Commitment Problems and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict

Abstract

IF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS among major powers turn hideously ugly in next twenty years it will be a simple matter to use hindsight to show how this was inevitable. Frightening analogies to 1920s and 1930s can be spun out. A protracted, costly has ended with collapse of one of combatants, its economy ruined and chaotic, its people resentful and ripe for mobilization by authoritarian demagogues who can easily argue for restoring national pride by means of expansion—Weimar Russia, as some have termed it. The largely pathetic response of Western states through NATO and UN to Serbian aggression in Croatia and Bosnia has already recalled impotence and incoherence of League of Nations. And for a time major powers' reactions to the Third Balkan war produced divisions reminiscent of older alignments that might conceivably foreshadow a return to insecurity in Western Europe. Russia, France, and Britain have tended to favor Serbia while Germany and United States have leaned toward Croatia.' Continuing analogy, principle of national remains as powerful and problematic today as it was in 1920s and 1930s. No one seriously questions principle, 2 but in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after communism, self-determination strongly pursued would seem to imply an endless succession of irredentist and secessionist wars, state repression of minorities, ethnic cleansing, enormous numbers of refugees and attendant problems, and perhaps fertile grounds for escalation to major-power conflict. In 1930s, according to some, Chamberlain 'and company's acceptance of principle of deeply influenced their initial response to Hitler's expansionist program (Taylor 1961, 189). In responding to diverse ethnic conflicts and nationalisms to East, Western powers have been similarly torn between desire for peace and stable borders on one hand, and acceptance

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