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Leadership, counterfactuals and complexity: synthesising social science and history

Benjamin Mueller, London School of Economics and Political Science B.D.Mueller@lse.ac.uk

Positivist social science struggles to account for the influence of both contingency and agency on the world: the notions of idiosyncrasy and chance sit uncomfortably with the endeavour to understand systemic, deterministic causal processes. At the same time, historians studying leadership produce case-bound findings that are difficult to generalise. I show how counterfactual analysis, subsumed under complexity theory, can address both these limitations in a manner that is both empirically and theoretically insightful. Idiographic (historical) counterfactuals are inherently case-specificity, nomothetic (social scientific) counterfactuals are reductionist and thus distanced from the empirical reality of world politics. In combination, however, both of these counterfactual methods are key means of uncovering the causal dynamics that operate in an open, complex adaptive system. I demonstrate this by showcaing the explanatory flaws in existing IR theories concerning the end of the Cold War. Thinking about counterfactual causation

Stephen Walt has observed that the rise of formal theory in IR was accompanied by a marked preference toward a probabilistic-mathematical approach to causation. This approach proceeds as follows: a model of the phenomenon under investigation is formulated, dependent and independent variables are specified, data pertaining to each variable is obtained, and the correlation examined.1 The aim of such research is ultimately to a) test the strength of the correlation between two variables and b) establish whether the two variables co-vary in the manner predicted by the researcher. There are two epistemological problems with this methodology. Firstly, correlation need not mean causation: probabilistic empirical testing leaves the actual causal logic of the model untouched – it can only find evidence for or against it. Secondly, large-n analysis in IR is an awkward fit for the study of single historical events: “The statistical scholar is interested in general patterns (“mean effect”), not the explanation of particular events.”2

This poses a problem for the study of systemically significant one-off occurrences such as the end of the Cold War. The decade of the 1980s was of great consequence for international politics, but it is hard to subject the end of                                                                                                                1 Walt, Stephen M. ‘Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Rational Choice and Security Studies.’ International

Security 1999 Vol. 23 2 Goertz & Levy, ‘Causal explanation, necessary conditions, and case studies’ p. 13

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the Cold War to statistical analysis in order to infer causation. When studying a single event, historians and social scientists agree that making causal claims requires either implicit or explicit assumptions about how events would have unfolded differently, had there been some kind of change in the purported causal factor. 3 In other words, counterfactuals are intrinsically linked to causal statements. Bruce de Mesquita, for instance, maintains: “we cannot understand what happened in reality without understanding what did not happen but might have happened under other circumstances.”4

The counterfactual relationship between cause and effect explained above is watertight in cases of ‘necessary condition’ explanations: that is, accounts that follow the structure “were it not for X, Y would not have occurred.” This is particularly salient for the study of individual events. Counterfactual analysis can help us make sense of cases: if a strong argument can be made that X was necessary for Y to happen, this in turn is a strong argument that X was an important cause of Y.5 Causal generalisations that apply across cases are instead derived from correlations and subsumed under covering laws (such as the claim that ‘democratic states are less likely to fight war against other democratic states’). 6 What all causal claims share is the core logic of counterfactual causality: a causal link is established when it is shown that removing the antecedent (the purported cause) brings about a change the consequent (the outcome under investigation). If multiple antecedents bring about the same consequent, said event is redundant as opposed to contingent. If antecedent X can lead to many outcomes {Y, Z, …}, outcomes {Y, Z, …} need to be further causally reduced to other antecedents. Where this is not possible, the process under investigation is subject to randomness.

Tetlock and Belkin have conducted an exhaustive survey of the types of counterfactuals deployed in the social sciences and categorised their findings. The two types that are of greatest interest here are idiographic and nomothetic counterfactuals. The latter are essentially deductive, theory-based counterfactuals: they take a clearly specified theoretical model, apply it to an actual empirical situation and manipulate the antecedents of said case to draw conclusions in the form of predictions, which are grounded in the theoretical implications of the model. The goal of nomothetic counterfactuals “is not historical understanding; rather, it is to pursue the logical implications of a theoretical framework.”7 This works very well when the theoretical basis in question consists of a well-defined covering law. For example, in modern monetary economics, money supply is directly linked to inflation as a causal linchpin. Hence one can counterfactually analyse episodes of inflation: if the German government hadn't printed excess amounts of money in 1923, there would have been no period of hyperinflation in the 1920s, ceteris paribus.                                                                                                                3 Levy, Counterfactuals, Causal Inference, and Historical Analysis, draft prepared for delivery at

the 2014 Annual Meting of the American Political Science Association, August 28-31 4 De Mesquita ‘Counterfactuals and International Affairs: Some Insights from Game Theory’ in

Tetlock, Belkin (eds.) ‘Counterfactual Thought Experiments’ 299 5 Levy, Counterfactuals, Causal Inference and Historical Analysis 6 For more, see Goertz and Levy, pp. 12 - 26 7 Belkin & Tetlock, p. 6

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Idiographic counterfactuals are historical counterfactuals: they re-imagine events – i.e., constructing trajectories of history that didn't actually unfold – in order to loosen the deterministic grip of post-hoc analysis and reconstruct the world as it was during the period under analysis. Why did events unfold the way they did? It could either be that they were foreordained – a finding which idiographic counterfactual analysis would yield by showing that there was no real alternative to the actual outcome – or highly contingent – which counterfactuals would illustrate by pinpointing the contingent points on the trajectory of actuality where history could have taken a different path. The speculative nature of ‘What-If’ thinking makes it contentious in a research setting. That said, counterfactuals are not new to IR, and have been put to productive use in other disciplines like history and economics. Idiographic (historical) counterfactuals rely on historical narration, using causal inference to suggest at which moments leaders and their choices made a difference, when luck was the driver of events, or when bigger structural forces were at work. That approach rests on telling fact-driven tales to make the case that a given variable was causally weightier than another in a given context. Nomothetic (deductive) counterfactuals deductively analyse closed systems, making conclusions logically compelling. The researcher pays a sacrifice in terms of the validity of findings due to the parsimonious nature of modelised analysis. Both variants of counterfactual reasoning exhibit weaknesses: nomothetic counterfactuals are theoretically rigorous but remote from the empirical realities of world politics – the lessons they generate rest on the reductionist assumptions made by whichever theory that provides the analytical baseline. Idiographic counterfactuals are interesting and make for engaging research output, but are limited by their inherent case-bound specificity – they generate few ‘lessons to be learnt’, instead illuminating particular historical episodes. There appears to be, then, a seeming trade-off that counterfactual researchers have to confront: a choice between empirical relevance and analytical rigour. In the following, I argue that this gap can be bridged when counterfactuals are used not to support a particular paradigm or class of causes, but to make a wider ontological point about the complex nature of world politics. A complex adaptive system is a dynamic entity whose whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, whose units are interconnected so that changes in some part of the system can have effects in other, seemingly unrelated areas. Fundamental to complexity theory are ideas of indeterminacy, open-endedness and unintended consequences, which conventional (linear) modes of analysis struggle to incorporate.

One way to illuminate complex causal pathways is through counterfactuals, which highlight the co-dependence of different parts. Counterfactuals are speculative because they bring to the fore the co-tenability of variables – they are seen as unreliable because of the inherent difficulty of establishing such links: when one fact is changed, a cascade of related changes follows. But what changes, exactly? Far from making counterfactuals unreliable, it in fact makes them a compelling device to explore the interdependence of

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events.8 The study of uncertainty, while fraught with cognitive biases of its own, is more fruitful than the post hoc rationalisation of the unpredictable. In the following, I provide an overview of the output produced by International Relations concerning the end of the Cold War. I highlight the inadequacies of the various accounts, whilst also pointing out the strengths of their various competing paradigm-specific causal claims made. I suggest when and how counterfactuals can be used to draw connections between various paradigmatic accounts of why the Cold War ended the way it did, and end with a few specific points relating the use of counterfactuals to complexity theory in the context of the end of the Cold War. International Relations Theory and the end of the Cold War There are three types of general theories of International Relations concerning the end of the Cold War. Broadly speaking, the discipline treats the end of the Cold War as one of the following:

· A decisive shift in the material balance of power towards the United States (realists)

· The extension of liberalism into the USSR’s sphere of influence in eastern Europe, brought about by an interplay of domestic and international processes (be these processes commercial, value-based or institutional – all variants of liberal IR theory)

· The replacement of one (wrongly assumed to be fixed) social reality – that of superpower adversarialism – with another, governed by a more co-operative set of norms (constructivists)

That said, IR's usual compartmentalization into realism and liberalism (as well as their their respective 'neo'-variants), constructivism and critical approaches does not readily lend itself for use when categorizing the subject’s output regarding the end of the Cold War. IR ‘proper' is more concerned with general theorising than with studying particular events: structural realism, liberal institutionalism and indeed Marxism “attempt to explain patterns of behaviour that persist across space and time, and they use relatively few explanatory variables (e.g. power, polarity, regime type) to account for recurring tendencies.”9 That is why “international relations theory deals with broad sweeping patterns; while such knowledge may be useful, it does not address the day-to-day largely tactical needs of policymakers.”10

                                                                                                               8 Such as why an innocent conversation between a CIA and a KGB officer in Kabul in the summer

of 1979, among other causes, led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan six months later – a finding which complex causation explains much more convincingly than rationalising it under the intellectually wholly unsatisfying cop-out of ‘contingency’ (a non-statistician’s error term in all but name). Or the role the Helsinki Accords played in acting as a focal point for Soviet dissidents – an example of an unforeseeable corollary of an event (the CSCE in 1975) in a complex system.

9 Walt, Stephen M. The relationship between theory and policy in international relations, Annual Review of Political Science 8(1), 2005, 33

10 Stein, Arthur. Counselors, Kings, and International Relations: From Revelation to Reason, and Still No Policy-relevant Theory. In Being Useful: Policy Relevance and International Relations

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IR's tendency to focus on macro-theorizing calls into question how the discipline can conceptualise an event like the end of the Cold War: was this a tectonic shift in IR, brought about by the collapse of one of the two poles of power that dominated the international system since 1945? Or is the Cold War's end a mere 'data point', conclusions drawn from which are inherently limited in scope since the event, despite its symbolic significance, is ultimately just another 'happening' in the chronology of world politics, one which is not significant enough to merit an evaluation of the major theoretical orientation?11

Gaddis is surely right when he argues that “the end of the Cold War brought about nothing less than the collapse of an international system, something that has happened in modern history only once before – if one accepts structuralism's emphasis on the shift from multipolarity to bipolarity at the end of World War II.”12 It is a fact that “more than one generation of theorists made the Cold War their central occupation.”13 The abrupt and dramatic 'change of scenery' in IR that the end of the Cold War amounted to merits and indeed demands further investigation of this political earthquake's meta-theoretical disciplinary implications. Henry Kissinger has noted that the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet empire is without precedent, “no world power had ever disintegrated so totally or rapidly without losing a war.”14 Jack Matlock, US Ambassador to the USSR at the time of its collapse and previously Ronald Reagan’s top advisor on the Soviet Union, explains the enormity of events in stark terms:

“I could not explain with confidence just how it had happened. After all, the Soviet Union had possessed the largest military machine ever assemble on this planet by a single political authority. It had been governed by an apparently monolithic party with historically unparalleled instruments of compulsion. Tentacles of its elaborate bureaucracy had reached into every crevice of its subjects’ lives. How could such a state simply have destroyed itself? […] I realised that while I probably knew as much about the political developments in Moscow during the past seven years as anyone not actually in the Soviet leadership, I could not give an honest answer to the questions the Soviet collapse raised. Why did it happen at the end of 1991, rather than years later – or months earlier? What were the decisive events that had brought it about? Had a different outcome ever been possible? Could the Soviet system have modified itself so as to last for decades to come?”15

Absent a forecast of what was effectively the first 'suicide' of an empire since the creation of the Westphalian order, IR's theories need to be examined as much as

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Theory, p 50–74. Edited by Miroslav Nincic and Joseph Lepgold. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, 56

11 See Richard Ned Lebow, “The Long Peace, the End of the ColdWar, and the Failure of Realism,” International Organization, 48(2), Spring 1994, p 249–277.

12 Gaddis IR Theory and end of Cold War 52 13 Ibid 53 14 Henry A. Kissinger, Diplomacy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, 763 15 Matlock, Jack F. Autopsy on an Empire: New York, NY, Random House, 1995

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they need to examine the Cold War's end, since “history contains no precedent for so striking an example of abrupt but amicable collapse.”16

Any such examination must zoom into the nature of world politics at a micro-scale not typically favoured in IR. The Cold War ended through an aggregation of foreign policy decisions taken by actors representing numerous involved parties participating in high-level bargaining that brought about the fall of the Iron Curtain. Analyses of these events thus fall more into the domain of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) than into IR. 17 Insofar as IR concerns itself with the end of the Cold War, this involves a shift in analytical focus from the 'upper' to the 'lower' levels of analysis: by scrutinizing a bounded case featuring a significant degree of individual involvement (regardless of whether these agentic influences are treated as causally relevant), more attention must be paid to both the level of the state and the level of decision-making. This stands in contrast to the more typical state-as-agent assumption encountered in IR,18 where the aim is (broadly) to explain the configuration of the international system populated by states, be this from the perspective of the system, or the state. 19 By focusing on an epochal period in IR rather than testing a replicable hypothesis or modelling a phenomenon (such as the democratic peace, or bargaining under conditions of anarchy, respectively), the level of abstraction that gives rise to the state-as-agent axiom is no longer possible. This should not be particularly troublesome. Despite IR’s disregard for the lower levels of analyses, all state behaviour is the product of human decisions: “we talk about the ... behaviour of states [original italics], but this is merely a convenient shorthand ... for the goals and choices of individual human beings who make decisions that result in the behaviour we observe.” 20

There are some useful conceptual signposts that help make sense of the bewildering array of output generated by IR in the wake of the Cold War's abrupt end. These are, chiefly, the location of causal primacy in the following conceptual schisms: the relative emphasis on agents versus structures, and the preference given to material as opposed to ideas-based causal factors. Where theorists stand on these issues helps to mark out the territory on which competing IR approaches battle it out in the fight for explanatory dominance. Walt's broad-brush portrait of three competing explanations for the end of the Cold War is helpful: “Did the Cold War end because the Soviet economy was dying from ‘natural causes’ (i.e., the inherent inefficiency of centrally planned economies),

                                                                                                               16 Gaddis 59 17 As explained by Herrmann, FPA investigates “the discrete purposeful action that results from

the political level decision of an individual or group of individuals.” Cited in Carlsnaes, Walter, 'Actors, Structures, and Foreign Policy Analysis.' Smith, Steve, Amelia Hadfield und Tim Dunne (eds.) 'Foreign Policy - Theories, Actors, Cases', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 90

18 David Singer, who first drew the distinction between system (the 'international) and unit (the nation state) in 1961 which later rose to such conceptual prominence in IR, made it clear that he regarded the state to be the “primary actor in international relations.” See Singer, J. David. 'The Level-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations.' World Politics 14.1 (1961), 79

19 Fearon, James D. 'Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Theories of International Relations.' Annual Review of Political Science (1998), 295

20 Welch, David. Painful Choices - A Theory of Foreign Policy Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

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because Soviet elites were persuaded by norms and ideas imported from the West, or because the United States was putting greater pressure on its overmatched adversary?”21 This heavily simplified 'tripartite division' of IR's takes on the end of the Cold War accentuates the important distinctions between different theoretical. Those who point to the ailing Soviet economy as the determining cause must of logical necessity argue for the primacy of domestic material structures in explaining and shaping a state's foreign policy. The ‘elite persuasion’ argument, by contrast, attaches causal primacy to the norms that leaders and foreign policy elites subscribe to, and focuses on the emergence and influence of ideational structures on policy-making. The argument about 'greater US pressure' can be interpreted in two distinct ways: it either assumes that agents possess the ability to fundamentally alter the foreign policy choices of other states through the clever and adept choice of appropriate strategies; thus, Reagan's arms build-up can be seen as the 'causal difference-maker' that brought about the USSR's implosion. Alternatively, this is simply a re-statement of the earlier material deterministic argument: the consistently superior capabilities of the US economic base inevitably caused the USSR’s hostile Cold War policies to give way as the Soviet state succumbed to the external, structural-material pressures created by the United States' sheer economic power, which was deployed by America's political elites to literally spend the Soviet Union into the ground.

The dominance of the material: Realism

Realists, in accounting for the end of the Cold War, are broadly united around assigning causal primacy to structural material dynamics. In their analyses of the foreign policies states and their leaders pursue, the distribution of material resources in international politics figures prominently. Neoclassical realists in FPA apply neorealist thinking, which emphases the effects of material-structural conditions on the behaviour of states, to the business of foreign policy-making. Structural variables are tempered by the intervening variable of the policy-making process, which includes the perceptions and misperceptions of the actors in charge, and the domestic politicising involved in the determination and implementation of foreign policies.22 Neoclassical realists such as Wohlforth see the relative economic decline of the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies as the cause for the end of the Cold War.23 In the decade of the 1980s, the Soviet economy was marred by economic crisis, experiencing a recession from 1980-82, declining oil revenue as a result of plummeting world oil prices from 1985 onwards, economic growth rates that lagged behind their US counterparts by at least one percent per annum and had done so since 1975, and a defence

                                                                                                               21 Walt, 30 22 Rose, Gideon. ‘Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy.’ World Politics 51.1 (1998),

144-172 23 Davis, James W. und William C. Wohlforth. ‘German Unification.’ In Herrmann, Richard K. and

Richard N. Lebow (eds.), ‘Ending the Cold War - Interpretations, Causation and the Study of International Relations’, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 133

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budget that approached 20% of GDP by the time Gorbachev assumed office.24 Realists argue that the Soviet leadership simply lacked the material means to maintain the Cold War status quo and faced complete economic collapse unless it took steps to end its on-going confrontational relationship with the United States.

Such reasoning rests on the assumption that the material balance of power determines outcomes in foreign policy: “The end of the Cold War was caused by the relative decline in Soviet power.”25 Agency is not denied outright; realists like Davis and Wohlforth recognise that ultimately, leaders choose foreign strategies.26 Wohlforth makes it clear that “decision-makers' assessments of power are what matters,” and that “rational decision-makers may revise assessments of capabilities dramatically and suddenly when confronted with new information.” 27 In other words, structural developments are translated via governmental agents into actual policy. Individuals aren’t irrelevant to the realist explanatory framework, but insofar as they play a role, they are pawns in a wider material game directed by the balance of power. Rational leaders respond to the incentives provided by objective material facts: Gorbachev “could not have been a reform leader ... unless he could point to undeniable material trends” to explain his change in foreign policy.28 In other words, Gorbachev was responsible for the surprise announcement of a unilateral Soviet troop withdrawal from Eastern Europe in December 1988, but the underlying reason for this change in foreign policy was the USSR’s precipitous economic decline, which made such military commitments unaffordable.

This introduces an intervening variable in the form of agents’ perceptions of power and their reaction to changes in the balance of power. Was Gorbachev’s realisation that the USSR’s perpetual confrontational stance with the US harmed his country predestined? Schweller and Wohlforth write that “The Soviet Union’s best response to relative decline within a US-dominated bipolar system was emulation and engagement [emphasis mine],” implying that the USSR could have responded differently (and in doing so pursued a sub-optimal policy) to the change in material structures. 29 Agency isn’t absent in this explanatory framework, but material change “precedes and prompts change in ... ideas.”30 This begs the question of why Gorbachev chose the policies that defined his tenure: were they identified as the optimal response to Soviet decline? If so, was their optimality defined by reference to some objective vantage point of ‘rationality’ – or the product of idiosyncratic analysis by Gorbachev? Realists argue that changes in material circumstances beget changes in policy. But the transmission belt from ‘material change’ to ‘policy change’ is unclear: the notion

                                                                                                               24 Ibid, 135-136 25 Wohlforth, William C. ‘Realism and the End of the Cold War’, International Security 19.3 (1995):

96 26 Davis and Wohlforth, 145 27 Wohlforth, 97-98 28 Davis and Wohlforth, 151 29 Schweller, Randall L. und William C. Wohlforth, ‘Power Test: Evaluating Realism in Response to

the End of the Cold War’, Security Studies 9.3 (2000), 85 30 Ibid, 104

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that there may be different responses to a materially-induced crisis is left underexplored by realism.

A counterfactual analysis of policy-making helps shed light on why given policies were chosen over others, and can furthermore illustrate how and whether policies chosen by agents actually influenced events or were subsumed by other developments. Surely from the Soviet perspective, Gorbachev’s policies were far from optimal, given that they resulted in the country’s collapse. It is highly unlikely that this was the intent of Soviet policy-makers, raising the question, then, of a) whether they are to be blamed for having chosen the wrong policies, and b) whether their policy choices were irrelevant since the USSR’s fate was determined by other, non-agentic factors, which would reduce the role of policymakers to that of extras.

The realist response to these objections is unsatisfactory, to say the least. Their analysis, it is maintained, explains the broad policy direction taken: “We do not claim – no responsible analyst can – to account for each microanalytical decision or bargaining position adopted during the Cold War endgame.”31 That may be true, but realists fail to even make an effort to understand the links between decision-making and outcomes. It is doubtful whether the latter can be made sense of without investigating how it interacts with the former. By counterfactually scrutinizing the potential consequences of alternative decisions, researchers can at least begin to measure the interaction effects between policy-making and corollaries, and specify the choice mechanisms that account for Gorbachev’s policies, and whether they in any way reflect realist assumptions about rational-agent responses to structural-material problems.

To drive home the primacy of material factors in accounting for the Cold War’s end, Brooks and Wohlforth, in an impressive display of statistical firepower, demonstrate how the USSR’s acute decline began in the 1970s, a decline from which the country never recovered. By 1985, the Soviet Union had grown less than the US by 1 to 2% per year for a decade. It was the country’s international position that caused its economic malaise: defence and military research and development (R&D) consumed too much of GDP.32 Brooks and Wohlforth speak of a “punishingly high peacetime military burden,”33 given that “nearly a quarter of all economic activity, the best R&D resources, and the best technical and science expertise were being cannibalized by the massive defence sector.” 34 There are three problems with this analysis. Firstly, despite the implicit assumption that the size of the Soviet military was a problem, the logic behind this is never spelt out. It is easy to proclaim that defence cost too much and that military R&D consumed too much of GDP. But how much is too much? The average citizen suffers when national resources are devoted to the military rather than to consumption goods, but whether this inevitably translates into

                                                                                                               31 Brooks & Wohlforth, Economic Constraints and the End of the Cold War, 298 32 Ibid, 274-5 33 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold

War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas’, International Security, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Winter, 2000-2001), 23

34 Brooks and Wohlforth Economic Constraints, 296

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declining national power cannot just be assumed. The Soviet economic model was entirely different from the Western consumer-capitalist paradigm. The USSR’s excessively military-oriented economy may well have been the logical conclusion of Soviet-style communism, which spurned a market-based supply and demand society – viewing this as the cause of class warfare and inequality – in favour of a massive state-led production system. Given that the Soviet behemoth justified its political monopoly by constant reference to the threat of counter-revolution from within and attack from abroad, it made sense to direct a large proportion of GDP on the armed forces: permanent militarization was surely an inevitable outcome of such a model of governance. Why this had to be detrimental to economic performance is not spelt out. Kenneth Oye speaks of the potentially positive relationship between economic growth and military spending;35 it is simply not the case that military spending unavoidably equates to economic weakness. The US currently spends 20% of its federal budget and nearly half of all discretionary spending on its military,36 but to argue that it is nearing a Soviet-style collapse is contentious, to say the least.

The realists’s story about Soviet decline provides an expedient narrative after the state had imploded. At the time the USSR’s economic difficulties were first beginning to show, it seemed much less determining than Brooks and Wohlforth make it out to have been. In 1984, Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow, two prominent economists, asked: “Can economic command significantly compress and accelerate the growth process?” and opined: “The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. In 1920 Russia was but a minor figure in the economic councils of the world. Today it is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison to those of the United States.”37 That view was empirically valid at the time: between 1950 and 1973, annual Soviet real per capita growth rate exceeded that of the USA by one percent.38 During the same period, the USSR witnessed a 100% increase in real GDP per person employed, 25% more than in the US. Clearly, the Soviet economy wasn’t a disaster from start to finish, and it is unclear why Brooks and Wohlforth deem Soviet economic troubles of the 1980s as terminal, and why the economy’s former virility could under no circumstances return. The USSR’s rise from an impoverished agrarian state into a superpower was indeed stunning. The Soviet collapse discredited Communist economics: but to conclude that the latter caused the former is spurious in the absence of evidence that the Soviet economy was beyond salvation. Such evidence can be provided by counterfactually looking at potential escape routes from the Soviet malaise.

                                                                                                               35 Behavioural adaptations on page with footnote 15 36 Horton, Scott. ‘The Illusion of Free Markets: Six Questions for Bernard Harcourt’, ‘The Stream’,

Harper’s Magazine, September 8, 2011. Web. Accessed on October 5, 2012, at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/09/hbc-90008208

37 R. Heilbroner and L. Thurow, ‘The Economic Problem’, 7th Edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1984, 629

38 This and subsequent figures are taken from: Ferguson, Niall. ‘The Political Economy of the Cold War,’ LSE IDEAS public lecture. Old Theatre, London School of Economics and Political Science. Monday October 18 2010.

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Moreover, the statistical picture painted by Brooks and Wohlforth is not nearly as clear-cut as they make it out to be. Their figures show that in 1988, economic growth was picking up again.39 That data-point may just be an outlier, but it certainly defies the deterministic picture that realists consistently paint of Soviet economic performance. Other statistics belie the notion of the Soviet military eating up an ever-greater share of shrinking resources. Oye cites figures showing that Soviet military spending stayed broadly constant as a share of GDP from 1966 onwards, hovering between 12 and 13%.40 Moreover, Brooks and Wohlforth’s assertion that the USSR experienced declining productivity relative to the US is based on the use of inaccurate statistics which were inflated by the inclusion of value added by offshore production of intermediate products to American plants, a mistake corrected by the US Department of Commerce in 1991.41 The revised figures show that Soviet productivity growth from 1972 onwards first exceeded that of the US, and only began to underperform marginally by 1984.42

Gorbachev’s reforms, the argument goes, were spurred by Soviet economic decline, but at the same time, “Gorbachev’s particular economic reforms clearly helped propel the Soviet economy into a severe tailspin by the late 1980s.”43 The glaring conceptual contradiction at work here – that Gorbachev was a passive respondent to fundamental economic trends and responsible for their subsequent course – is ignored. How could Gorbachev’s policies simultaneously have been the dependent and the independent variable with respect to the Soviet economy? That view only makes sense when the leader and the economy are positioned in a feedback loop, responding to one another. This, of course, implies that the potential for Gorbachev to embark on positive reforms, leading to improved economic outcomes, existed. The real question is: how and when can agents impact economic performance, and why did Gorbachev pursue the wrong choices? By asking and pursuing these questions, counterfactuals can help shed light on the causal processes at work during the Soviet decline in the late 1980s.

The point here is not to dispute that the USSR was experiencing severe economic turbulence by the start of the 1980s, but that the economic picture at the time was a lot fuzzier than Brooks and Wohlforth claim. This is especially pertinent because their analysis disregards the economic story of the West at the time. The USSR struggled economically in the 1980s, but the malaise they suffered affected Western countries as well. In 1980, inflation in the United States topped 15% and in 1981 the unemployment rate topped 10%, the highest

                                                                                                               39 Brooks, Economic Constraints, 282 40 Oye, Kenneth A., ‘Explaining the End of the Cold War: Morphological and Behavioral

Adaptations to the Nuclear Peace?’ in Lebow, Richard N. and Thomas Risse-Kappen (eds.), ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995: 69

41 Gray, John ‘Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern’, London: Faber and Faber, 2007: 51; Kay, John ‘A True and Fair View of Productivity’, Financial Times, London, 27 March 2002

42 Oye, 68 43 Brooks, Economic Constraints 295

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since the Great Depression.44 For the first time since the Great Depression, the real value of stock holdings in the UK and the US was lower in 1980 than at the beginning of the decade.45 Clearly, economic difficulties were not limited to the Eastern bloc alone. In the absence of further causes, it appears that hindsight is the only basis for Brooks and Wohlforth’s claim that the USSR’s economic position made the peaceful and rapid end of the Cold War all but inevitable: their certitude stems from the fact the outcome was already known when they authored it.

This is postdiction as opposed to prediction. Certainty here is post-hoc rather than logical necessity. On the contrary, the more statistics and facts are cited in support of the position that the Cold War ended peacefully because of incontestable material developments which left Gorbachev no choice but to effectively wind down the bipolar stand-off, the more it begs the question: if this is so obvious now, why wasn’t it then? Philip Everts makes the point elegantly: “The manifest inability to assess correctly the probability of certain developments in the East-West context since 1988 does not seem to have contributed notably to the modesty of many observers and commentators of this conflict, and to reluctance on their part to make strong claims and predict what would happen next.”46 Quite simply, glasnost was unthinkable in the early 1980s, and to treat political reform of this kind as inevitable – when it was anything but – is a major fault with the realist position. Counterfactuals highlight the fallacy of hindsight bias: when other alternative developments taken into account, the over-determinacy of realists’ arguments is exposed.

Jon Elster points out that “One cannot have a law to the effect that ‘if p, then sometimes q.’”47 The end of the Cold War upset a whole range of realism’s staple axioms, including the notion that when the cost of maintaining hegemony rises, states try to adjust without ever giving up their hegemony voluntarily. Indeed, this was regarded as the reason why the international system is so war-prone.48 This is not a glib point, but one that strikes right at the heart of contemporary social science’s existential troubles, as put by Everts: “We should recall that we are not talking here about trivial details, but about central elements and characteristics of the international system. The very incapacity to distinguish between ‘fundamental’ and ‘accidental’ forms of change of the system strikes me as a reason for serious concern.”49 Counterfactual analyses of change, by exploring the various trajectories the Cold War could have taken and trying to establish the mechanisms of change through contrastive appraisals of various scenarios, try to correct this very flaw.

                                                                                                               44 Ferguson, Niall, “The Political Economy of the Cold War” 45 Dimson, Elroy, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton, ‘Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns

Sourcebook 2012’, Zurich: Credit Suisse AG, 2012: 55 - 56 46 Everts in Allen & Goldmann, 58 47 Elster, J. 'Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences,' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989,

10 48 Robert O. Gilpin, ‘War and Change in World Politics’, New York: Cambridge University Press,

1981, 157 49 Ibid, 71

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One solution is to counterfactually take into account a range of possible outcomes, rather than prematurely foreclosing most of these outcomes on the basis of axiomatic covering laws that can be upended virtually overnight, as the case of the USSR shows. The dynamics at work in the international system appear to permit multiple outcomes – a sign that complexity is a defining characteristic of the international system. Why did the ‘Domino theory’ fail to hold after the fall of Saigon, but was patently at work in Eastern Europe in 1989? Counterfactuals can describe causal mechanisms and highlight different possible outcomes. This, as Jon Elster recognised, is an important feature of social science: “Mechanisms … make no claim to generality. When we have identified a mechanism whereby p leads to q, knowledge has progressed because we have added a new item to our repertoire of ways in which things happen.”50

Brooks and Wohlforth maintain that the USSR, as the declining challenger in a bipolar system, was especially sensitive to any trends that had negative consequences for its ability to keep up with the leading power.51 That leaves open why a strategy of retreat was pursued rather than an effort to correct the negative underlying trend, or at least a strategy of maintaining the status quo as far as possible. The importance of this point is illustrated by one of the cases that Brooks and Wohlforth cite in support of their own theory: between 1893 and 1913, Britain’s economy grew by 56%, compared to 90% in Germany.52 This seems a classic case of relative decline, which, according to the neorealist dogma, led to a major reorientation in British grand strategy, combining retrenchment and engagement with rivals such as Germany. Even if it is accepted that the USSR experienced relative decline – a finding which the previous statistical analysis showed is not at all unambiguous – this case is illustrative of realism’s core flaw: post-hoc over-determination. Where the case of declining Britain versus rising Germany culminated in the First World War, the case of a relatively declining USSR versus the USA culminated in the Soviet Union’s implosion. To attribute this difference entirely to the USSR’s position as a declining challenger (rather than that of a declining hegemon) is misleading. Brooks and Wohlforth argue that the rapidly escalating economic costs of maintaining the USSR’s international position made the end of the Cold War on American terms the most likely outcome.53 How they arrive at this probabilistic judgment of the ‘most likely outcome’ is left unclear, especially since they were unable to provide it in advance of actual events, somewhat surprising in view of the supposed inevitability of said outcome. Indeed, any judgment of a ‘likeliest’ scenario logically necessitates a range of counterfactuals that are, by definition, less likely than the purported scenario. Counterfactuals can oblige researchers to transparently delineate why their chain of causation has a higher probability than alternative chains: they force transparency on the argumentative structure underpinning a causal account.

                                                                                                               50 Elster, Nuts and Bolts, 10 51 Brooks and Wohlforth, 26 52 Ibid, 19 53 Ibid, 273

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Brooks and Wohlforth maintain that just because some variable (economic malaise in the USSR) did not wholly determine an outcome (the peaceful end of the Cold War), this neither invalidates their theory nor does it show that other causes matter. By misrepresenting their work as ‘deterministic’, they argue, critics construct a strawman for the purpose of showcasing the significance of the otherwise unremarkable finding that some other cause matters in explaining a complex outcome.54 But that misses the point: of course, no one demands that political theories can predict single events such as the rise of Gorbachev or the design and implementation of perestroika.

Instead, the relevant question is asked by Grunberg and Risse-Kappen: what does it tell us about IR and the nature of change in the international system when such seemingly singular micro-events can have momentous consequences?55 One thing it unquestionably tells us is that a more open-ended means of causal analysis than neorealism’s nomothetic-deductive approach will provide more relevant analyses of complex outcomes. Brooks and Wohlforth are right when they say it is not enough to show that other causes mattered. But by acknowledging that the phenomenon under investigation is complex, they make the case for counterfactual analysis: by excluding or altering given causal variables and investigating how this might have changed outcomes, the interaction effects between causes can be studied. After all, the realists’ analytical focus on Soviet economic performance ignores the fact that it was never the USSR’s economic might that caused of superpower friction, but its military capabilities, which continued to pose a real and massive threat to the US. The interesting question is how and why the mutual perception of animosity between the US and the USSR changed, and what steps were taken by the relevant actors on both sides to transform this hostile relationship.

Institutions and ideas: liberals and constructivists

Liberal institutionalists like Oye concur that the economic decline of the USSR formed the underlying cause of the end of the Cold War, but include the prevailing international environment as a conditioning factor which accounts for the Soviet response.56 The principle of nuclear deterrence, for instance, allowed Gorbachev to implement policies that created short-term vulnerabilities, such as a more conciliatory foreign policy, in pursuit of a more solid economic footing, without putting the USSR’s national security at risk. This still leaves open the question of how it was that Gorbachev arrived at his policy choices – how did he formulate his policies, and what degree of scope did he possess to go down other routes? Deudney and Ikenberry suggest that the international ideal context was one in which liberalism simply ended up dominating competing ideologies: in terms of satisfying human wants, the free market proved superior to command economies; in addition, liberal democracies managed to provide stable and

                                                                                                               54 Brooks and Wohlforth, Economic Constraints, 273 55 Grunberk & Risse-Kappen, in Allen & Goldmann, 105 56 Oye, 73

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agreeable political governance whilst respecting a broad array of rights, in stark contrast to Communist rule.57

Such an explanatory perspective contends that long-term liberal trends punctuated the ideological membrane surrounding the Communist world. People desire to live in freedom, and the USSR was not immune to this universal aspiration. The prospect of democratic liberalization explains the opposition to Communism both in Eastern Europe and at home. Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland: periods of widespread dissent and unrest in the Soviet sphere remained a theme throughout the Cold War. And where liberal modernization –capitalism’s dominance over collectivised economies’ in terms of enhancing human welfare – explains the failure of communism, liberal internationalism, in the form of transnational commercial links and interactions of dissident movements in the East with human rights campaigners in the West, undermined the social stability of Communist rule. Ultimately, the outlook for the Soviet leadership of joining the prospering liberal sphere of peace offered the most appealing way out of the increasing and worsening strains and burdens of Cold War competition.58

This is an intuitively credible approach to explaining Communism’s failure. It has yielded some surprising philosophical implications. Fukuyama, for instance, ingeniously used the liberal story to turn Marx’s Hegelian interpretation of history – as a series of class-conflict driven epochs that inevitably bear toward Communism – on its head, proclaiming the inverse to be true: in the evolution of political thought, the back and forth between the cosmopolitan liberal creed and its communitarian detractors – fascism and Communism – had finally culminated with liberalism (not Communism, as Marx had claimed) remaining as the only credible political system capable of enabling Hegelian self-actualization on a macro-social scale. 59 Communism collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions: it promised freedom from capitalist oppression and thus both equality as well as genuine political emancipation, but only at the cost of penury (relative to capitalist societies) and systematic repression of all dissent.

Fukuyama is careful to point out that this argument does not spell the end of international conflict per se, that ethnic and nationalist violence would persist and perhaps increase. His proclamation only applied to the struggle of ideas, in that liberalism now towered above all competing creeds and was bereft of credible alternatives. After all, even China had turned its back on the centrally planned economy by 1989.60 But the finding that there is now no other ideological show in town is purely normative. It is analytically misleading to deduce

                                                                                                               57 Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “The International Sources of Soviet Change,”

International Security 16 (Winter 1991 / 92): 74-118; and “Soviet Reform and the End of the Cold War: Explaining Large-Scale Historical Change”, Review of International Studies 17 (Summer 1991): 225-50.

58 See: Doyle, M., ‘Liberalism and the End of the Cold War’, in R. Lebow and T. Risse- Kappen (eds.), International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995

59 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History? After the Battle of Jena”, The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 1- 18

60 Ibid, 14

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empirical insights into the operation of world politics from this. The case of the Chinese Communist Party reveals why: Deng Xiaping re-oriented China’s economy toward a market system – following the footsteps of Gorbachev’s perestroika – but retained totalitarian rule. There was no Beijing-style glasnost, quite the contrary, as the Tiananmen crackdown showed.

Fukuyama was correct in arguing, “What is important about China from the standpoint of world history is not the present state of the reform or even its future prospects. The central issue is the fact that the People's Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris.” 61 Liberalism, in other words, still lacks a credible competitor. But the success of China’s economic reforms shows that even if the liberal story is true on a normative level, its seeming self-evidence acts as a smokescreen, hiding the wider array of possible courses of action that presented themselves to the Soviets in the 80s which did not entail the end of one-party rule. The USSR was not obliged in any sense of the word to adopt the political system of its competitor. By examining the potential for economic rejuvenation in the absence of pluralist politics in the Soviet Union, the contingency of liberalism’s victory can be examined. Was it an unintended consequence of particular choices? A contingent coincidence? Or, after all, an inevitability? To pose and probe these questions counterfactually is to study the causal force of agents, the influence of chance, and the potency of liberalism’s future in the context of world politics.

Liberals also have a hard time explaining the timing of the USSR’s reforms: why was the superiority of capitalist democracy acknowledged in the late 1980s, when this was patently not a recent revelation? As put by former Secretary of State George Shultz, the USSR’s failure as an economic and ideological model was fairly clear to most objective observers; it was in the military dimension “it had proved itself able to develop awesome power and use it ruthlessly and skilfully.”62 It may be that the timing of the Soviet collapse was the result of the rapid deterioration of the USSR’s economic performance at the end of the 1980s. But was said collapse a consequence of Gorbachev’s decisions? Could the Soviet malaise have been handled differently? Was the USSR’s economic deterioration caused by Gorbachev’s idiosyncrasies or by powerful underlying economic forces? By counterfactually changing certain of Gorbachev’s decisions and studying how this would have affected the performance of the Soviet economy, such causal riddles left unanswered by liberalism can be studied.

Constructivist accounts discuss the sources and course of the Soviet ideological transformation. Koslowski and Kratochwil, for instance, focus on the changing constitutive rules of politics: the international system is an ensemble of institutions, these institutions are man-made, fundamental change in the

                                                                                                               61 Ibid, 16 62 Shultz, George, ‘Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State’, New York, NY:

Scribner’s, 1993, 10

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international system takes place when its constitutive norms are changed.63 Actors and structures mutually constitute one another: structures are not immutable because they depend on actors for their reproduction; said actions are in turn conditioned by the social systems that surround them.64 Material facts are meaningless in and of themselves. Instead, constitutive social norms govern how and why agents choose to deploy the material resources available to them. To understand the end of the Cold War, it is necessary to study changes in the rules governing superpower relations, not changes in material balances. In this vein, Stalin’s rejection of free elections in Eastern Europe started a process that created an informal Soviet empire, while Gorbachev’s revocation of the Brezhnev doctrine began the process whereby this informal empire was deconstructed.

Koslowski and Kratochwil maintain that the bipolar international system that prevailed during the Cold War was the “outcome of a succession of choices” by key actors.65 All decision-makers rely upon normative conceptualizations of the world, which constitute an ideal-structural framework. The re-constitution of norms such as the Brezhnev Doctrine was only possible after developments in civil society prompted changes to actors’ self-identification and thus to social-structural foundations.66 Shifting social practices – for example the rise of anti-totalitarian movements in Eastern Europe – undermined the legitimacy of the existing norm of Soviet suzerainty and brought about a society-wide backlash in countries like Poland, East Germany and the Baltics. This eventually destabilised the Soviet system, as the actors in charge decided to dismantle the social practices that upheld the informal Soviet empire, such as military intervention in client states that rejected Communist one-party rule. The structural-ideal features of the ‘normative identity’ concept are placed on a co-constitutive footing with the policy decisions of agents: in conceptual terms, neither agency nor structure causally precedes the other.

This commitment to co-constitution is interesting, and at the same time frustrating. It is interesting because co-constituting ideal structures and idiosyncratic agents makes for a thought-provoking explanation of how the Cold War ended. But the reliance on co-constitution means that one of the features observed in previous theories – namely, the synthesis of complex factors into a comprehensible, interactive causal chain – cannot be met: the account does not answer why these normative-ideal changes occurred. Koslowski and Kratochwil maintain that Gorbachev’s toleration of Poland’s free elections in 1989 (in which the Communist party was roundly defeated) meant the beginning of the end of Soviet dominance of the Warsaw Pact. But just why Brezhnev sent troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to uphold Communist governance, while Gorbachev refused to do so in 1989, is not accounted for. And the norm-evolution posited as the explanation for Communism’s collapse is troubling in its certitude. Anti-                                                                                                                63 Koslowski, Rey and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, ‘Understanding Change in International Politics:

The Soviet Empire's Demise and the International System’, Lebow, Richard N. and Thomas Risse-Kappen (eds.), ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995: 134

64 Ibid, 128 65 Ibid, 143 66 Ibid, 158

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totalitarian sentiment in Eastern Europe was hardly a normative innovation of the 1980s. What prompted the grip of dictatorship to be lessened after 50 years of domination?

As Dessler has noted, constructivist theories relying on co-constitution “have often been presented in terms too vague to be of practical use.”67 What is the causal mechanism that brings about changes in the prevailing normative discourse? How do agents and structures interact in this process of norm evolution? Why did the reforms that took place in the USSR differ from those that occurred in China? Which changes were caused by specific choices that could have gone differently? It is well documented that the Chernobyl disaster was a watershed moment in exposing just how deeply embedded lies and deception were in the Soviet mode of governance. Gorbachev himself claims it first convinced him of the necessity of nuclear disarmament.68 Chernobyl provided important backing for Gorbachev’s signature policy of glasnost, and helped shore up public support behind his reform efforts.69 At the same time, the Chernobyl disaster was a highly contingent, complex confluence of a myriad of distinct causes – including at least five human errors, the removal of any of which would have prevented the accident.70 Whether or not Chernobyl causally contributed to the normative evolution of Soviet thinking can be investigated by studying the disaster’s impact on Gorbachev’s policies, and whether they would have differed in its absence. This sharpens the analytical contribution of constructivist accounts: for instance, by demonstrating that single events of emotive significance such as Chernobyl can affect prevailing discourses and shift consensus views in a particular direction. If there is compelling evidence that the policies of perestroika, glasnost and nuclear disarmament intensified as a direct result of Chernobyl, we arrive at a clearer understanding of why Gorbachev’s reform proposals gained root. This aligns constructivist thinking more closely with causal analysis.

Risse-Kappen argues that ideas intervene between material factors and actors’ interests and preferences. In terms of where they originate, “ideas do not float freely”: agents are always exposed to a number of competing, sometimes contradictory policy ideas, which arise from “epistemic communities of knowledge-based transnational networks.”71 Domestic political structures are the key variables that determine which policies move up to high-level decision-making stratas. Risse-Kappen discusses Soviet political institutions, state-society relations and the values and norms embedded in Soviet political culture, all of

                                                                                                               67 Dessler, David. ‘What's At Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?’, International Organization

43.3 (1989), 442 68 Gorbachev, Mikhail, “Turning Point at Chernobyl”, Project Syndicate, 14 Apr 2006. Web. 19 Apr

2013. <http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/turning-point-at-chernobyl>. 69 See Hopkins, Arthur T. ‘Unchained Reactions: Chernobyl, Glasnost and Nuclear Deterrence’,

Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1993 70 See, for example, the American Nuclear Society’s description of the accident, at

<http://www.new.ans.org/pi/resources/sptopics/chernobyl/whathappened.php> 71 Risse-Kappen, Thomas, ‘Ideas Do Not Float Freely: Transnational Coalitions, Domestic

Structures, and the End of the Cold War’, Lebow, Richard N. and Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,’ New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995, 189

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which influenced the intellectual policy climate at the end of the 1980s. Policy networks in the West advocated common security and nonoffensive defence, and promoted these ideas to Soviet institutchniks who participated in exchanges and meetings with Western security analysts and scholars. This emerging intellectual community changed the normative environment within which Gorbachev’s new thinking developed and took hold. When Gorbachev adopted the idea of a common security policy, the most immediate and positive response came from West Germany, where the idea of shared East-West security concerns had already established itself as a normative consensus in wider society.72

This raises questions about the role of the agent, specifically the scope he possesses to actively shape the ideational basis of policymaking: to what extent do idiosyncrasies matter? Is the agent in charge of or beholden to extraneous ideological forces? To what extent is the agent a recipient as opposed to a generator of ideas? There is a class of cognitive theorising in IR that borrows from psychology to open up the ‘black box’ of the decision-maker and attempt to answer such questions. Such theories can “offer significant insights into why particular ideas carry the day in specific policy choices.”73 Lebow, for example, highlights the importance of agents’ motivation and the consequent distribution not of material capabilities but of interests.74 Stein argues that Gorbachev was an inductive learner who was open to radical ideas and policies and adjusted his policies in response to Western reactions and initiatives, rather than deductively thinking about how to best maximize his objectively given interests.75 Of course, Gorbachev was just one half of the equation: he had to interact with his counterpart in the US in order to defuse the Cold War. Breslauer and Lebow argue that Reagan entered office with simplistic but strong anti-Soviet views, illustrated by his ‘evil empire’ rhetoric, but “retired as the biggest dove in his administration.”76 Because his image of the Soviet Union, “while pronounced in its hostility, was relatively simple and undifferentiated,” it was susceptible to dramatic change.77 Reagan’s tendency “to reduce issues to personality” meant that he came away from personal meetings with Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 and in Reykjavik in 1986 impressed and convinced by his commitment to reduce the nuclear danger.78

This cognitive assessment of agency stands in opposition to the utility maximising agent encountered in rational choice theories: idiosyncrasies matter, in that perception affects one’s choice of policy. Leaders work to build a balance of interest, interacting with other leaders, their domestic audience, international

                                                                                                               72 Ibid, 195 73 Ibid, 193 74 Lebow and Risse-Kappen, ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’ 17 75 Lebow, Richard N. and Janice G. Stein. ‘Understanding the End of the Cold War as a Non-Linear

Confluence’, in Lebow and Herrmann (eds.), ‘Ending the Cold War’ 189-218 76 Breslauer, George W. und Richard N. Lebow, ‘Leadership and the End of the Cold War’, in

Lebow, Richard N. and Richard K. Herrmann, ‘Ending the Cold War - Interpretations, Causation, and the Study if International Relations’, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 182

77 Lebow & Risse-Kappen, 10 78 Breslauer & Lebow, 183

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public opinion and the elite consensus among the policy-making class.79 The national interest is not a fixed, materially defined goal, but a flexible construct subject to re-definition via a complex process of ideological change. This means that policy-making behaviour is path-dependent and non-linear.80 Elite learning at the unit level has systemic consequences: “reflective actors ... can ... transcend the consequences of anarchy.”81 Human can “alter their social environment in profound ways” by knowing and understanding the structures around them.82 The human intellect gives agents the “understanding and courage to escape from their security dilemma.”83

The implication is that individual actors matter a great deal in world politics: due to the importance of idiosyncrasies, agents cannot simply be exchanged without affecting outcomes. This stands in contrast to the notion that in international (as opposed to domestic) affairs, decision-makers face a broadly constant set of priorities and constraints, meaning there is little scope to ‘personalise’ foreign policy. By asking and trying to answer counterfactual questions – both about decisions taken and those considered but not taken (why not?), and about the presence of agents themselves – the extent to which individuals were essential to the end of the Cold War can be probed. This involves looking at specific decisions, for instance on arms control negotiations, which involved the weighing up of options and adjudication between competing views. By looking at why given options were selected and others discarded, the level of opposition that needed to be overcome, and suggesting alternative courses, the causal weight of actors can be studied. Was Reagan uniquely accommodating to Gorbachev’s overtures? Would different decisions have yielded different outcomes, or was the USSR headed inexorably toward collapse and capitulation? If the latter is true, was this due to Gorbachev?

Counterfactuals, causation and complexity None of the theories discussed here are ‘wrong’ outright. Realists are right

to point out that objective material pressures matter in determining a state’s position in the international system. But there is no singular causal direction from material structural developments to changes in policy, and certainly no single policy path open to the decision-maker responding to material pressures. Thus, realism is essentially an underspecified theory. Liberals offer a convincing perspective on how the ideological basis of Communism was eroded by the West’s relative success. But they fail to explain why the Soviet desire for change took on a liberal mantle, when technocratic economic reform along Chinese lines could also have been attempted, along with the maintenance of a repressive state apparatus. Constructivist theories do well to highlight the interaction of agents and structures when identities are re-constituted, and shed light on the process by which norms evolve and permeate the policy-making establishment. However,

                                                                                                               79 Lebow and Stein 80 Ibid, 214 81 Lebow, 1994, 276 82 Ibid, 275 83 Ibid, 276

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they do poorly on the causal front, helping to answer ‘how possible’ questions rather than the ‘why questions’ that explain what brought about a given outcome over another. Lastly, the cognitive approaches that integrate psychological accounts of how agents adopt new norms don’t delimit idiosyncrasy against the external structures that exert unified pressure on all foreign policy agents (e.g., national security imperatives).

The above survey of IR’s explanation of the end of the Cold War points out weaknesses and outright contradictions in the existing accounts, as well as tentatively suggesting how counterfactuals can be used to remedy some of these flaws. It argues against 'big picture' theories and in favour of a fox-like approach as advocated by Berlin84: picking and choose the theories that best account for given developments. This is done by testing the causal implications behind theories, e.g. by looking at alternative decisions contemplated by leaders but not taken. Such an approach entails a re-examination of Cold War history, which can yield surprising, hitherto underappreciated historical insights. Examples of this include the link between the (highly contingent) Cuban Brigade Affair in the summer of 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or the unexpected policy continuities between Carter and Reagan (as well as the causally relevant differences between the two).

Essentially, counterfactuals try to ‘predict the past’, by studying how events unfolded, versus how they could have unfolded, so as to better differentiate between essential and incidental causes. Counterfactuals thus suggest causal pathways. The credibility of a postulated cause rests on how convincing its counterfactual inverse is. History is non-repeatable, so reverse-engineering it is enormously challenging. 85 But by bringing about a better understanding of the general properties of the phenomenon under study (how structures, agents and chance interact to bring about systemic change in IR), and learning the limits of what can’ be known, the exercise is a knowledge-generating one. Suggesting what kinds of associated changes result from counterfactual re-writes, be they realistic or not, points to some of the big causal pathways in complex systems.

After events have happened, it is relatively easy to erect a narrative suiting a particular theory that makes decisions look preordained. In actual fact, the uncertainty leaders face when they deliberate on a decision is, more often than not, vast and preceded by intense policy debates. The ‘right’ answer (or, for that matter, the ‘wrong’ answer) may appear obvious in retrospect, but focusing solely on the chosen policy path fails to take into account the reality of decision-making at the time. When a system is in crisis, actors need to respond. The solution to the crisis will be far from clear and various options will be forward, which may

                                                                                                               84 Berlin, Isaiah: ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History’, New York,

NY: 1953: Simon and Schuster; New York, 1957 85 See Taleb, Nassim N., ‘The Black Swan’, New York, NY: Random House, 1997: 195 – 198. Taleb

likens the process to tracing a water puddle to its original state as an ice cube. When looking at an ice cube on a table, we can confidently predict that it will turn into a puddle of water, and precisely compute the process. When looking at a puddle of water, even with the knowledge that this used to be an ice cube, the process of reconstructing the shape of the ice cube and its disintegration is far more difficult.

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seem equally adequate at the time given the lack of complete knowledge. The formulation of a policy response by leaders is as relevant as the actual decision itself if we wish to understand outcomes in IR. Almond and Genco have described this understanding of political reality well, arguing it “consists of ideas – human decisions, goals, purposes – in constant and intense interaction with other ideas, human behaviour and the physical world. At the centre of this complex system are choices and decisions … that is the heart of politics.” [Emphasis mine]86

Counterfactuals underpin all explanation-seeking analytical thinking. As Hawthorne noted, “an explanation suggests alternatives. […] the force of an explanation turns on the counterfactual which it implies.”87 Thus, whether we like it or not, counterfactuals are deeply engrained within the analytical fabric of IR, by virtue of the discipline’s aspiration to explain events in the domain of international relations. Moreover, any kind of goal-oriented decision-making rests on a counterfactual supposition of the cause-effect consequences of one’s choice. Counterfactuals have thus always been a part of IR’s analyses, since they pose a basic causal-analytical device essential to any kind of logical investigation, though this was not made explicit until recently.88 It is important for IR to begin ‘handling’ counterfactuals in an explicit and transparent manner, so as to harness their analytical value-add and advance IR’s research programme. By attempting to do this in the context of decision-making during the end of the Cold War, my research aspires to pave the way for a clearer understanding of the dynamics of change that drive international relations forward. This could profoundly improve IR’s ability to aid practitioners: in an increasingly intertwined world, decision-makers need to rely on historically informed judgment to steer their nations successfully through what is a nonlinear-multicausal rather than an linear-axiomatic world.

Jervis has previously noted the suitability of counterfactual analysis for the study of complex systems.89 Such a system has emergent properties: its units are interconnected such that the system’s characteristics and behaviour cannot be inferred from the individual behaviour of the units within. Changes in one unit or the relationship between any two have ramifications in other units or relationships. In such a system – which presents a realistic ontological grounding for world politics – causation operates in ways that elude standard means of

                                                                                                               86 Almond, Gabriel A. and Stephen J. Genco. ‘Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics.’ World

Politics 1977 Vol. 29 87 Hawthorne, Geoffrey. Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social

Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 13-14 88 Take this famous quote from Thycudides, the first thinker of IR to be recognized as such: “The

growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.” This unequivocal causal claim (seemingly in the mould of the ‘necessity’ school of causal thought) contains within it a powerful but implicit counterfactual: absent Athens’ rise, the Peloponnesian war would not have occurred. Athens’ rise was a necessary and sufficient condition for the war: the analysis therefore presumes that agency played no part in causing the war (other than indirectly, through the agency of Athenians bringing about the rise of their city-state) and leaders could not have prevented the war in any event. See Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, 1.23

89 Jervis. Robert E. ‘Counterfactuals, Causation and Complexity.’ In Belkin, Aaron and Philip E. Tetlock, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics

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scientific analysis.90 Counterfactual thinking facilitates the development of our understanding of how elements in complex systems are connected and results arise: well-structured counterfactual scenarios alert us to the possible presence of causal pathways that we could otherwise ignore.

Reductionist-linear models of world politics do a poor job of explaining complex change. A reductionist approach struggles to accurately capture the intricate dynamics that characterise change in international politics. If a system’s variables cannot be effectively isolated from each other or from their context, then “linearization is not possible, because dynamic interaction is one of the system’s defining characteristics.”91 Nonlinearity has become of great interest to the social sciences of late, accounting for the unpredictability of economic-political developments by incorporating phenomena such as “interconnectedness and context, interaction, chance, complexity, indistinct boundaries, feedback effects,” as opposed to modelling social developments in the mould of Newtonian physics. 92

The combination of causal and counterfactual reasoning yields what Ringer terms “a dynamic vision of alternate paths of historical change.”93 This is especially important because it potentially allows to overcome a key barrier to fruitful counterfactual reasoning – the fact that multiple sufficient causes (as opposed to necessary causes) and equifinality “make counterfactuals more difficult because the absence of factors on one causal path does not exclude the effects of other causal paths.”94 As I have tried to suggest in this paper, by studying the interaction effects between various classes of causes – structural, agent-based, and contingent – and combining both idiographic/historical and nomothetic/deductive counterfactuals, we may be able to build a richer understanding of the multiple and precarious channels of causation that are present in the international system. As Jervis has maintained, to explore more deeply whether causes are necessary or sufficient, “what is most important is that we need to bring out the counterfactual claims that are implicit in many arguments if we are to reach considered judgments about the empirical and normative questions involved.”95

There are two contributions my research tries to make to IR theory and to our understanding of the end of the Cold War.

1) Conceptual-substantive: I look at events in the 1980s and build a fact- driven causal narrative. The list of causes that influence the evolution of political events run along a spectrum with two poles: at one end are

                                                                                                               90 For a thorough overview of the basics of complexity theory, see ‘Complexity, Global Politics and

National Security’, David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (eds.), National Defense University, Washington DC, 1997

91 Beyerchen, Alan. ‘Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War.’ International Security 1992 Vol. 17

92 Ibid, p. 82 93 Ringer, Fritz. ‘Max Weber on Causal Analysis, Interpretation, and Comparison.’ History and

Theory 2002 Vol. 41 p. 167 94 Goertz and Levy, p. 15 95 Jervis, Causation and Responsibility in a Complex World, Prepared for delivery at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 2-5, 2010

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located structural variables with deterministic properties, and on the other end are agents possessing free will as well as chance. Counterfactually probing how and whether events could have unfolded differently allows me to determine how contingent events were: events that are ‘hard’ to re-imagine are located nearer to the structural-deterministic pole (e.g. hardening of the US stance vis-à-vis the Soviets by the beginning of the 1980). Events that can easily be re-imagined (e.g. a Soviet invasion of Poland in 1980) are contingent and located near to the free will-chance pole (in the case of Poland, Brezhnev’s idiosyncrasy was causally significant). When an event turns out to have been contingent, I can explore its wider causal impact by conjecturing what its non-occurrence would have entailed (e.g. no Chernobyl)

2) Conceptual-methodological: By deploying counterfactuals to

distinguish incidental from coincidental causes I have a tool to assess the relative value of existing theories about the end of the Cold War (broadly divided into structural, domestic-political, ideas-based and leadership theories). Moreover, I can explore the implications of timing and of path-dependencies on the comparative worth of theories (e.g.: the idiosyncrasies of Reagan and Gorbachev causally dominated nuclear disarmament during and following the Reykjavik summit, while structural-realist factors lessened in importance at such highly charged, personal meetings) and explore interaction effects between the theories (e.g. how could Gorbachev [a leader] have turned around the Soviet economy [a structure]?)