliance leads to peace, or whetherthe key lies in the transitionof preponderance from one power to another. Everyone is familiarwith these questions; yet, more than twentyyears of rigorous elaboration and sophisticated quantitativetesting have done littleto produce the answers.' Do thesein- conclusive resultssuggest that thereis no relationbetween the distribu- tion of power and war? It would be unwise to draw such a conclusion,because, despite much scholarlyeffort devoted to the topic,important aspects have not been ad- dressed. One such aspect is the perceptionof power. If "power" influ- ences internationalrelations, it must do so through the perceptionsof those who act on behalf of states.2The quantitativemeasures of power used in the literatureto testvarious power theoriesare thusestimators of perceivedpower. It followsthat a good way to check the adequacy of the testsis to compare the measure of power used with actual perceptionsin a particularcase. This is the comparisonI shall make with regardto Rus- sia beforeWorld War I. * I am gratefulto Bruce Russettfor his help in revisingearlier drafts and to Paul Kennedy forhis helpfulcomments on the firstdraft. I The pioneeringstudy is J.David Singer,Stuart Bremer, and JohnStuckey, "Capability Distribution,Uncertainty and Major Power War," in Bruce Russett,ed., Peace, War and Numbers(Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, I972). Their findingssupported the equality-equals-peace propositionfor the i 9th century,but thepreponderance-equals-peace proposition for the 20th. Wayne H. Ferris,in The Power Capabilitiesof National-States (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1973), covered a similartime span; his findingssupported the equality propositionfor both centuries.Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, "Risk, Power Distributions,and the Likelihood of War," InternationalStudies Quarterly 25 (December i98i), 54I-68, foundno relationbetween power distributionand the likelihood of war over the same period. See also Alan Ned Sa- brosky,Polarity and War (Boulder,CO: Westview,i985), and, fora good reviewof the liter- ature,Randolph Siversonand Michael Sullivan, "The Distributionof Power and the Onset of War," Journalof ConflictResolution 27 (SeptemberI 983), 473-95. 2K. J.Holsti, International Politics: A FrameworkforAnalysis, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall,I972), I58. 354 WORLD POLITICS In one sense, it is not surprisingthat thisroute has not been taken be- fore:uncovering decision makers' perceptionsis a difficulttask. The pre- sentationof the major powers' perceptionsof Russian capabilitiesin the years prior to World War I takes up a significantportion of this article. Furthermore,perceptions as recorded in diplomatic documentsare im- preciseobservations; the bestone can expectfrom even themost extensive historicalresearch is a general sense of contemporaryviews. Still,the en- deavor is worthwhile,for it reveals that indicatorsof numericalcapabil- ities misrepresentnot only Russia's prewar power, but the system-wide distributionof power. These indicatorsalso fail to captureimportant dy- namic elementsin the prewar power balance. Although World War I is only a single case, the disparitybetween perceptionsand estimatorsdis- covered forthe period is sufficientlylarge to suggestthat the inconclusive resultsof quantitativeanalyses of power theoriesmay be more a resultof measurementproblems than of a lack of explanatorypower on the part of the variable itself. A positive dividend of investigatingperceptions of power is the con- tributionto understandingthe onset of war. Perceptions(and mispercep- tions) help to explain the bellicosityof the major powers in I9I4, their unwillingnessto take risks forpeace, and why the war occurred in 19I4 ratherthan earlier or later. The balance of power emerges fromall this as an importantvariable which should not be ignored in the studyof in- ternationalconflict; its influenceis exertedin verycomplex ways thatare difficultif not impossibleto capture statistically. ESTIMATING THE PREWAR BALANCE Beforeturning to a presentationof perceptions,it may be usefulto de- scribehow the prewar balance of power is representedby quantitativein- dicators.Table I shows the measure developed by the Correlatesof War project the most widely used in the field.It is a composite index com- bining the followingindicators with equal weights:total population,ur- ban population,energy consumption, steel production, military expendi- tures,and militarypersonnel. The figuresshow England, Germany,and Russia vyingfor first place among the European powers. Russia and Ger- many appear approximatelyequal in power; by I905, bothhave surpassed England. France is clearlyin the second rank, having a power position closer to Japan's or Austria's than to those of the great powers. With re- gard to alliances,the Dual Alliance betweenGermany and Austria seems slightlyinferior to the Russo-French Entente. When England joins the lattergrouping in the wake of the Russo-JapaneseWar of 1905, the re- PERCEPTION OF POWER 355 TABLE I CAPABILITIES OF MAJOR POWERS Percentageof WorldPower 1900 1905 1910 1913 Russia 15 16 18 18 France 10 9 9 9 England 20 15 14 14 Germany 16 16 17 18 Austria 6 6 6 6 Italy 5 4 4 4 U.S. 22 25 26 26 Japan 5 10 6 6 Source: JamesLee Ray, Global Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,I979), io6. sultantcombination massively outweighs the Austro-Germanalliance on the scales of European power. In a more generalvein, the figuresindicate thatcapabilities were fairlywell dispersedthroughout the system,rather than concentratedin one stateor alliance. The main dynamic element portrayedby the indicatorsis England's precipitatedecline, which is perhaps exaggeratedby her demobilization afterthe Boer War. In most respects,power relationshipsseem fairlysta- ble. France appears to be slowly losing her battle to maintain a place among Europe's great powers. Russia passes Germany in capabilitiesin 1905 and i9io, but the latterappears to be gaining relativeto Russia in the years just beforethe war. Because the Ententepowers' relativecapa- bilitiesremain stable in the finalprewar period,this German riseleads to an improvementin the Alliance's positionvis-a'-vis the Ententeon the eve of the war. How do contemporaryperceptions compare with thispicture of a Rus- sia superiorin power to Germany until just beforethe outbreak of war? To address this question, I shall examine the perceptionsof each of the major powers (excluding Italy,but including Russia herself)of Russia's capabilitiesbetween I905 and 1914. PERCEPTIONS OF THE POWERS BRITAIN Although Russia's defeatby Japanin 1905 and the subsequent revolu- tionproduced a degradationof Russia's power in the eyesof all European 356 WORLD POLITICS statesmen,its effectwas most muted among the British.British military observers,who had greatrespect for the qualities of the Russian infantry- man (thoughnot the officers)and forthe vastnumbers Russia could field, did not see the Manchurian defeatas a sign of any fundamentalRussian weakness.3British officers believed, as stated in a i908 reportof the at- tache in St. Petersburg,that Russia "in a defensivewar ... would render a good account of itselfeven against a combinationof its Westernneigh- bours." In contrastto I905, Russia would, firstof all, "performbetter in a war thatenlisted national sympathies."Furthermore, "there is a strong forcealready on the frontierand an admirable systemof railwaysfrom the interior,"again in contrastto theManchurian situation. And "theelite of the Russian troops are immediatelyavailable. These troops were not touched in the last war." To thismust be added the well-knownqualities of the Russian soldier who, if "properlyled ... should accomplish any- thing."4 From 1908 to 1914, Britishmilitary observers continued to assess fa- vorablyRussia's extensiveefforts to absorb thetactical and organizational lessons of the Japanesewar and to increase the overall size of the army. An attache's memo of 1914, which representedthe war office'sview and was shown to Prime MinisterGrey, took note ofcontinuing problems but concluded that "the army is improvingevery day ... [and it is] only a matterof time before[it] becomes a match forall of Western Europe."5 Britishdiplomats were similarlyreluctant
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