War, conflict and Security.

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Introduction

When you pick up one piece of this planet, you find that, one way or another, it’s attached to everything else—if you jiggle over here, something is going to wiggle over there. . . . We need this sense of the continuing interconnectedness of the system as part of the common knowledge, so that politicians feel it and believe it, and so that voters feel it and believe it, and so that kids feel it and believe it, so that they’ll grow up with an ethic.

[To minimize oil spills] we should . . . mandate double-hulled vessels and compartments in tankers.

—Wallace White, “Profiles (Sylvia Earle)” in The New Yorker

On the centennial of the publication of The Origin of Species, H. J. Muller wrote an article entitled “One Hundred Years Without Darwinism Are Enough.”1 His point was that although the basic ideas of evolution were well known, people often thought in nonevolutionary terms, a defect he hoped to correct. My aim is parallel. Although we all know that social life and politics constitute systems and that many outcomes are the unintended conse- quence of complex interactions, the basic ideas of systems do not come readily to mind and so often are ignored.2 Because I know international

1 H. J. Muller, “One Hundred Years Without Darwinism Are Enough,” School Science and Mathematics 59 (April 1959), pp. 304–16; the famous paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson thought so well of this title that he used it, with acknowledgment, for one of his essays in This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964). For the argument that many aspects of Darwinism have yet to be incorporated into philosophy, see Ernst Mayr, “How Biology Differs from the Physical Sciences,” in David Depew and Bruce Weber, eds., Evolution at a Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 43–63.

2 This may stem from deeply ingrained patterns of thought: Jerome Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow, and George Austin, A Study of Thinking (New York: Wiley, 1956); also see Nancy Henley, Robert Horsfall, and Clinton De Soto, “Goodness of Figure and Social Structure,”Co

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4 C H A P T E R 1

politics best, I will often focus on it. But the arguments of the book are more general and I will take examples from many fields. This is not difficult: Sys- tems have been analyzed by almost every academic discipline because they appear throughout our physical, biological, and social worlds.3 The fact that congruent patterns can be found across such different domains testifies to the prevalence and power of the dynamics that systems display. Much of this constitutes variations on a few themes, in parallel with Darwin’s summary remark about the structures of living creatures: “Nature is prodigal in vari- ety, but niggard in innovation.”4

This is not to promise a systems theory of politics, although some work in this vein has been extremely fruitful. Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of Interna- tional Politics is the most important book in the field in the past decade, and I will devote much of chapter 3 to it.5 My objectives are more modest, however, in part because I have doubts as to whether more ambitious goals can be reached.6 Few if any realms of human conduct are completely deter- mined at the systems level. Actors’ choices are crucial and, as I will discuss later, are influenced by beliefs about how the system operates. We should not expect too much of theorizing here—actors may be able to take advan- tage of discernable patterns in ways that would destroy at least some of them. But human guile and idiosyncracies are not the only factors that limit our ability to make determinant predictions: Many systems, including inani- mate ones, are highly complex and contingent.7

Psychological Review 76 (March 1969), pp. 194–204, and Roger Shepard, “Evolution of a Mesh between Principles of the Mind and Regularities of the World,” in John Dupré, ed., The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 251–75.

3 The list of works on systems and systems theories is very long. In this book I will cite only those I have found most useful, which I realize excludes many that others consider classics. These, of course, often have influenced other works on which I do draw.

4 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Modern Library, 1936), p. 143. 5 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 6 For discussions of what we can—and cannot—expect from theorizing about complex

systems see, for example, David Ehrenfeld, “The Management of Diversity: A Conservation Paradox,” in F. Herbert Bormann and Stephen Kellert, eds., Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 26–39; Stuart Kauffman, “Whispers from Carnot: The Origins of Order and Principles of Adaptation in Complex Non- equilibrium Systems,” in George Cowan, David Pines, and David Meltzer, eds., Complexity: Mataphors, Models, and Reality (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), pp. 85–87; David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natu- ral Selection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 490–91.

7 Related arguments stem from chaos theory. The standard source for nonexperts—which I assuredly am—is James Gleick, Chaos Theory (New York: Penguin, 1988). Also see Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (New York: Macmillan, 1992); M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Stephen Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and David Ruelle, ChanceCo

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 5

This does not mean an absence of regularities. Indeed, crucial to a sys- tems approach is the belief that structures are powerful and that the internal characteristics of the elements matter less than their place in the system. That is why different kinds of countries often behave similarly, as Waltz has stressed; why the Cold War resembled the rivalry between Athens and Sparta; why the behavior of Frederick the Great in 1756 was not unlike that of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914; why I can locate parallel processes in realms as diverse as international politics and ecology. As a leading biologist put it: “Whenever I come across a system which is oscillating, whether it be the menstrual cycle or the numbers of hares and lynxes in Canada, I look for delayed feedback. In doing so, I am assuming that . . . the behaviour is determined by the structure, and not by whether the components are elec- trical circuits, hormones, or animals.”8 In most cases, our first instinct is to explain behavior in terms of the actors’ preferences and power. Instead, we should start with how the actors are positioned. For example, the argument that poverty will increase when welfare policy is devolved to individual American states is often rebutted by pointing out that state political leaders are no more heartless than national ones. But a systemic perspective indi- cates that the focus should be on the fact that because the states compete with one another for national prominence and mobile businesses, their leaders will feel greater pressures to cut welfare benefits, and thereby cut taxes, than will national figures. Furthermore, much about the actor is sys- temically determined: Many of an individual’s preferences stem from her position in the social system, and her power is influenced by its configura- tion (e.g., a swing voter gains power because the others are evenly divided).

Definitions and Illustrations

Definitions are rarely exciting but rarely can be completely ignored. Perhaps we should simply say about systems what Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Indeed, Garrett Hardin says, “One of the most important ideas in modern science is the idea of a system; and it is almost impossible to define.”9 Hardin continues his excellent essay by defin- ing by examples, which I will do as well. But a little more precision may be

and Chaos (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). For the importance of contin- gency in evolution, see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (New York: Norton, 1989) and Depew and Weber, Darwinism Evolving. For a critique of the more extreme claims of some theorists, see John Horgan, “From Complexity to Perplexity,” Scientific American, June 1995, pp. 104–9.

8 John Maynard Smith, Did Darwin Get It Right? Essays on Games, Sex, and Evolution (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1989), p. 226.

9 Garrett Hardin, “The Cybernetics of Competition,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 7 (Autumn 1963), p. 77.Co

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6 C H A P T E R 1

helpful. We are dealing with a system when (a) a set of units or elements is interconnected so that changes in some elements or their relations produce changes in other parts of the system, and (b) the entire system exhibits properties and behaviors that are different from those of the parts.10

As this chapter and the next will show, the result is that systems often display nonlinear relationships, outcomes cannot be understood by adding together the units or their relations, and many of the results of actions are unintended. Complexities can appear even in what would seem to be simple and deterministic situations. Thus over one hundred years ago the mathe- matician Henri Poincaré showed that the motion of as few as three bodies (such as the sun, the moon, and the earth), although governed by strict scientific laws, defies exact solution: While eclipses of the moon can be predicted thousands of years in advance, they cannot be predicted millions

10 For similar and overlapping definitions, see Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 195, 209–10; Anatol Rapoport, “Systems Analysis: General Systems Theory,” International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 15 (New York: Free Press, 1968), p. 453; Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory: Foun- dations, Development, Applications (New York: Braziller, 1986), p. 55; George Klir, “The Poly- phonic General Systems Theory,” in Klir, ed., Trends in General Systems Theory (New York: Wiley, 1972), p. 1; Howard Odum and Elisabeth Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 5; Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36 (October 1948), pp. 538–39; Kenneth Boulding, The World as a Total System (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985), p. 9; W. Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain, 2d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1960), p. 16; Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 5–6, 20–22; James Miller, Living Systems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), pp. 16–19. Also see Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Anatol Rapoport, eds., Yearbook of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Mental Health Research Institute, 1956), and Robert Flood, Liberating Systems Theory (New York: Plenum, 1990), chapter 5. For somewhat different definitions from scholars of international politics, see Inis Claude, Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 42; Stanley Hoffmann, “International Systems and International Law,” in Klaus Knorr and Sidney Verba, eds., The International System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 207–8; Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: Wiley, 1957), pp. 4–6; Kaplan, Towards Professionalism in International Theory (New York: Free Press, 1979), p. 96; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 8–16; Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 79; Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 25–29. Feedbacks play a vital role in most systems and will be the subject of a later chapter, but one can have a system without them.

For some purposes, it is important to distinguish among systems on such dimensions as organized or disorganized, open or closed, simple or complex, hierarchical or anarchic, or oligopolistic or freely competitive: see, for example, Harlan Wilson, “Complexity as a Theoreti- cal Problem: Wider Perspectives in Political Theory,” in Todd La Porte, ed., Organized Com- plexity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 281–88, and Jack Snyder, “In- troduction,” in Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis, eds., Coping with Complexity in the International System (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 6–13. But for much of my analysis, these distinctions are not crucial.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 7

of years ahead, which is a very short period by astronomical standards.11 As a student of mathematical approaches to ecology explains, “It doesn’t need any complicating factors to cause complicated behaviour. The very simplest type of self-regulation can . . . account for it.”12 A systems approach shows how individual actors following simple and uncoordinated strategies can produce aggregate behavior that is complex and ordered, although not nec- essarily predictable and stable.13 Similarly, biologists stress that highly com- plex life-forms are composed of elements that, taken individually, are quite simple.

The counterintuitive way systems operate—and the habit of even accom- plished systems theorists of lapsing into simpler ways of thinking—can be shown by the quotation that opens this chapter. It seems obvious that if tankers had double hulls, there would be fewer oil spills. But interconnec- tions mean that the obvious and immediate effect might not be the domi- nant one. The straightforward argument compares two worlds, one with single-hulled tankers and one with double-hulled ones, holding everything else constant. But in a system, everything else will not remain constant. The shipping companies, forced to purchase more expensive tankers, might cut expenditures on other safety measures, in part because of the greater pro- tection supplied by the double hulls. The relative cost of alternative means of transporting oil would decrease, perhaps moving spills from the seas to the areas traversed by new pipelines. But even tanker spills might not de- crease. The current trade-off between costs and spills may reflect the prefer- ences of shippers and captains, who might take advantage of the greater safety by going faster and taking more chances.14 If double hulls led to even

11 For a recent discussion, see Robert Pool, “Chaos Theory: How Big an Advance?” Science 245 ( July 9, 1989), p. 26.

12 Karl Sigmund, Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 52.

13 This is brought out clearly by the studies of “complex adaptive systems”: see, for example, Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Washington, D.C.: the Brookings Institution, 1996); John Holland, Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaption Builds Complexity (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995); Nigel Gilbert and Ro- saria Conte, eds., Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Life (London: Univer- sity College London Press, 1995); David Lane, “Artificial Worlds and Economics” (un- published, Santa Fe Institute paper No. 92–09–048). This perspective can be found in Darwin, Origin of Species, especially pp. 196–202, 374; also see Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978), passim, and especially pp. 147–55.

14 For a related set of concerns, see Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 89. For a discussion of marine safety in terms of systems effects, see Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (New York: Basic Books, 1984), chapter 6. My thinking has been strongly influenced by this book. For evidence of this effect with automobile safety devices, see below, chapter 2, pp. 68–70.

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8 C H A P T E R 1

a slight increase in the price of oil, many other consequences could follow, from greater conservation, to increased uses of alternative fuels, to hardship for the poor.

International history is full of interconnections and complex interactions. Indeed, this one might seem like a parody were it not part of the events leading up to the First World War:

By the end of the summer of 1913 there was a real danger of yet another Balkan conflict: the King of Greece [said] that Turkey was preparing an expedition to recover the islands in Greek hands, and from Constantinople the German ambas- sador reported that the Bulgarian minister to the Porte had informed him of a verbal Turco-Bulgarian agreement under which Bulgaria would attack Thrace in the event of a Turco-Greek war. The danger that a Turco-Greek war could spread beyond the Balkans could not be lightly dismissed. If Turkey and Greece came to blows the Bulgarians could be expected to seek revenge for the defeats of the previous summer; so early a repudiation of the Treaty of Bucharest would offend the Rumanians, whilst the Greeks, if attacked by the Bulgarians, could still invoke their treaty with Serbia. If Serbia became involved no-one could guarantee that Austria-Hungary would once again stand aside.15

Here part of the complexity arises because we are unfamiliar with the situation, but this is not the entire story. Look, for example, at Paul Ken- nedy’s brief discussion of the multiple relations that interacted with one another in the 1930s:

It was not simply . . . that [for Great Britain] dealing with “the German problem” involved a constant reference to France and that dealing with “the Japan problem” involved equally close consultation with the United States. An additional compli- cation was that these two triangular relations interacted with each other. For ex- ample, British attempts to improve relations with Tokyo would, it was argued, enable a stiffer line to be taken towards Berlin—which would gratify the French; but this “appeasement” of the Japanese would enrage the Americans, possibly with grave consequences, and that would alarm the Dominions. The stiffer tone in Europe might also lead the Germans to settle their differences with that other

15 R. J. Crampton, The Hollow Detente: Anglo-German Relations in the Balkans, 1911–1914 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980), p. 131. The late eighteenth century is filled with similar cases: for examples see Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986).

The first scholars who applied ideas from ecology to international politics noted that when elements are interconnected, “any substantial change in one sector of the milieu is nearly certain to produce significant, often unsettling, sometimes utterly disruptive consequences in other sectors.” (Harold and Margaret Sprout, An Ecological Paradigm for the Study of Interna- tional Politics [Princeton University, Center for International Studies, Research Memorandum no. 30, March 1968], p. 55.) A more recent study in this vein is James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).Co

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 9

“mystery” state, the Soviet Union. The whole thing worked in the reverse order, too: if Japan threatened aggression in the Far East, the British would need to move closer to the United States; but they would probably also have to “buy off ” Hitler in Europe, which might alarm France and its smaller allies.16

As these cases show, it is difficult to know what will happen in a system, but at minimum we can say that a change at one point will have wide- ranging effects. Thus when the European settlers in North America made friends or enemies of a native tribe or gave it modern tools and weapons, they affected relations between that tribe and its neighbors, setting in mo- tion a ripple effect that affected the behavior of others hundreds of miles away.17

Ripples move through channels established by actors’ interests and strate- gies. When these are intricate, the ramifications will be as well, and so the results can surprise the actor who initiated the change. The international history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, centered on maladroit German diplomacy, supplies several examples. Dropping the Re- insurance Treaty with Russia in 1890 simplified German diplomacy, as the Kaiser and his advisors had desired. More important, though, were the indi- rect and delayed consequences, starting with Russia’s turn to France, which increased Germany’s need for Austrian support, thereby making Germany hostage to its weaker and less stable partner. In 1902, the Germans hoped that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, motivated by Britain’s attempt to reduce its isolation and vulnerability to German pressure, would worsen British relations with Russia (which was Japan’s rival in the Far East) and France (which sought British colonial concessions).18 There were indeed ramifica- tions, but they were not to Germany’s liking. The British public became less fearful of foreign ties, easing the way for ententes with France and Russia.

16 Paul Kennedy, “The Logic of Appeasement,” Times Literary Supplement, May 28, 1982, p. 585.

17 As one historian has noted, “A tribe whose enemies had the weapons which it lacked had few alternatives, and all of them were unpleasant. It inevitably made war upon the competitor. So quickly did such hostilities arise after the entry of the Europeans, and so fiercely did they continue, that observers were prone to consider war as the usual intertribal relationship, not knowing how they themselves had transformed these relations” (George Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940], p. 19). For the argument that the explanation for why lions encountered by the European settlers in East Africa had a propensity to eat humans can be traced to ecological changes brought about by earlier European activities elsewhere on the continent, see Craig Packer, “Coping with a Lion Killer,” Natural History 105 ( June 1996), p. 16. Ecologists sometimes try to trace relations by removing the members of a species from an area, although the extent to which these experiments can mimic natural pro- cesses is not entirely clear: See, for example, Stuart Pimm, The Balance of Nature? Ecological Issues in the Conservation of Species and Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chapter 12.

18 P. J. V. Rolo, Entente Cordiale (New York: St. Martin’s, 1969), p. 121.Co py ri gh t © 1 99 7. P ri nc et on

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Furthermore, Japan, assured of Britain’s benevolent neutrality, was able to first challenge and then fight Russia. The Russian defeat, coupled with the strengthening of the Anglo-Japanese treaty, effectively ended the Russian threat to India and so facilitated Anglo-Russian cooperation, much against Germany’s interests and expectations.

The interwar period also reveals the way changes in bilateral relations both ramify through the system and are conditioned by it. Great Britain, realizing that the strength of its potential enemies outran its resources, was unable to act on the sensible impulse to conciliate Japan because doing so would have alienated the United States. But, in the end, American hostility to Japan turned out to serve Britain well: Without the attack on Pearl Har- bor, Britain might have lost the Second World War. Indeed, Japan attacked the American naval base as well as Malaya and the Dutch East Indies in the questionable belief that the U.S. and U.K. were so closely linked that the former would respond with force to an attack on the latter’s empire. Fur- thermore, the U.S. was spared a terrible dilemma when Hitler, Japan’s ally, responded by declaring war on the U.S. despite the fact that he had previ- ously taken great care not to match the American provocations in the Atlan- tic.19 These processes do more than reflect established interests: Alliances often derive their influence less from norms or the value that states place on their reputations for living up to their commitments than from the way interconnections expand and alter states’ concerns.20

We Can Never Do Merely One Thing

In a system, the chains of consequences extend over time and many areas: The effects of action are always multiple. Doctors call the undesired impact of medications “side effects.” Although the language is misleading—there is no criterion other than our desires that determines which effects are “main” and which are “side”—the point reminds us that disturbing a system will produce several changes. Hardin again gets to the heart of the matter in pointing out that, contrary to many hopes and expectations, we cannot de- velop or find “a highly specific agent which will do only one thing. . . . We can never do merely one thing. Wishing to kill insects, we may put an end to the singing of birds. Wishing to ‘get there’ faster we insult our lungs with smog.”21 Seeking to protect the environment by developing nonpolluting

19 The reasoning behind Hitler’s decision is still unclear: for a brief summary of recent research, see Justus Doenecke, “U.S. Policy and the European War, 1939–1941,” Diplomatic History 19 (Fall 1995), pp. 682–83.

20 For further discussion, see Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 426–27 and chapter 6 below.

21 Hardin, “The Cybernetics of Competition,” pp. 79–80, emphasis added. John Dewey would not have been surprised: “It is willful folly to fasten upon some single end of conse-

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sources of electric power, we build windmills that kill hawks and eagles that fly into the blades; cleaning the water in our harbors allows the growth of mollusks and crustaceans that destroy wooden piers and bulkheads; adding redundant safety equipment makes some accidents less likely but increases the chances of others due to the operators’ greater confidence and the inter- action effects among the devices; placing a spy in the adversary’s camp not only gains valuable information but also leaves the actor vulnerable to de- ception if the spy is discovered; eliminating rinderpest in East Africa paved the way for canine distemper in lions because it permitted the accumulation of cattle, which required dogs to herd them, dogs which provided a steady source for the virus that could spread to lions; releasing fewer fine particles and chemicals into the atmosphere decreases pollution but also is likely to accelerate global warming; pesticides often destroy the crops that they are designed to save by killing the pests’ predators; removing older and dead trees from forests leads to insect epidemics and an altered pattern of re- growth; allowing the sale of an antibaldness medicine without a prescription may be dangerous because people no longer have to see a doctor, who in some cases would have determined that the loss of hair was a symptom of a more serious problem; flying small formations of planes over Hiroshima to practice dropping the atomic bomb accustomed the population to air raid warnings that turned out to be false alarms, thereby reducing the number of people who took cover on August 6.22

In politics, connections are often harder to discern, but their existence guarantees that here too most actions, no matter how well targeted, will have multiple effects. For example, William Bundy was correct to worry that putting troops into Vietnam might not make that country more secure be-

quence which is liked, and permit the view of that to blot from perception all other . . . conse- quences” (Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt, 1922), pp. 228–29).

22 Jonathan Weisman, “Tilting at Windmills,” Wildlife Conservation 97 ( January/February 1994), pp. 52–57; Lindsey Gruson, “Problem with Clean Harbor: Creatures Devour Water- front,” New York Times, June 27, 1993; Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988); Perrow, Normal Accidents; the classic case of “turned” agents was revealed in J. C. Masterman, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972); Packer, “Coping with a Lion Killer,” pp. 14–17; William Stevens, “Acid Rain Efforts Found to Undercut Themselves,” New York Times, Janu- ary 27, 1994; Richard Kerr, “Study Unveils Climate Cooling Caused by Pollutant Haze,” Sci- ence 268 (May 12, 1995), p. 802; Kerr, “It’s Official: First Glimmer of Greenhouse Warning Seen,” ibid. 270 (December 8, 1995), pp. 1565–67; Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), pp. 148–50, 292–94; “You Want Hair, Get a Prescription,” Aspen Daily News, July 28, 1994 (in the end, the FDA decided to permit freer sale of the medication: “Hair-Growth Drug to Be Sold over the Counter,” New York Times, February 13, 1996); Leon Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 215–16. Those who believe that it is healthy to eat food that has not been treated with pesticides will be interested in Jane Brody, “Strong Views on Origins of Cancer,” New York Times, July 5, 1994. But as we will discuss in chapters 2 and 7, not all unintended consequences are undesired.

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cause deployment could not only lead the North to escalate, but also might “(1) cause the Vietnamese government and especially the army to let up [and] (2) create adverse public reactions to our whole presence on ‘white men’ and ‘like the French’ grounds.”23 It seems that the American development of nuclear weapons simultaneously restrained Stalin by increasing his fear of war and made him “less cooperative and less willing to compromise, for fear of seeming weak.”24 Indeed, it is now widely accepted that mutual second strike capability not only decreased the chance of nuclear war but also made it safer for either side to engage in provocations at lower levels of violence.25 (Similarly, providing security guarantees to the countries of East Europe might lead them to take harsher stances toward minority ethnic groups and make fewer efforts to maintain good relations with their neighbors.)

To mention three more surprising cases, in the fall of 1948 General Lu- cius Clay warned that American budget deficits would be seen in Europe as a forerunner of inflation and so would undermine morale in West Berlin; the American pressure on the Europeans to rearm more rapidly in response to the North Korean attack on the South produced squabbles that encouraged the USSR “to believe that contradictions in the enemy camp ultimately would tear apart the enemy coalition. . . . [and so] undermined U.S. bar- gaining power”; in 1994 the dollar strengthened after President Clinton hired a powerful lawyer to defend him against charges of sexual harassment: As one currency trader put it, “We were starting to lose faith in him and that helped turn things.”26

We should now return to what is meant by the claim that the system has properties distinct from those of its parts and then give a more extended discussion of how interconnections knit systems together.

Emergent Properties

The phrase “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” can call up images of metaphysical “holism” and organic metaphors. That is not what I have in mind. If we are dealing with a system, the whole is different from,

23 Quoted in Larry Berman, “Coming to Grips with Lyndon Johnson’s War,” Diplomatic History 17 (Fall 1993), p. 525.

24 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 272.

25 Glenn Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” in Paul Seabury, ed., The Balance of Power (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), pp. 184–201.

26 Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), p. 526; William Stueck, The Korean War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 6; quoted in Thomas Friedman, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World Money Market,” New York Times, May 8, 1994. As these examples show, people’s expectations—based in part on their beliefs about others’ expectations—are central to the dynamics of systems.Co

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not greater than, the sum of the parts.27 Reductionism—seeking to under- stand the system by looking only at the units and their relations with one another—is not appropriate. Many academic disciplines have come to this conclusion, although often using different terminologies. Economics rests in part on an understanding of the “fallacy of composition.” Biologists who study entire organisms see the world differently than their colleagues who work on the level of cells or molecules.28 Interactional psychology rests on

27 For a good—and critical—discussion and review of the literature, see D. C. Phillips, Holistic Thought in Social Science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976).

Also relevant are discussions of self-organizing systems: See, for example, Heinz Von Foer- ster and George Zopf, Jr., eds., Principles of Self-Organization (New York: Pergamon Press, 1962); Ilya Pregogine and Isabelle Stenger, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984); Per Bak and Kan Chen, “Self-Organized Criticality,” Scientific American, January 1991, pp. 46–53; Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self- Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); more accessible is Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). A good general discussion of the meaning and development of complexity in organisms is John Bonner, The Evolution of Com- plexity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); For some of the literature in eco- nomics, see Paul Krugman, The Self-Organizing Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1966). Some of these arguments resemble standard defenses of the free market (e.g., the writings of Friedrich Hayek), but the formation and maintenance of markets in fact requires strong authority and conscious efforts.

28 It is not surprising that a number of scholars who went on to develop systems theories, like Anatol Rapoport and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, started their careers as biologists. See, for example, Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies, eds., Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Francisco Ayala and Theodosius Dobzhansky, eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1975); Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Michael Ruse, Philosophy of Biology Today (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), chapter 3; Depew and Weber, eds., Evolution at a Crossroads, especially the chapters by Ayala and Mayr; Timothy Allen and Thomas Hoekstra, Toward a Unified Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 195–200. Also see C. Dyke, The Evolutionary Dynamics of Complex Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Stanley Salthe, Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 200–218; John Searle, “The Mystery of Consciousness,” New York Review of Books 42 (November 2, 1995), pp. 60–66. For arguments about holism and reductionism in other disciplines, see Ernest Nagel, “Whole, Sums, and Organic Unities,” Philosophical Studies 3 (February 1952), pp. 17–32; Kyriakos Kontopoulos, The Logics of Social Structure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), passim, and especially pp. 14–41; Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Ques- tions in Social Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), chapter 2; Daniel Little, Varieties of Social Explanation (Boulder: Westview, 1991), chapter 8; Frank Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More Than the Sum of the Parts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), passim, and especially pp. 190–95; John Bennett, The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation (New York: Pergamon, 1976); Geoffrey Hodgson, Economics and Evolution: Bringing Life Back into Economics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), passim, and especially chapter 15. An earlier cri- tique of economics for ignoring systems approaches is Sidney Schoeffler, The Failures of Eco-Co

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the parallel sense that what seem to be immutable personality traits are in fact formed by the interaction between the individual and her surroundings, including, if she is in therapy, the behavior of the therapist, which in turn, is influenced by her.29

Much of sociology is similarly built on the idea that societies cannot be reduced to the sum of the individuals who compose them. Indeed, many sociologists draw the analogy between society and a living creature, although this need not imply organic unity. As Emile Durkheim put it:

Whenever certain elements combine and thereby produce, by the fact of their combination, new phenomena, it is plain that these new phenomena reside not in the original elements but in the totality formed by their union [or interaction]. The living cell contains nothing but mineral particles, as society contains nothing but individuals. Yet it is patently impossible for the phenomena characteristic of life to reside in the atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen.30

As a social psychologist explains: “The whole might be symmetric in spite of its parts being asymmetric, a whole might be unstable in spite of its parts being stable in themselves. . . . Properties of a social group, such as its orga-

nomics: A Diagnostic Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). For reduc- tionism and chaos, see Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, pp. 88–90, 114–18.

29 See, for example, Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: Norton, 1967); Paul Watzlawick and John Weakland, eds., The Interactional View (New York: Norton 1977); George Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); David Mag- nusson and Norman Endler, eds., Personality at the Crossroads (Hillsdale, N.J.: Earlbaum, 1977); David Magnusson, “Personality Development from an Interactional Perspective,” in Lawrence Pervin, ed., Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), chapter 8; Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action (Engle- wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1986); Sandra Scarr, “Developmental Theories for the 1990s: Development and Individual Differences,” Child Development 63 (February 1992), pp. 1–19.

30 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1938), p. xlvii. Quite different kinds of work in sociology share this general perspective: See, for example, Walter Buckley, Sociology and Modern Systems Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967); Jonathan Turner, A Theory of Social Interaction (Stanford, Calif.: Stan- ford University Press, 1988); Tamotsu Shibutani, Social Processes (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1986); David Knoke, Political Networks: The Structural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Sociology is also the home discipline for dialectics, an approach—or set of approaches—similar to systemic analysis: See Kenneth Boulding, A Primer on Social Dynamics (New York: Free Press, 1970), chapters 3 and 4, and Louis Schnei- der, “Dialectic in Sociology,” American Sociological Review 36 (August 1971), pp. 667–78. Also relevant are many of the studies of the “micro-macro link”—see, for example, the volume of that title edited by Jeffrey Alexander and others (University of California Press, 1987). More recently, studies of artificial life and artificial worlds have focused on how seemingly uncoordi- nated individual acts create and are influenced by emergent properties: See the literature cited in footnote 13, above.Co

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nization, its stability, its goals, are something different from the organization, the stability, and the goals of the individuals in it.”31

In some cases the concepts we apply to a system (e.g., polarity) cannot be applied to the units that compose it, and in other cases the description of a unit, such as a state being nonaligned, an actor being centrally positioned, or a person playing multiple roles, only makes sense in systemic terms. More strikingly, from the hypothetical fact that everyone in the system possesses a given characteristic, we cannot infer that the system can be so described. Thus the whole may be symmetric, peaceful, or stable only if the parts are not, and a reliable system can be formed from unreliable components.32 This view is not an intuitive one and many people undoubtedly would agree with Margaret Thatcher that “you get a responsible society when you get responsible individuals” or with Charles Kindleberger that “for the world economy to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer.”33 But this simply is not true when the units interact to form a system that has quite different characteristics than they do. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 55, “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would have been a mob.”34

The difference between the parts and the system is often put in terms of the latter’s “emergent properties,” and the question of whether they exist does not have to involve metaphysics:

Can the properties of complex systems be inferred from knowledge of the proper- ties that their component parts have in isolation? For example, can the properties of benzene be predicted from knowledge about oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon? Or, at a higher level of complexity, can the behavior of a cheetah chasing a deer be predicted from knowledge about the atoms and molecules making up these ani- mals? . . . No matter how exhaustively an object is studied in isolation, there is usually no way to ascertain all the properties that it may have in association with any other object.35

As Reuben Ablowitz explained over fifty years ago, in a system we find

31 Kurt Lewin, Resolving Social Conflicts (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 73. 32 See the critical discussion in Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents,

and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 19–21. 33 Quoted in R. J. Apple, Jr., “Margaret Thatcher: A Choice, Not an Echo,” New York Times

Magazine, April 29, 1979, p. 36; Kindleberger, The World in Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 305. For a sophisticated demonstration of how increasing the number of whites who are tolerant of minorities in their neighborhood can lead it to become segregated, see Schelling, Micromotives, pp. 162–64; for the argument that “order may prevail without an orderer,” see Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 77; also see p. 64.

34 The Federalist Papers (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 336. 35 Francisco Ayala, “Biological Reductionism: The Problem and Some Answers,” in F. Eu-

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a characteristic that could not possibly have been deduced from the nature of its components; it is a new characteristic that is attributable only to the structural organization. . . . of its component parts [and which can be called] “emergent.” . . . I can tell precisely what the volume or loudness of the new sound [of the piano] will be if I know how loud each note is, . . . . [but] if I play two notes together. . . , there is an aspect or quality of this sound which is not the property of either of the notes taken separately. The chord has the characteristic of “chord- ness”; the harmonious combination of sounds has a new attribute which no one of its individual components had.36

More recently, Charles Perrow analyzed “error-inducing systems” whose problems cannot be traced to faults in any particular element or to the relationships between any of them.37

This argument is not teleological: The system is driven by the behavior of individual actors who are moved by their own incentives, goals, and calcula- tions. But local predictability, if not simplicity, produces a high degree of complexity and unpredictability as the outcomes and patterns are formed interactively. Moving from actors’ intentions and behavior to results (and to the environment the actors face at later periods of time) is extremely diffi- cult, in part because behavior is influenced by the actors’ own estimates of the consequences of alternative courses of action. In other words, the ap- proach outlined here has firm microfoundations despite its rejection of the reductionist claim that the system is “nothing but” the behaviors of individuals.38

The system also can influence the characteristics of its elements. It is often said that Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher refute the claims that world politics would be more peaceful if women played larger roles. But although this conclusion may be correct, the reasoning is not. The kind of women who would be selected as leaders in a world of sexual equality could be very different from those who now come to the fore. Indeed, much about actors can be explained in terms of their positions in the system. The state’s place in the international economic system affects its internal arrangements, and a state is more likely to be democratic if its international environment

36 Reuben Ablowitz, “The Theory of Emergence,” Philosophy of Science 6 ( January 1939), pp. 2–3.

37 Perrow, Normal Accidents, p. 172. For a lucid discussion of how an understanding even of individual characteristics requires an appreciation of the attributes of the system as a whole, see Stephen Jay Gould, Full House (New York: Harmony Books, 1996).

38 I am grateful to Mark Blyth for discussion on this point. Waltz’s systems theory also has microfoundations and disagreement on whether his analysis is focused on the system or on the individual actors thus does not take us far: See the exchange between Martin Hollis and Steve Smith and Alexander Wendt in Review of International Studies 17 (October 1991), pp. 383– 410 and 18 (April 1992), pp. 181–85.

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permits it the luxuries of internal tolerance and diffusion of power.39 (Of course, democracies and dictatorships may also have different predisposi- tions toward war, thus influencing the environments in which both they and others live.) Many of the characteristics of individuals are formed interac- tively as well. We all know couples of whom we could say: “Why did he marry her? He’s so kind, sensitive, and helpful and she is cold and self- centered.” But each of them may have developed in this way in part because of the relationship with the other.

The study of life-forms brings out the reciprocal relations between units and the context which they form and by which they are constrained. Dar- win’s formulation is hard to improve:

[T]he structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings, with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys. This is obvious in the structure of the teeth and talons of the tiger; and in that of the legs and claws of the parasite which clings to the hair on the tiger’s body. But in the beautifully plumed seed of the dandelion, and in the flattened and fringed legs of the water-beetle, the relation seems at first confined to the ele- ments of air and water. Yet the advantage of plumed seeds no doubt stands in the closest relation to the land being already thickly clothed with other plants; so that the seeds may be widely distributed and fall on unoccupied ground. In the water- beetle, the structure of its legs, so well adapted for diving, allows it to compete with other aquatic insects, to hunt for its own prey, and to escape serving as prey to other animals.40

Interconnections

Emergent properties are less central to my analysis than is “inter- connectedness”—in a system, the fates of the units and their relations with others are strongly influenced by interactions at other places and at earlier periods of time. When the interconnections are dense, it may be difficult to trace the impact of any change even after the fact, let alone predict it ahead of time, making the system complex and hard to control.41 Many years ago, Harry (the Hat) Walker spoke for many of us when he opposed changes in the rules of baseball: “I think it is dangerous to fool around with fundamen- tals because they can have a chain effect on other parts. Every move in that

39 Peter Gourevich, “The Second Image Reversed,” International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978), pp. 881–912.

40 Origin of Species, p. 61. 41 This is the theme of Perrow, Normal Accidents.

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direction should be taken with extreme caution because the consequences could be disastrous.”42

As Walker implies, interconnections can defeat purposive behavior. Not only can actions call up counteractions, but multiple parties and stages per- mit many paths to unanticipated consequences. Thus Jay Forrester posits dynamics by which obvious ways to help the urban poor may fail to do so: Building subsidized housing attracts more poor people to the city and in- creases the tax rate, thereby making the city less attractive to business and so decreasing employment.43 The obvious question of how—and indeed whether—people can act effectively in the face of systems effects will be addressed in the concluding chapter.

Interconnections are highlighted when a system is disturbed by the intro- duction of a new element. The study of ecology provides numerous examples:

Some keen gardener, intent upon making Hawaii more beautiful than before, introduced a plant call “Lantana Camera,” which in its native home of Mexico causes no trouble to anybody. Meanwhile, someone else had also improved the amenities of the place by introducing turtle-doves from China, which, unlike any of the native birds, fed eagerly upon the berries of Lantana. The combined effects of the vegetative powers of the plant and spreading of the seeds by the turtle- doves were to make the Lantana multiply exceedingly and become a serious pest on the grazing country. Indian mynah birds were also introduced, and they too fed on the Lantana berries. After a few years the birds of both species had increased enormously in numbers. But there is another side to the story. Formerly the grass- lands and young sugar-cane plantations had been ravaged yearly by vast numbers of army-worm caterpillars, but the mynahs also fed on these caterpillars and suc- ceeded to a large extent in keeping them in check, so that the outbreaks became less severe. About this time certain insects were introduced in order to try and check the spread of Lantana and several of them . . . did actually destroy so much

42 Quoted in Arthur Daley, “Out of the Hat,” New York Times, March 26, 1969; also see Lewis Thomas, “On Meddling,” in Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (New York: Viking, 1979), pp. 110–11. The same point is made in the title of a recent news story: R. W. Apple, Jr., “Line-Item Veto Would Begin Voyage into a Vast Unknown,” New York Times, March 27, 1995. This perspective is common in ecology: “The more managers alter a forest, the less they can predict the paths that succession will take. . . . [although] the changes managers have made to forests have all been done with the goal of making succession more predictable” (Langston, Forest Dreams, p. 227).

43 Jay Forrester, Urban Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969). The argument has several flaws, most notably in the systems context the treating of an individual city as a self- enclosed universe; in fact the results of what one city does influence and are influenced by the policies of others. (On this point, see Schelling, Micromotives, p. 69.) Forrester’s general ap- proach has spawned a cottage industry, which can be followed in the journal Systems Dynamics Review. Its best-known and most controversial application is Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972).Co

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seed that the Lantana began to decrease. As a result of this, the mynahs also began to decrease in numbers to such an extent that there began to occur severe out- breaks of army-worm caterpillars. It was then found that when the Lantana had been removed in many places, other introduced shrubs came in, some of which are even more difficult to eradicate than the original Lantana.44

Because most systems have either been designed to cope with adversity or have evolved in the face of it, breakage or overload at one point rarely destroys them. It will, however, produce disturbances at other points. Thus the argument that the German railroad system in World War II was invul- nerable because it had so much excess capacity appears to have been an oversimplification. While military traffic was only a small percentage of the total, German industry depended on power generated almost exclusively by coal. Coal, in turn, had to be moved in enormous quantities over the railroad net, which meant that the system’s capacity did not have to be reduced to anything like the point at which only military material could be carried in order to cripple the German war effort. Furthermore, while the extensive interconnections in the system made it flexible, it also meant that disrup- tions could spread throughout the system. As one set of marshaling yards was disabled, traffic had to be shifted to other areas, creating burdens, bot- tlenecks, and obstacles for even a sophisticated command and control sys- tem. In response, individual ministries, sectors, and industries tried to de- sign their own solutions, usually by hoarding coal and sequestering boxcars. While at the beginning these kept the system going, past a certain point they paralyzed it.45 Tightening the connections between elements will increase efficiency when everything works smoothly but will spread any problems that arise, as air travelers discover when they sit in a plane that is awaiting passengers from a delayed connecting flight and wonder if their own con- necting flight will be held for them.46

Some arrangements of connections will make a system resistent to change and others can facilitate instability. When one element or relation cannot

44 Charles Elton, Animal Ecology (New York: Macmillan, 1927), pp. 54–55, as quoted in Hardin, “The Cybernetics of Competition,” p. 77. See Tenner, Why Things Bite Back, chapters 6–7 for a review of many cases in which species have been introduced into an area.

45 The postwar debates about the effects of the Allied bombing campaign and alternatives to it are almost as heated as the contemporary arguments were. Here I am relying on Alfred Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). He observes that the leading proponent of attacking the German trans- portation net was Solly Zuckerman, a zoologist who “looked at problems as wholes and consid- ered their individual components as parts of a complete organism” (ibid., p. 81). For a discus- sion of vulnerability and the transmission of disturbances throughout an organization, see Chris Demchak, Military Organizations, Complex Machines: Modernization in the U.S. Armed Ser- vices (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

46 For a general discussion of loose and tight coupling, see Perrow, Normal Accidents, pp. 89–96.Co

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change unless several others do, small and slow adjustments will not be possible; each element has a veto over all the others. In international politics the most important case is that each state might be glad to abandon a preoc- cupation with power and narrow self-interest if its rivals did. But for anyone to change everyone must change, which means that Realism may exist be- cause it exists: Once it is in place, no individual state can alter it.47 To turn to domestic society, many experts believe that the U.S. would have a much more efficient transportation system if it relied more on rail (including streetcars in urban areas) and less on airplanes and automobiles. The diffi- culty is that such a change would require not only enormous investments of capital, but also coordinated changes in attitudes, municipal codes, tax laws, and subsidy policies. To take an example from university life, the increasing costs of books coupled with decreasing library budgets has created a crisis in many areas of scholarly publishing as university presses cannot afford to publish many excellent monographs. An obvious alternative is to move to cheaper electronic forms of dissemination for books that contain important scholarship but will never attract many buyers. But doing so would require large and almost simultaneous adjustments of policies and attitudes on the part of such disparate but interrelated actors as publishers, libraries, individ- ual scholars, departmental hiring committees, and the authorities that grant tenure.48

In other cases, one element controls another, which in turn controls a third, thereby producing great indirect influence. Thus in the 1920s, if the U.S. had been willing to guarantee Britain’s security, Britain would have been willing to guarantee France’s, which would have generated a very dif- ferent pattern of international politics. Under still other circumstances, a small change in any one of several elements can set off other changes in the same direction, leading to drastic alterations in the system and its elements.49

Sometimes the interconnections are relatively obvious because the chains are short or the processes involved are familiar. For example, the danger of the spread of nuclear weapons as each country arms in response to its neigh- bor’s program is relatively straightforward: Pakistan’s desire to acquire nu- clear weapons was in significant measure a response to India’s program; India’s was partly triggered by China’s; China’s program was in part a reac- tion to the nuclear weapons of the U.S. and the USSR; the latter’s program

47 For a nice appreciation, see Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, especially pp. 10, 48. This dynamic also means that we cannot infer desires from behavior: Any or all statesmen could prefer a world governed by norms and justice to one dominated by power politics and yet act according to the precepts of the latter.

48 For parallel examples in ecology and international political economy, see Langston, For- est Dreams, p. 277, and Giulio Gallarotti, The Anatomy of an International Monetary Regime: The Classical Gold Standard, 1880–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) respectively.

49 Chapter 4 will discuss the related topic of feedbacks.

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was accelerated by U.S. success.50 In the domestic arena, the connection between rent control and housing shortages is now so clear that even ardent liberals shun this policy. Indeed, the foreseeability of consequences is often an element in determining legal responsibility. Thus in New York State a person who commits a crime but does not kill anyone can be tried for mur- der if the crime leads to a death in a way that a reasonable person could have expected; more questionably, “Five teen-agers were charged with murder . . . after authorities said their effort to flee a crime scene had caused two police vehicles to crash, killing an officer.”51

When chains of interconnections are long and intricate, the results are more likely to be surprising. Charles Darwin provides a nice example:

Humble-bees are almost indispensable to the fertilization of the heartsease [and some kinds of clover]. . . . as other bees cannot reach the nectar. . . . The number of humble-bees in any district depends in great measure on the number of field- mice, which destroy their combs and nests. . . . Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as everyone knows, on the number of cats. . . . Hence . . . the pres- ence of feline animals in large numbers might determine, through the interven- tion first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!52

But even this account may underestimate the complexity of the chains. With fewer cats, other animals might move into the district. Even without a preda- tor, the mouse population might stabilize due to increased competition for territory or the spread of disease. Furthermore, cats probably have a number of effects on the environment, and introducing or removing them could set off several other changes, some of which would affect the fates of the bees and the flowers, others of which would alter other aspects of the environment.

Kinds of Interconnections

Interconnections can be of several kinds.53 Most obviously, the parts may be locked together so that one change literally requires, prohibits, or constrains

50 Some second-order considerations are not as obvious: The invocation of the Pressler amendment prohibiting U.S. aid to Pakistan if that country developed nuclear weapons may have decreased India’s incentives to reach a nonproliferation agreement with Pakistan, thereby making it more likely that the latter will continue its program.

51 See Jan Hoffman, “Court Weighs Expanding Scope of Murder Charge,” New York Times, January 9, 1994; Joseph Fried, “5 Charged With Murder in Crash Fatal to Officer,” ibid., April 29, 1994 (also see Joe Sexton, “Parolee Faces Murder Charge in Queens Fire,” ibid., January 2, 1996). For an interesting discussion of related issues, see Linda Greenhouse, “High Court Narrows Definition of What ‘Using’ a Gun Means,” ibid., December 7, 1995.

52 Origin of Species, p. 59. Darwin similarly explains how “in several parts of the world insects determine the existence of cattle” (ibid., p. 58); also see the story of the sources of canine distemper in Tanzanian lions in Packer, “Coping with a Lion Killer.”

53 For related classifications of linkages, see Ernst Haas, “Why Collaborate: Issue-Linkage

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others. This is true in some biological systems and in technologically ad- vanced projects. Thus military aircraft developers have found to their dis- may that changing one part is likely to call for a series of cascading alter- ations that consume much time and money.54 The adoption of one weapon similarly often requires changes in other weapons, in tactics, and—in some cases—in strategies and interests.

The linkages that confronted France in the 1920s were not quite physical, but were so embedded in the laws of economics that they might as well have been. France had two basic objectives: to extract reparations from Germany and to keep that country weak. “Only a prosperous Germany could pay reparations and buy French goods, but a prosperous Germany would pose a renewed threat, and if French recovery became narrowly dependent on Germany prosperity, the Germans would have the leverage to throw off reparations entirely.”55 Even if the U.S. had loaned Germany money to en- able it to trade with France, it is hard to see how France could have pros- pered if Germany had remained impoverished. The understanding of this linkage paved the way for very different policies after the next war.

The laws of politics are also hard to evade. The importance of “strategic interests” will lead states to try to gain or at least neutralize those areas that, if controlled by an adversary, could menace them.56 Thus when coal re- placed sail as the force propelling their warships, the British had to acquire and protect coaling stations around the world. The subsequent shift to oil led Britain to acquire oil fields—and commitments—in Persia and the Mid- dle East. Once Great Britain occupied Egypt in the late 1880s (partly to protect the route to India), it not only gained a new territory to defend, but also menaced the colonial aspirations of other European states. The process

and International Regimes,” World Politics 32 (April 1980), pp. 357–405; Kenneth Oye, Eco- nomic Discrimination and Political Exchange: World Political Economy in the 1930s and the 1980s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Arthur Stein, Why Nations Cooper- ate: Circumstance and Choice in International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), chapter 2. Also see Kenneth Boulding, Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolu- tion (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978); John Kroll, “The Complexity of Interdependence,” International Studies Quarterly 37 (September 1993), pp. 321–48; Thomas Schelling, “A Framework for the Evaluation of Arms-Control Proposals,” Daedalus 104 (Summer 1975), pp. 187–200.

54 Michael Brown, Flying Blind: The Politics of the U.S. Strategic Bomber Program (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). Earlier weapons also formed a system and so were also constrained: See Stanley Sandler, The Emergence of the Modern Capital Ship (Newark: Univer- sity of Delaware Press, 1979), pp. 154–55, 234–35.

55 Walter McDougall, France’s Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1924 (Princeton, N.J.: Prince- ton University Press, 1978), pp. 128–29.

56 Glenn Snyder, Deterrence and Defense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 31–40. For a recent discussion, see Michael Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and the United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1993).Co

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of dividing Africa then fed on itself as there were few natural barriers be- hind which the colonial possessions could be secure.57 This dynamic was at work on a smaller scale when the British established outposts in South Af- rica and Malaya that required protective belts, which in turn created a new frontier that had to be defended.58 A similar process operated when new laws dealing with corruption and racketeering made illegal behavior that could only be detected by undercover agents, thereby requiring new kinds of police practices.59

In deterrence theory it is reputation, commitments, and others’ expecta- tions that create interconnections. As Schelling put it, “Our threats are inter- dependent. Essentially we tell the Soviets that we have to react here be- cause, if we did not, they would not believe us when we say that we will react there.”60 This line of reasoning is not unique to the era of bipolarity and nuclear weapons: At the turn of the century a British statesman argued that “if we have rights and interests in any quarter of the world and are unprepared to defend them, it is certain that foreign nations will know how to take advantage of our weakness.”61 Underlying these arguments is the belief that the actor’s behavior is attributable to its stable internal charac- teristics or dispositions and therefore that its behavior will be the same from one situation to the next. Even if this view is false, the actor must be guided by it if others believe it.62

The inferences others draw may therefore require that a state’s foreign policy have a kind of perceived unity. Thus the admonition to the British foreign minister in the spring of 1938:

Foreign policy must be regarded as a whole. It is not possible to take a strong line in one quarter and an apparently weak one in another indefinitely. There is some danger, it seems to me, that our policy in Spain may react eventually and unfavora-

57 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians (New York: St. Martin’s, 1967).

58 John Galbraith, “The ‘Turbulent Frontier’ as a Factor in British Expansion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (October 1968), pp. 150–68. Similar processes can entrap statesmen and produce deeper involvement in ventures than they had originally intended, although the old belief that American policy in Vietnam was largely to be explained in this way probably is not correct. For some Israeli decision-makers, this process was at work during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982: Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security: Politics, Strategy, and the Israeli Experience in Lebanon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 110–27. Related are the more benign linkages discussed later that can be triggered by limited regional integration.

59 Gary Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1988).

60 Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 55.

61 Quoted in J. L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, vol. 3, Empire and World Policy (London: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 213–14.

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bly upon our policy in central Europe and in the Far East. . . . In the Far East the Japanese are watching us closely. If we appear to them to be kicked about by the Italians and Germans over Spain, they must be expected to start doing the same with British shipping and interests, etc., in China and the China Seas. If we can follow up our initial success in Czechoslovakia and also put a stop to the attacks on our shipping in Spain, the Japanese will view us with the more respect.63

According to this view, it is hard to treat issues separately: Disputes that would be small if they could be isolated are highly consequential because the world is tightly interconnected.

During the Cold War, perceived interconnectedness not only forced a worldwide role on the U.S., it also made it possible. The obvious difficulty was that the credibility of American threats to protect allies was undercut by the disparity between the great costs and risks of doing so and the slight inherent value of these countries to the U.S. But if everyone believed that permitting a limited defeat would have widespread consequences, they would expect the U.S. to pay a high price in order to defend even a small country. Indeed, the U.S. reinforced this perception by promising to protect these countries: Commitment is a tactic that increases the unity of foreign policy by tying the state’s reputation for living up to its word to its behavior in a designated area.64 The degree to which and the ways in which world politics is interconnected then are not entirely forced on the state by the laws of international relations or the perceptions of others, but can be al- tered by statesmen.65

The kinds of interconnections believed to be present strongly influence policy preferences. Some people think that economic integration is so great that each state must be concerned with all economic issues everywhere; others argue that the behavior of one state in one area will set a precedent for others; those who believe that peace is indivisible will have to prevent

63 John Harvey, ed., The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1937–1940 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1970), pp. 425–26. Henry Kissinger made a similar argument on somewhat different grounds: “A conceptual framework—which ‘links’ events—is an essential tool [of foreign pol- icy]. The absence of linkage produces exactly the opposite of freedom of action; policy makers are forced to respond to parochial interests, buffeted by pressures without a fixed compass” (White House Years, [Boston: Little, Brown, 1979], p. 130).

64 The classic discussion of commitment is Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

65 Secretary of State Vance explains that the Carter administration was careful to deal with the invasion of the Shaba province in Zaire “as an African—not an East-West—problem”: Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), pp. 70–71. On the general subject of the decoupling of signals, see Robert Jervis The Logic of Images in International Relations, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 142–65. In some cases, consistency develops because people think they and others should be consistent; thus arguments about “slippery slopes.”

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wars throughout the world in order to keep their own country safe.66 Be- cause Metternich believed that revolution—and even liberalism—was con- tagious, he concluded that the sovereignty of states had to be limited: “Any false or pernicious step taken by any state in its internal affairs may disturb the repose of another state. . . . Therefore, every state—or rather, every sovereign of a great power—has the duty, in the name of the sacred rite of independence of every state, to supervise the governments of smaller states and to prevent them from taking false and pernicious steps in their internal affairs.”67 He then saw connections that enforced a sort of unity in outcome as the entire world would remain conservative or become revolutionary. Both the U.S. and USSR had similar beliefs during the Cold War. The “Brezhnev Doctrine” declared that decisions of socialist countries “must damage neither socialism in their own country nor the fundamental inter- est of other socialist countries nor the worldwide workers’ movement. . . . This means that every Communist Party is responsible not only to its own people but also to all the socialist countries and the entire communist movement.”68

The U.S. also saw the world as interconnected not only by American reputation and credibility, but by developments within countries as well. As Dean Acheson told students at the National War College in December 1947: “I remember when it was accepted doctrine to say in the United States, ‘We don’t care if another country wants to be communist, that is all right, that is an internal matter, that is a matter for them to decide.’ ” But then the U.S. concluded that a communist regime “had the inescapable consequence of inclusion in the system of Russian power” and that neigh- bors were affected through contagion and subversion.69

By contrast, critics of American policy during the Cold War argued that the U.S. vastly overestimated the degree to which events were intercon- nected. For them, the causes and outcomes of local disputes lay in the ac-

66 Precedents and beliefs about them have received insufficient attention: see Elizabeth Kier and Jonathan Mercer, “Setting Precedents in Anarchy: Military Intervention and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” International Security 20 (Spring 1996), pp. 77–106. For the claim that allowing Norway to use a loophole in international treaties to kill whales will lead to the slaugh- ter of wildlife in Africa, see the political advertisement “The Next Victim of Norway’s Whale Slaughter?” New York Times, May 8, 1993. For a balanced discussion of when and where interconnections require American intervention today, see James Davis and Jack Snyder, “Pro- jecting Power Abroad: An Indirect Approach,” in Charles Hermann, ed., American Defense Annual, 1994 (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1994), pp. 129–45.

67 Paul Schroeder, Metternich’s Diplomacy at its Zenith, 1820–1823 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1969), p. 126; also see pp. 89–90.

68 Quoted in Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transi- tion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 47.

69 Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 63–64.

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tions of indigenous actors, these incidents were not tests of American re- solve, and the effects would not reverberate throughout the international system. Other critics made arguments quite different in content but similar in their denial of interconnections: The sources of Soviet conduct were in- ternal as Soviet leaders followed the dictates of their ideology, if not of a plan. It was then foolish to worry that American efforts might provoke the USSR since it would seek to expand when and only when it was ready.70

This is not to say that everything in the world is connected to everything else. Even in today’s international system, not all countries influence one another. A book on Afghan-Bolivian relations would be short (although poli- tics in Afghanistan affects how much opium grows there, which in turn affects the drug trade in Bolivia), and few changes in the relations between Argentina and Brazil would affect anyone outside of the Western Hemi- sphere. Domestically, in recent years the Supreme Court has looked with favor on arguments that many federal laws, such as those banning guns in the vicinity of schools, are unconstitutional because the effects on interstate commerce are inconsequentially remote.

Appearances are not sufficient to determine whether actors are reacting to each other, however. For example, when two states sequentially increase their arms, they may be responding similarly to technological opportunities, domestic politics, or bureaucratic bargaining, not racing against each other. In other areas as well, actors may be responding to the same objective situa- tion rather than to the other’s actions. Thus James Joll argues that in July 1914 “although each government claimed that its own mobilization was or- dered as a reaction to the preparation of others, the respective military ma- chines were set in motion largely independently of each other once the gravity of the crisis was realized.”71 Similarly, we need to ask the extent to which waves of social fashion and protest reflect contagion and the extent to which they represent parallel responses to similar conditions. For example, was 1968 a turbulent year in some countries because there had been distur- bances in others, or were an unusual number of societies independently unstable, perhaps because they were feeling the same tensions?

The fact that interconnections are not always present is not inconsistent with the argument that they may be overlooked. Actors are often caught in a wider web than they realize. Thus before World War I, both American and German statesmen thought that the main threats to their relations were bilateral and neither side focused on what turned out to be the eventuality that unfolded. In 1918, the French supported the Japanese intervention in

70 See, for example, George Kennan quoted in ibid., p. 20. As Gaddis notes, “The extent to which Soviet behavior would be determined by Western attitudes was the most consistent single theme in wartime analyses of Soviet-American relations undertaken by the Office of Strategic Services” (ibid., p. 19).

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Siberia but “tended to ignore the obvious consequences of this policy on their relations with the Bolsheviks, or preferred to treat European Russia and Siberia as two separate theaters of action.”72 Japan’s policy in the 1920s and the 1930s was similarly flawed as it failed to see that its attempt to dominate China would greatly increase conflict with the U.S. and Britain. “From the Japanese point of view, China and America were separate prob- lems.”73 More recently, Nixon and Kissinger did not expect the rapproche- ment with China to adversely affect American relations with India.

Games against Nature Are Not Games against Nature

While the human attempt to anticipate and thwart others’ behavior under- lies some of the dynamics discussed in this book, more fundamental is the simpler capacity to react. The phrase “playing a game against nature” gener- ally is used to designate a situation in which the other side is unchanging. But this misunderstands the natural world: Nature does react to what people do—or, more precisely, the elements in nature compose a system. While William McNeill may go too far when he talks of “the tendency towards the conservation of catastrophe,” he is certainly correct to point out that many attempts to “tame” natural forces have unleashed if not more then at least different kinds of disasters. Writing four years before the great floods of 1993, he took

a simple example from water engineering [to] make this situation obvious. In my lifetime the Army Corps of Engineers began to control Mississippi floods by build- ing an elaborate system of levees along the river’s lower course. This had the undesired effect of concentrating sediment on the river bottom between the le- vees. As a result, the water level now rises each year, and the levees have to be raised higher from time to time. Under this regimen, sooner or later the mighty Mississippi will break its banks and inflict far greater damage on the surrounding landscape than if there were no levees and the river were free to overflow each spring and deposit sediment across the breadth of its natural floodplain, as it did in my childhood.74

72 Michael Carley, “French Intervention in Russia,” Journal of Modern History 48 (Septem- ber 1976), p. 432.

73 Akira Iriye, “The Role of the United States Embassy in Tokyo,” in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Ikamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 126; also see Iriye, After Imperialism (New York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 87–88, 222–23. Iriye argues that in the 1920s the U.S. as well believed that its policies toward China would not affect its relations with Japan and that East Asian affairs could be isolated from the rest of world politics: ibid., pp. 185, 259.

74 William McNeill, “Control and Catastrophe in Human Affairs,” Daedalus, Winter 1989, pp. 1–2. As an expert notes, “River systems have a way of adjusting themselves in response toCo

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Attempts to control beach erosion also magnify the problem. To preserve the sand on their beach, people build groins to trap sand moving laterally along the shore. But this creates severe erosion on the other side of the groin, and those living there have to build their own groins to prevent that area from being completely stripped. And so it goes all the way down the beach. Other communities, seeing what the individualistic approach pro- duces, have tried to cope collectively by constructing barriers that weaken the power of the waves and stabilize the beach. These rarely work: The beach is indeed prevented from migrating inland as it would have without intervention, but slow erosion is replaced by periods of temporary stability interrupted by catastrophic failures when the waves, no longer able to dissi- pate their energy on a beach shaped by natural forces, break through the barriers.75

Recent work in ecology also indicates that change—often unpredictable change—is much more common than equilibrium. Even without human intervention, old forests rarely attain a stable configuration and predators and prey may neither reach a plateau nor change their numbers in a regular cycle. As one expert noted, “When you introduce a population to a new area it goes up and then crashes, and it doesn’t remain constant. The long-term numbers vary.” Indeed, in a number of cases, predators wiped out the prey and then themselves starved.76

Interconnections and emergent properties define systems, whether or not humans are part of them. The general kinds of effects that are produced are the subject of the next chapter, after which we will review the systems litera- ture in international politics, analyze feedbacks, discuss the dynamics of bargaining and alliances, and close with the puzzle of how people can act effectively in the face of processes that generate outcomes that are so hard to control and even foresee.

human manipulation . . . in ways that can never be entirely foreseen”: James Tripp quoted in William Stevens, “The High Risks of Denying Rivers Their Flood Plains,” New York Times, July 20, 1993.

75 See Wallace Kaufman and Orrin Pilkey, Jr., The Beaches Are Moving (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983); Robert Dolan, “Barrier Dune System along the Outer Banks of North Carolina,” Science 176 (April 21, 1972), pp. 286–88.

76 William Stevens, “New Eye on Nature: The Real Constant Is Eternal Turmoil,” New York Times, July 31, 1990; Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty- first Century (New York: Oxford Univerity Press, 1990); Allen and Hoekstra, Toward a Unified Ecology; Pimm, Balance of Nature?, chapter 6; also see Andrew Read and Paul Harvey, “Evolv- ing in a Dynamic World,” Science 260 ( June 18, 1993), pp. 1760–62; Alan Hastings and Kevin Higgins, “Persistence of Transients in Spatially Structured Ecological Models,” ibid. 263 (Feb- ruary 25, 1994), pp. 1133–36; Anne Simon Moffat, “Biodiversity Is a Boon to Ecosystems, Not Species,” ibid. 271 (March 15, 1996), p. 1497.

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