Alliances and War Expansion: An Old Puzzle Revisited
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It has been argued that allies are more likely to join an ongoing war than are nonal-lies. However, the relationship between alliances and war at the systemic level have been still inconsistent or inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to offer both theo-retical hypotheses and their empirical findings on the systemic relationship. Contrary to the individual tendency of nations, whether or not a war will tend to involve addi-tional nations has nothing to do with either the number of allies or power status that the initial belligerents have. Instead, the possibility of war expansion has increased togeth-er with the increase of the following factors: the number of nations tied together by alliances and the number of poles within the entire international system. This result may suggest a solution to the old puzzle about the relationship between alliances and war at the systemic level. Finally, alliances of initial belligerents have deterred nations from bandwagoning in ongoing wars while the magnitude of third-party participation has increased the probability of an initiator’s failure.
Abstract
It has been argued that allies are more likely to join an ongoing war than are nonal-lies. However, the relationship between alliances and war at the systemic level have been still inconsistent or inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to offer both theo-retical hypotheses and their empirical findings on the systemic relationship. Contrary to the individual tendency of nations, whether or not a war will tend to involve addi-tional nations has nothing to do with either the number of allies or power status that the initial belligerents have. Instead, the possibility of war expansion has increased togeth-er with the increase of the following factors: the number of nations tied together by alliances and the number of poles within the entire international system. This result may suggest a solution to the old puzzle about the relationship between alliances and war at the systemic level. Finally, alliances of initial belligerents have deterred nations from bandwagoning in ongoing wars while the magnitude of third-party participation has increased the probability of an initiator’s failure.