Long-Term Consequences of Aggressive Diplomacy: European Relations after Austrian Crimean War Threats

摘要

There is a large literature on the impacts of explicit threats on the outcomes of crises between states, but the longer-term impacts of threats on dyadic state relationships and on international outcomes have been much less studied because of the difficulty of establishing causal connections between events separated in time. By comparing nearly identical foreign policy contexts before and after the Austrian Crimean War ultimata to Russia, this article demonstrates that, contrary to the prevailing view in much of the international relations literature, such long-term effects are not marginal ones that theoretical simplification with the goal of analyzing the central tendencies of the international system can usefully ignore. Under conditions discussed below, when a state is threatened in a way that attempts to deny one of its key policy objectives, that state will be less likely to come to the aid of the threatening state in the future and more likely to join the other side in future wars, realign its alliance commitments, and adopt strategies to drain the resources of the threatening state. Among the implications of these findings are that policymakers should take greater account of the long-term consequences of aggressive negotiating stances than current theories imply and that scholars have underestimated the information conveyed by private threats in crisis bargaining.