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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, largen 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


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
1

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.


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
3

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

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 USSRs 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 cooperative 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 subjects 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


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-statisticians 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
8

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
Reagans 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 5074. 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 249277.
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

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-asagent axiom is no longer possible. This should not be particularly troublesome.
Despite IRs 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 broadbrush 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),


Gaddis 59
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.
16
17

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 USSRs 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


Walt, 30
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
21
22

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 arent 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 USSRs 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 Gorbachevs
realisation that the USSRs perpetual confrontational stance with the US
harmed his country predestined? Schweller and Wohlforth write that The Soviet
Unions 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 isnt 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


Ibid, 135-136
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
24
25

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, Gorbachevs policies
were far from optimal, given that they resulted in the countrys 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 USSRs 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 policymaking and corollaries, and specify the choice mechanisms that account for
Gorbachevs 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
Wars end, Brooks and Wohlforth, in an impressive display of statistical
firepower, demonstrate how the USSRs 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 countrys
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


Brooks & Wohlforth, Economic Constraints and the End of the Cold War, 298
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
31
32

declining national power cannot just be assumed. The Soviet economic model was
entirely different from the Western consumer-capitalist paradigm. The USSRs
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 realistss story about Soviet decline provides an expedient narrative
after the state had imploded. At the time the USSRs 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 wasnt 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 economys former
virility could under no circumstances return. The USSRs 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.


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

10

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
Wohlforths 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
Gorbachevs reforms, the argument goes, were spurred by Soviet
economic decline, but at the same time, Gorbachevs 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 Gorbachevs 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


Brooks, Economic Constraints, 282
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
39
40

11

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 Wohlforths claim that the USSRs 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 wasnt 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 overdeterminacy 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 realisms
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 warprone. 48 This is not a glib point, but one that strikes right at the heart of
contemporary social sciences 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.


Ferguson, Niall, The Political Economy of the Cold War
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
44
45

12

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, Britains 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 realisms 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
Unions implosion. To attribute this difference entirely to the USSRs 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 USSRs 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.


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

13

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 neorealisms 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 USSRs 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 USSRs 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


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

14

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 capitalisms
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 Communisms
failure. It has yielded some surprising philosophical implications. Fukuyama, for
instance, ingeniously used the liberal story to turn Marxs 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


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
57

15

empirical insights into the operation of world politics from this. The case of the
Chinese Communist Party reveals why: Deng Xiaping re-oriented Chinas
economy toward a market system following the footsteps of Gorbachevs
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
Chinas 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 liberalisms 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 liberalisms future in the context of world politics.
Liberals also have a hard time explaining the timing of the USSRs
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 USSRs 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 USSRs economic performance at the
end of the 1980s. But was said collapse a consequence of Gorbachevs decisions?
Could the Soviet malaise have been handled differently? Was the USSRs
economic deterioration caused by Gorbachevs idiosyncrasies or by powerful
underlying economic forces? By counterfactually changing certain of Gorbachevs
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
62

Ibid, 16
Shultz, George, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, New York, NY:
Scribners, 1993, 10

16

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, Stalins rejection of free elections in Eastern Europe started a process that
created an informal Soviet empire, while Gorbachevs 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 socialstructural foundations.66 Shifting social practices for example the rise of antitotalitarian 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 coconstitutive 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 Gorbachevs toleration of Polands 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 Communisms collapse is troubling in its certitude. Anti-


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
63

17

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 Gorbachevs 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
disasters impact on Gorbachevs 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 Gorbachevs
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 decisionmaking stratas. Risse-Kappen discusses Soviet political institutions, state-society
relations and the values and norms embedded in Soviet political culture, all of


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 Societys 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
67

18

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
Gorbachevs 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 Reagans 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 ones choice of policy. Leaders work to build a balance of
interest, interacting with other leaders, their domestic audience, international


Ibid, 195
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
72
73

19

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 Gorbachevs 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 states
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 Wests
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,


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

20

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 dont delimit idiosyncrasy against the
external structures that exert unified pressure on all foreign policy agents (e.g.,
national security imperatives).
The above survey of IRs 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 reverseengineering 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 rewrites, 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


Berlin, Isaiah: The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoys 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.
84

21

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 disciplines 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 ones
choice. Counterfactuals have thus always been a part of IRs 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 IRs 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 IRs 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 nonlinearmulticausal 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 systems 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


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 citystate) 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
systems variables cannot be effectively isolated from each other or from their
context, then linearization is not possible, because dynamic interaction is one of
the systems defining characteristics.91 Nonlinearity has become of great interest
to the social sciences of late, accounting for the unpredictability of economicpolitical 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 factdriven causal narrative. The list of causes that influence the evolution
of political events run along a spectrum with two poles: at one end are


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 structuraldeterministic pole (e.g. hardening of the US stance vis--vis the
Soviets by the beginning of the 1980). Events that can easily be reimagined (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,
Brezhnevs 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]?)

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