Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis

Marc TrachtenbergDepartment of Political Science

University of California at Los Angeles

October 4, 2011

It used to be taken for granted that relative power and relative interest were

of fundamental importance in determining how international crises run their course

—that the weak would defer to the strong and the side that cared less about the

issues at stake would tend to give way in the dispute. But in an important article

published in 1994, James Fearon argued that in a rational world relative power and

relative interest and indeed anything observable in advance should already have

been taken into account as the policies that led up to a crisis were being worked

out. Outcomes would therefore be determined by new information revealed during

the crisis about how far each state was willing to go. And information of that sort,

he said, could not be effectively conveyed through “quiet diplomatic exchanges,”

given that states “have strong incentives to misrepresent their willingness to fight in

order to get a better deal.” The rival powers would have to do things that “allow

them credibly to reveal their own preferences.” “Cheap talk” could not convey new

information, since “a state with low resolve may have no disincentive to sending”

such signals; a move made during a crisis had to be “costly signal” if it was to

“warrant revising beliefs.” Only costs “generated in the course of the crisis itself”

could “convey new information about a state’s resolve”; only costly signaling could

enable the receiver of the signal to distinguish between low-resolve and high-resolve

adversaries.1

1 James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes, American Political Science Review 88, no. 3 (September 1994), pp. 578, 586, 579; note especially the repeated use of words like “must” and “only” on p. 579. Fearon builds here on the well-known work of Michael Spence. See especially Spence’s important article, “Job Market Signaling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (August 1973). A similar idea was developed independently at roughly the same time by the Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi: “Mate Selection: A Selection for a Handicap,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 53 (1975). For a discussion and additional references, see Carl Bergstrom, “Dealing with Deception in Biology,” in Brooke Harrington, ed., Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 24-25, and William Searcy and Stephen Nowicki, The Evolution of Animal Behavior: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 6-13 and 207-224. Spence, for his part,

What then allows a state to make its true preferences known? Fearon argued

that one particular mechanism played a key role in this regard. Crises take place in

public, and a government might well have to pay a domestic political price if it

backed down in the dispute. In such circumstances, it would be less likely to make

threats that it did not intend to follow through on than if it could bluff with impunity;

those threats it did make would therefore be taken more seriously. This audience

costs mechanism, as it was called, thus allowed states to make credible

commitments in this kind of conflict. And indeed the claim was that this mechanism

was of fundamental importance—that it played a “crucial role” (as Fearon put it) in

“generating the costs that enable states to learn” during a crisis.2 Or as Alastair

Smith, another leading audience costs theorist, put the point: public foreign policy

statements “are only credible when leaders suffer domestically if they fail to fulfill

their commitments.”3

It follows, these theorists argue, that democracies probably have a bargaining

advantage in international crises. Relative audience costs, in Fearon’s model,

matter a great deal: “the side with a stronger domestic audience (e.g., a

democracy) is always less likely to back down than the side less able to generate

built to a certain extent on the work of Robert Jervis, who, in his The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), had dealt with somewhat similar problems a bit earlier. (See n. 208 below.) Jervis, in fact, had referred (on p. 18 n. 2 of that book) to the costs that would be incurred if it was later discovered that signals had been designed to be misleading, and went on to note that “if there were no such costs associated with issuing misleading signals, there would be no reason for receivers to place any faith in them.” More recently, Jervis has emphasized some of the problems with the costly signaling approach. See especially his short but quite important article “Signaling and Perception: Drawing Inferences and Projecting Images,” in Kristen Monroe, ed., Political Psychology (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002). His basic argument here is that, for both the signaler and the perceiver, subjective factors—the factors that determine how the signaler thinks the other side will interpret its signals and how the perceiver actually does interpret them—loom much larger than one think, and that the whole process of signaling is therefore not nearly as straightforward as many theorists seem to believe.2 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 579. See also ibid., pp. 577-578. 3 Alastair Smith, “International Crises and Domestic Politics,” American Political Science Review 92, no. 3 (September 1998), p. 623. Emphasis added.

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audience costs (a nondemocracy).”4 Fearon himself, to be sure, was quite cautious

in developing that argument. The idea that democratic leaders “have an easier time

generating audience costs” he advanced simply as a “plausible working

hypothesis.”5 But other writers have made stronger claims, and the basic idea that

the audience costs mechanism gives democracies a certain bargaining advantage,

especially in crisis situations, is taken quite seriously in the international relations

literature.

Fearon and other scholars who argued in that vein were basically making a

theoretical argument, and they developed that argument by showing how particular

models work. But a theory is of value only to the extent that it rings true when one

examines the empirical evidence. And clearly their assumption was that the

“audience costs story” was empirically plausible—that it was empirically true that

many crises appear “as competitions in creating domestic political audience costs.”6

Fearon’s argument, as he himself pointed out, was rooted in an “empirical claim,

namely that crises are public events carried out in front of domestic political

audiences and that this fact is crucial to understanding why they occur and how

they unfold.”7

But does the audience costs theory in fact hold up in the light of the empirical

evidence? It is not obvious how one should go about answering that question.

Direct statistical tests, as Kenneth Schultz has pointed out, “are fraught with

methodological difficulties.”8 The more effective the audience costs mechanism is,

4 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 577.5 Ibid., p. 582.6 James Fearon, “Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, no. 1 (February 1997), p. 68, and also p. 87.7 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 577.8 Kenneth Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 45, no. 1 (February 2001), p. 35.

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the less likely it is that audience costs themselves would actually be incurred (since

the opposing side would back down). “This creates a problem for statistical

inference,” Schultz notes, “because the outcomes that we observe should be

associated with lower domestic costs, on average, than the outcomes that we do not

observe.”9 It is hard, therefore, to draw inferences about how powerful the

audience costs mechanism is by just studying the audience costs that are actually

incurred—and yet statistical inference deals with observables.

If direct tests are impossible, one can always try to infer additional

propositions from the model and subject them to empirical analysis. But the

problem here is that those propositions might also be consistent with very different

sets of assumptions. Hypotheses inferred from an audience costs model might thus

make perfect sense to people who do not find the audience costs theory plausible, so

even if a statistical analysis supports those hypotheses, that finding would not

convince these skeptics that the theory is basically valid. Given these problems,

perhaps the best way to get a handle on this issue is to do historical analysis.

“Where large sample statistical tests come up short,” Schultz writes, historical cases

studies “may be the most effective way of deciding whether the search for audience

costs is a fruitful enterprise.”10

So my goal here is to examine the audience costs theory in the light of the

historical evidence—that is, to see how much of a role the audience costs

mechanism, as Fearon defined it, plays in determining the way international crises

run their course. I will be looking at a set of crises—episodes in which there was a

significant perceived risk of war—involving great powers, at least one of which was

a democracy, and which were settled without war.

9 Ibid., p. 33.10 Ibid., p. 53.

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These criteria were chosen for the following reasons. The cases are all crises

because the Fearon theory explicitly deals with crises. But I will be looking only at

great power crises for essentially practical reasons. In crises between minor

powers, or between a great power and a minor power, the possibility of intervention

on the part of an outside great power is often very real, and this considerably

complicates the analysis. Great power crises generally have a simpler structure, so

their logic should stand out more clearly. And that means that if audience costs play

a key role in shaping outcomes, that role should be easier to see in such cases.

The focus here, moreover, is on crises in which at least one of the contending

parties is a democracy, since much of the debate on this issue has to do with

whether the audience costs mechanism gives democracies an advantage over non-

democratic regimes. This means that the crises to be examined all took place after

1867. It was in that year, with the passage of the Second Reform Act, that Great

Britain became a democracy, or at least that is what both historians and political

scientists commonly argue.11 No other great power (if certain brief revolutionary

periods in France are ignored) could be considered a democracy before that point.

Finally, only those crises that did not terminate in war will be examined here.

The rationale has to do with the basic thrust of the Fearon theory. His argument,

both in his audience costs paper and in his very important article “Rationalist

Explanations for War,” is that rational states in a sense should be able to reach a

bargain that would enable them to avoid war, but sometimes cannot do so because

they suspect each other of bluffing.12 It follows that anything that would allow them 11 “The Reform Act of 1867,” Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example, writes, “was one of the decisive events, perhaps the decisive event, in modern English history. It was this act that transformed England into a democracy . . .” Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Politics of Democracy: The English Reform Act of 1867,” Journal of British Studies 6, no. 1 (November 1966), p. 97.12 James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995).

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to credibly reveal their actual preferences might point the way to a clear outcome

and thus allow them to credibly head off an armed conflict, and the audience costs

mechanism, in Fearon’s view, provides an effective way for them to do so. What this

means is that if that mechanism is as important as Fearon suggests, we are more

likely to see it in operation in crises that end peacefully than in those that end in

war.

That set of criteria generates a list of about a dozen crises: the “War-in-

Sight” crisis of 1875; the Eastern Crisis of 1877-78; the Fashoda crisis; the two

Moroccan crises; the Rhineland crisis of 1936; the Czech crisis of 1938; the Turkish

and Iranian crises of 1946; the Berlin Blockade of 1948; and the Berlin and Cuban

crises of 1958-62. This is not a long list, and all of those episodes will be examined

here. But there is nothing sacrosanct about that set of crises. One could easily

argue, for example, that China was a great power in the 1950s and that the Sino-

American crises of that decade should be included in the list. I have no fundamental

quarrel with arguments of that sort. I assume only that if the audience costs

mechanism is as powerful as many scholars believe, we should see it at work in

crises that unambiguously meet the criteria laid out here, and especially the crises

discussed in the next section.

That section will deal with crises in which a democratic power prevailed—that

is, with crises in which its opponent backed down. These were the cases in which

the audience costs mechanism is most likely to have played an important role, but

how important was it in reality? Did the democratic state deliberately try to exploit

it, and (more importantly) did its opponent pull back because it could now see that

that state’s threats were credible because audience costs would be incurred if it

gave way in the dispute? The section after that, much shorter and less systematic,

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will look at what happens when democracies lose. How much of a price do their

leaders pay in such cases and how does it compare with the price paid by leaders in

non-democratic regimes? Finally, in a concluding section, I will discuss the basic

points that emerge from this analysis and what the findings here imply about the

way this sort of issue needs to be studied.

WHEN DEMOCRACIES PREVAIL

In this section we will look at great power crises that were won by

democracies: five cases from the pre-World War I period and five from the Cold War

period. We will be interested in two main questions. The more minor question has

to do with the tactics employed by the democratic power. Audience costs theorists

sometimes suggest—and in this regard they build on Thomas Schelling’s argument

about the importance in bargaining of the “power to bind oneself”—that the leaders

of those countries choose to “go public” in a crisis with the deliberate goal of

“burning their bridges” or “tying their hands” in order to gain a bargaining

advantage.13 But how often do those leaders in fact opt for tactics of that sort? The

second and far more important question focuses on the calculations of their

adversaries. Whatever the intentions of the leaders of the democratic state, the

audience costs mechanism can be decisive only if the opposing power understands

why it would be hard for them to back down. Unless it was able to see why their

hands were tied, it would have no reason to conclude that they were not bluffing. 13 Fearon talks, for example, about why leaders “would want to be able to generate significant audience costs in international contests.” Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 585. States, he says on p. 578 of that article, “resort to the risky and provocative actions that characterize crises,” such as making public threats, “because less-public diplomacy may not allow them credibly to reveal their own preferences.” This certainly suggests that governments deliberately pursue a strategy of this sort. Other audience costs theorists also argue that statesmen deliberately exploit the audience costs mechanism. See p. 17 below. For Schelling’s argument, see his article “An Essay on Bargaining,” in Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 22-28; on p. 28 Schelling had in fact presented the basic idea that lies at the heart of the audience costs theory.

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So for the audience costs argument to hold, the adversary power has to understand

that the democratic leaders would find it hard to give way for fear of incurring

audience costs. But do governments confronting democratic states actually make

this kind of calculation?

The “War-in-Sight” Crisis (1875)

On April 9, 1875, the Berlin Post published an article called “Is War in Sight?”

arguing that because of developments in France, a Franco-German war might well

be imminent. The Post was closely linked to the German government, and other

newspapers with official connections sounded similar themes. It was commonly

assumed at the time that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was behind the

press campaign, and it seems quite clear in retrospect that that assumption was

correct.14 Certainly Bismarck himself, both at the time and earlier, and both openly

and in private, had argued that a preventive war against France would be justified

as soon as it became clear that an armed confrontation was inevitable. General

Helmuth von Moltke, Germany’s top military officer, and Joseph Maria von

Radowitz, one of Bismarck’s closest collaborators at the Foreign Office, also

defended the idea of a preventive war in talks with foreign diplomats.15

14 See James Stone, The War Scare of 1875: Bismarck and Europe in the Mid-1870s (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010), pp. 212-224. There is a large literature on this episode (which Stone discusses in his first chapter), but this book—to my mind a model of how historical analysis should be done—is the most important study of the subject ever published.15 For a general account, see Stone, War Scare, pp. 224-245. For Bismarck’s views on preventive war, see Bismarck Reichstag speech, November 1871, quoted in ibid., p. 37; Bismarck to von Arnim, October 30, 1873, Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette 1871-1914, ed. Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Friedrich Thimme (Berlin : Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft fu ̈r Politik und Geschichte, 1922-1927), 40 vols. in 54, 1:221; Odo Russell to Granville, December 22, 1873, and Odo Russell to Derby, April 27, 1875, in Winifred Taffs, Ambassador to Bismarck: Lord Odo Russell, First Baron Ampthill (London: Frederick Muller, 1938), pp. 66, 86-87. On Moltke, see Stone, War Scare, pp. 236-239; Andreas Hillgruber, “Die ‘Krieg-in-Sicht’ Krise 1875—Wegscheide der Politik der europäischen Grossmächte in der späten Bismarck-Zeit,” in Ernst Schulin, ed., Gedenkschrift Martin Göhring: Studien zur europäischen Geschichte (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1968), p. 244 and the references cited in n. 13 there; and Otto Pflanze, Bismarck

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What was Bismarck up to? Following her defeat in 1871, France had been

forced to cede Alsace and much of Lorraine to Germany, but the French never

accepted that arrangement as final. France was rebuilding her military strength,

but unless she had allies she could pose no real threat to Germany. The danger was

that a strong France might ally with one or more of Germany’s neighbors, and that

danger would be particularly great if, as seemed possible, the monarchists, who in

1875 controlled the French government, seized power in that country. Strong

pressure therefore had to be brought to bear to prevent that from happening:

Germany’s threatening behavior might convince the French to pursue a non-

provocative policy. It might persuade French voters to back the republicans, or at

least keep the monarchists from attempting a coup.16

But if Germany had an interest in keeping France as weak and as isolated as

possible, the other main powers had an interest in a relatively strong France as a

counterweight to Germany. “Bismarck is really another old Bonaparte again,” the

British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, thought, “and he must be bridled.”17 He

explained to the foreign secretary, Lord Derby, what needed to be done: “We

should construct some concerted movement to preserve the peace of Europe. . .

There might be an alliance between Russia and ourself for this special purpose; and

other powers, as Austria, and perhaps Italy, might be invited to accede.”18 Derby

agreed that Britain and Russia could jointly pursue that kind of policy. It could not

and the Development of Germany, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 261, 268-269. Radowitz’s comments in meeting with the French ambassador in Berlin are reported in Gontaut-Biron to Decazes, April 21, 1975, Documents diplomatiques français (1871-1914), series I, vol. 1, pp. 417-418, henceforth cited in the form: DDF I:1:417-418.16 This is basically Stone’s argument. See also the passage from an April 1875 letter from Bismarck to State Secretary Bülow quoted in Johannes Janorschke, “Die ‘Krieg-in-Sicht’ Krise von 1875: Eine Neuebetrachtung,” Historische Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 121 n. 23.17 Quoted in William Monypenny and George Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (New York: Macmillan, 1929), vol. 2, p. 761.18 Disraeli to Derby, May 6, 1875, ibid., p. 762.

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be to “the interest of Russia,” he thought, “to have France destroyed and Germany

omnipotent.”19 The Russians were, in fact, approached to see if the two countries

could work together in this affair; indeed, Disraeli suggested to them that if a

Franco-German war did break out, other countries—meaning Britain and Russia—

would intervene.20 The Russian leaders—both the Tsar and the chancellor, Prince

Gorchakov—were about to visit Berlin. It was taken for granted that they would try

to preserve the peace and the British ambassador was instructed to support their

efforts. The Russian and British governments had little trouble getting the

assurances they wanted, since the German emperor had never been willing to

sanction a preventive war against France and Bismarck had been bluffing.21 When

his bluff was called, he had little choice but to give way, and that was the end of the

crisis.

What does this story tell us about the audience costs theory? Audience costs

were not the crucial factor in 1875. The audience costs mechanism, in fact, played

no real role at all. The one clearly democratic power, Britain, intervened, but in a

fairly low-key way, especially as far as the public was concerned. It had not

engaged in “costly signaling”: “what we did,” Lord Derby wrote, “involved no risk

and cost no trouble.”22 And even after the crisis had been settled, the government

did not try to cash in on its “victory” in domestic political terms. It sought to play

down what it had done, and to stress how “unostentatious” its policy had been; the

19 Derby to Odo Russell, May 3, 1875, in Lord Newton, Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy, vol. 2 (London: Edward Arnold, 1913), p. 75. 20 Shuvalov to the Tsar, May 13, 1875 (two documents), in R.W. Seton-Watson, “Russo-British Relations during the Eastern Crisis,” part I, Slavonic Review 3, no. 8 (December 1924), pp. 424-425 (docs. 54 and 55).21 See the emperor’s very interesting comment of May 16, 1875, laying out his reasons for opposing a preventive war strategy, in Grosse Politik 1:282. A French translation can be found in La Politique extérieure de l’Allemagne 1870-1914, vol. 1 (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1927), pp. 264-265. 22 Derby to Disraeli, May 20, 1875, in Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, 2:764.

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details of its action were deliberately not revealed to the nation.23 Indeed, it is hard

to see how the fact that Britain was now a democracy made any difference at all—

how the democratic system gave British leaders more effective tools for the conduct

of foreign policy than those they had long possessed.

So this particular case does not provide much support for the audience costs

theory. But it does not count heavily against that theory either. Bismarck’s bluff

was called rather easily, if only because of the emperor’s attitude. Britain and

Russia were pushing on an open door. It did not take much to get the German

chancellor to back down—to see that his own freedom of action was perhaps more

limited than he had realized. There was no need, in other words, for Britain to

engage in “costly signaling.” And that leaves open the possibility that in a more

serious crisis, the audience costs mechanism might play a more important role.

But there is one point bearing on the theory that should be noted. The

audience costs theorists think that states profit in bargaining terms from an ability

to generate audience costs—that taking a tough public stand (when that would

generate audience costs) strengthens a country’s position and gives it the upper

hand in a crisis. But the 1875 case shows why “going public” might not always be a

good idea: public threats might alienate third powers and might lead them to take

action that weakens one’s general political position. Public threat-making, in other

words, is not necessarily an effective instrument of statecraft.

The Eastern Crisis, 1877-78

In April 1877, Russia declared war on Turkey. That action came after

prolonged efforts, especially by the three eastern empires, to get Turkey to end the

mistreatment of her mainly Christian subjects in southeastern Europe, and only 23 Disraeli to Derby, May 30, 1875, ibid.; and Lord Derby’s May 31, 1875, speech in Parliament, Parliamentary Debates: House of Lords, series 3, vol. 224, col. 1098.

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after Russia had reached an important agreement with Austria governing the

outcome of the war. The Russian aim at first was to pursue only limited goals and to

avoid conflict with the two other great powers, Austria and Britain, with strong

interests in the area. But in the course of the war Russian objectives escalated,

especially after the fall of Plevna and the collapse of Turkish resistance in December

1877. The government, carried away by or unable to resist strong nationalist and

pan-Slav feeling, was tempted to end Turkish rule in the Balkans, liberate the

Christian populations there, and even seize control of Constantinople and the

Turkish Straits. But that program was utterly unacceptable to the British

government, and it seemed increasingly likely that Austria would side with Britain in

a showdown.24

From January through March 1878, Russia and Britain seemed to be on the

verge of war. In 1877, before it had become apparent just how far Russia was going

to go, British opinion had been divided about how strong a line to take. Prime

Minister Disraeli was quite warlike even then, but the foreign secretary, Lord

Derby, wanted very much to head off a conflict with Russia.25 So the actions the

British government took in 1877 were relatively restrained. When the Russians

crossed the Danube at the end of June, the British fleet was ordered to Besika Bay,

just south of the Turkish Straits, and in July the Russian ambassador was told by the

24 The account here is based mainly on two extraordinary works published in the 1930s: B.H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), and R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics (London: Macmillan, 1935). On Russian policy, see also David MacKenzie, “Russia’s Balkan Policies under Alexander II, 1855-1881,” in Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and for British side see also Marvin Swartz, The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1985). On the role of nationalist and pan-Slav opinion in Russia, see Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, esp. pp. 194-197, 380, 390.25 This is one of the basic themes in the Seton-Watson book. The evidence presented there about Disraeli’s bellicosity is quite extraordinary: Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, pp. 216-219. On political divisions in Britain, see ibid., esp. p. 272.

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British that (in B.H. Sumner’s paraphrase) “in the event of a Russian occupation of

Constantinople the government would be free to adopt any measures they might

think fit.”26 By the beginning of 1878, however, it seemed quite possible that Russia

might actually occupy that city, and British policy hardened. The fleet was sent up

the Dardanelles and anchored within sight of the Turkish capital, near the island of

Prinkipo; Parliament approved supplementary appropriations and “military and

naval preparations were pressed on with yet more urgent haste.”27 The Russians, as

it turned out, did not occupy Constantinople, but their armies did move to within a

few miles of the city, and at the beginning of March they were able to dictate peace

terms to the Turks—terms which were not in line with what the Austrians had been

promised before the war, and which neither the British nor the Austrians could

accept.

It thus seemed (for about ten weeks) that “violent nationalist feelings” in both

Russia and Britain would sweep both countries into war.28 The British, at the end of

March, “called up the reserves and decided to bring a contingent of Indian troops to

the Mediterranean.”29 That decision led to the resignation of Lord Derby and his

replacement at the Foreign Office by Lord Salisbury. Derby’s departure was seen

by the Russians as a sign that Britain was heading toward war—and that in fact a

military conflict was imminent.30 The immediate effect was to lead to a hardening of

the Tsar’s attitude: it was important to preempt a British move to seize

Constantinople.31 But his brother, the military commander in the theater, did not do

26 Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 317-318.27 Ibid., p. 374.28 Ibid., pp. 374, 380, 406.29 Ibid., p. 389. See also Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 364.30 Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 393.31 Ibid., pp. 374, 393-395.

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what the Tsar wanted. He was replaced in April, but by then the whole political

situation had changed.

The pan-Slav tide had by that point receded, and Russian leaders were now

prepared to approach the problem in a more sober, less emotional way. Russia was

in no position militarily, financially or politically to go to war against Britain, and

probably against Austria as well.32 Britain, on the other hand, was then at the peak

of her power: “England will hardly feel the war,” the German ambassador in

London noted, “while it will ruin Russia and throw back for at least a quarter of a

century the development of this half-barbaric state.”33 But the situation in Britain

had also changed and the British were now ready to make a bargain with the Tsar’s

government. Disraeli was now willing to allow Salisbury to call the shots, and

Salisbury was prepared to make a reasonable peace with Russia: to compromise on

the Balkan issues and to accept some Russian territorial gains in both Europe and

Asia. On that basis he and the Russian ambassador in London, Count Peter

Shuvalov, were able in May to reach an agreement that essentially settled the crisis;

the details were worked out at the Congress of Berlin later that year.

What light does this story throw on the audience costs question? Do you see

governments stirring up opinion at home to strengthen their bargaining position in

confrontations with other powers? Did governments interpret their adversaries’

public moves as creating situations in which, for domestic political reasons, they

would find it hard to pull back? And did that calculation play a crucial role in

convincing them that the other side was not bluffing and that they themselves would

therefore have to give way if war was to be avoided?32 Ibid., pp. 396-397, 406.33 Münster to Bennigsen, April 11, 1878, quoted in Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 378. Britain at the time accounted for over 22 percent of world manufacturing output, as compared to under eight percent for Russia. See the table in Paul Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 149.

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It turns out that the audience costs logic did come into play during the

Eastern Crisis, albeit in a fairly limited way . For Gorchakov, Sumner writes

(referring to a relatively early stage of the crisis), “patriotic effervescence in Russia

was in one sense far from unwelcome. It could be used to strengthen his hand

abroad, provided that it did not go beyond controllable limits.”34 And Disraeli, in

October 1877, did consider a maneuver based on stirring up public opinion at home.

Britain, he thought, could in effect recommend terms for ending the Russo-Turkish

War. If Russia rejected those terms, “she would put herself much more in the

wrong, and if the terms were publicly acknowledged by England as just and

satisfactory, it would be very difficult for us to adhere to our present neutrality.

Opinion at home would force us to action.”35 But he soon dropped the idea, and the

Russians did not really believe that the British government’s hands were tied by a

bellicose public opinion. Indeed, Lord Derby told the Russian ambassador not to

take Britain’s warlike moves too seriously. “I know my colleagues well: they do not

want war, but to satisfy their party by demonstrations.” If the Russians did not allow

themselves to be provoked, war might yet be avoided. And Shuvalov, after some

reflection, advised his government that Derby might well be right.36

The Russians, in fact, were not impressed when the British government

claimed at the Congress of Berlin that its hands were tied for domestic political

reasons. The issue here, which had to do with the status of the port of Batum, was

fairly minor. The British sought to convince the Russian government that because

of Jingo feeling in Britain, the Russians should take a relatively moderate line on

34 Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 197.35 Disraeli to Layard, October 11, 1877, quoted in Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 234. Emphasis in the original text.36 Shuvalov to Gorchakov, March 29 and 30, 1878, quoted in ibid., p. 378. For the original documents, see R.W. Seton-Watson, “Russo-British Relations, 1875-1878,” part 2, Slavonic and East European Review 28, no. 70 (November 1949), docs. 433 and 434, p. 226.

15

that issue. They should be told, Disraeli thought, that if they were “not wise, they

will have a Jingo Govt. & war with England in a month.” Salisbury agreed to “do all

that I can to frighten” Shuvalov. But his heart was not in it, and the real purpose of

the effort was to demonstrate the government’s “firmness to their Jingo followers”

at home.37 Salisbury, writing from Berlin, was in fact quite irritated by the

“extravagant nonsense talked at home” about Batum and Turkey’s Asiatic border.38

And looking at the crisis as a whole, it is quite clear that the he British

government did not calculate that it had to “go public” in order to tie its own hands

for bargaining purposes. Disraeli and Salisbury did not seek to limit their own

freedom of action; their goal was simply to make it clear, to both the country and

the world, that Britain would go to war if Russia did not moderate her position. The

Russians, for their part, understood that the Disraeli government had the power to

carry out that policy, and they did not doubt that that government would carry it out

if no settlement were reached. That judgment was based on all sorts of indicators;

what Shuvalov was able to learn, especially from Lord and Lady Derby, about the

views of key British leaders, was of particular importance in this context.39 The

whole question of whether Disraeli would be unable to pull back for domestic

political reasons was of no great importance, for the simple reason that he clearly

was not interested in pulling back if the terms were not satisfactory. It was scarcely

as though the Russians were trying hard to see whether the British were bluffing

37 Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 456; Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 540; Swartz, Politics of British Foreign Policy, pp. 94-96. The term “Jingo,” which came into use at this time, derived from a famous music-hall song sung during this crisis: “We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!” A clip from an early recording of this song is available at http://www.archeophone.org/Berliner5inch/berliner-040.php.38 Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 540.39 Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, pp. 250, 298; Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 29-30, 321; Swartz, Politics of British Foreign Policy, pp. 48-49, 70-72. See also Shuvalov’s reports to Gorchakov in Seton-Watson, “Russo-British Relations,” parts 1 and 2.

16

and were only convinced that they were not when they realized the government

would incur significant audience costs if it gave way during the crisis. If anything,

they thought Disraeli government was more bellicose than it in fact was.40

Thus the audience costs mechanism did not play a key role during the crisis,

and this particular story helps us understand why that mechanism might be weaker

than some theorists think. Tough talk tended to be vague. Disraeli’s Guildhall

address of November 1876 is a good case in point. “Although the policy of England

is peace,” he said, “there is no country so well prepared for war as our own.”

Britain’s resources were “inexhaustible,” and if she went to war, “she will not

terminate till right is done.”41 But this gave no clear sense for the terms Britain

would insist on; there was no precise commitment that Disraeli could be blamed for

not honoring. The same point could be made about the speech the Tsar gave in

Moscow two days later, in which he referred to Russia’s “sacred mission” in the

Balkans.42 This was tough language, but it did not mean much in operational terms,

and in particular it did not foreclose the possibility of a moderate peace.

And even if the thrust of a policy is relatively clear, a government that wants

to draw back can often finesse the situation in various ways. One is struck in this

context by R.W. Seton-Watson’s interpretation of Disraeli’s policy in 1878. In

allowing Salisbury to work out a compromise with Shuvalov, Disraeli was actually

retreating from his earlier hard line. The warlike measures he took at the time

served to “conceal his retreat and pacify the impatient Jingoes” and the way he

packaged the Berlin settlement as a defeat for Russia served the same purpose.43

40 See Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, esp. pp. 472, 475.41 Quoted in ibid., p. 226.42 Quoted in ibid., p. 226-227.43 Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 397. See also ibid., pp. 379, 530-531, 535, and 560-561, for related arguments and evidence.

17

The Jingoes had to be “calmed in their own language,” Salisbury said, and Disraeli

was the only one who could do it because he “speaks it fluently.”44

The Russians had a different way to avoid paying audience costs. They had

pursued a very ambitious policy in early 1878, “in reckless disregard,” as Sumner

puts it, of the probable reactions of Britain and Austria.45 Shuvalov was appalled by

that policy—he called the treaty Russia had imposed on Turkey “the greatest act of

stupidity we could have committed”—and it was largely thanks to his rather

extraordinary efforts that Russia was able to avoid what would certainly have been a

disastrous war with Britain, and probably with Austria as well.46 But Russian public

opinion was deeply disappointed by the Berlin settlement, and Shuvalov, the main

architect of that settlement on the Russian side, was held responsible for what had

happened. His political career was ruined, and the German government was also

blamed. The Tsar spoke of a “European coalition against Russia, under the

leadership of Prince Bismarck.” In that way, those responsible for the failed policy

—the Tsar especially—were able to limit the audience costs they had to pay.47

The Fashoda Crisis (1898)

For much of the nineteenth century, Britain sought to prevent Russia from

getting control of the Turkish Straits. A Russian presence in the eastern

Mediterranean would weaken Britain’s position in what was for her a region of

central strategic importance. When Russia formed an alliance with France in the

44 Swartz, Politics of British Foreign Policy, p. 96.45 Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 425.46 Quoted in ibid., p. 471.47 See Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, pp. 461-471, and Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 554-556. One should also note in this context Bismarck’s not-too-successful method for evading accountability in 1875: indirect threat-making (especially via the press) with “plausible deniability” (to use a term from a later period) followed by the scapegoating of those who had served as the instruments of that strategy. See Stone, War Scare, pp. 22, 284-311.

18

early 1890s, the problem became acute: the British could not risk a conflict with

Russia if their fleet could be attacked from behind by France. One possible solution

was for Germany to threaten to attack France if she joined with Russia in such a

case; Britain would then be able to pursue with Germany’s ally Austria a policy

directed at the containment of Russia. But the Germans were not willing to go

along with the idea.48

So by the mid-1890s the old strategy of defending Constantinople was

becoming increasingly untenable—all the more so, since after the Armenian

massacres of 1894-96 a policy of siding with the Turks against Russia was scarcely

viable in domestic political terms. The British would instead consolidate their

position in Egypt, which they had originally occupied in 1882; the corollary was

that they would also have to dominate the entire Nile valley. Indeed, Lord

Salisbury, who in the late 1890s was once again foreign secretary, had long

understood that Britain might have to go this route: as Robinson and Gallagher put

it in their classic work on the subject, it had been Salisbury’s “set policy since 1889

to exclude European rivals” from the upper Nile.49

The French, on the other hand, very much wanted to end the British

occupation of Egypt.50 Key officials thought that by sending a military expedition to

48 See William Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1935), vol. 1, pp. 52-54. See also Arthur Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880-1905 (New York: Knopf, 1940), chap. 11.49 See C.J. Lowe, The Reluctant Imperialists: British Foreign Policy 1878-1902 (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 196-204 (esp. pp. 203-204), and the extract from Salisbury to Currie, October 19, 1897, on pp. 377-378 (doc. 115); Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968), pp. 254-273, and p. 354 (for the quotation); and C.J. Lowe, Salisbury and the Mediterranean, 1886-1896 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). The two most important books on the British side of what was to become the Fashoda affair are the Robinson and Gallagher book just cited, a brilliant analysis, and G.N. Sanderson’s more detailed study, England, Europe and the Upper Nile, 1882-1899 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965).50 See Pierre Guillen, L’Expansion 1881-1898 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1985), pp. 397-425 and 461-462. For the French side of the Fashoda affair, see also Roger Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered: The Impact of Domestic Politics on French Policy in Africa, 1893-1898

19

the upper Nile, France could reopen the Egyptian question. An international

conference would be convened and Britain would be made to withdraw from Egypt.

Some French leaders thought this policy was insane.51 But the government, under

strong pressure from the so-called parti colonial, approved the plan, and in late

1896 the parliament, by a vote of 477 to 18, agreed to fund what was to become the

Marchand Mission. Marchand’s arrival at Fashoda on the upper Nile, the foreign

minister said, would be a “pistol shot”: it would force Britain to negotiate.52

But the French had totally misread the situation and were in a much weaker

position than they had realized. The other continental powers would not go to war

over the issue. Given the Alsace-Lorraine problem, true political intimacy between

France and Germany was out of the question.53 French leaders had hoped, however,

that their Russian ally would support their Egyptian policy, but it was clear by early

1898 that no real support would be forthcoming.54 This was in part because they

themselves were unwilling to support Russia in other areas, but was also because

the shift in British strategy away from the defense of Constantinople meant that

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970); Marc Michel, La Mission Marchand, 1895-1899 (Paris: Mouton, 1972); and C.M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, “Gabriel Hanotaux, the Colonial Party and the Fashoda Strategy,” in E.F. Penrose, ed., European Imperialism and the Partition of Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1975).51 This was the view expressed by Colonies Minister Chautemps in testimony before a parliamentary committee in 1895, quoted in A.S. Kanya-Forstner’s review of Sanderson’s England, Europe, and the Upper Nile, in the Historical Journal 9, no. 2 (1966), p. 251.52 See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 409, and Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “Gabriel Hanotaux,” p. 77. On the parti colonial, see C.M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, “The French ‘Colonial Party’: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1885-1914,” Historical Journal 14, no. 1 (March 1971), and L. Abrams and D.J. Miller, “Who Were the French Colonialists? A Reassessment of the Parti Colonial, 1890-1914,” Historical Journal 19, no. 3 (1976).53 The French foreign minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, told the President of the Republic when he left office in mid-1898 that French opinion was opposed to cooperation with Germany against Britain. See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 449.54 See ibid., pp. 428-440, esp. p. 439; Michel, Mission Marchand, pp. 130-131, 135; Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 327. See also A.J.P. Taylor’s reviews of the two volumes in the DDF dealing with this episode, in the English Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 273 (October 1954), and vol. 74, no. 291 (April 1959).

20

Britain was in a better position to strike a deal with Russia. Salisbury, in fact, made

a point of staying on good terms with that country: “in six months’ time,” he said in

early 1898, “we shall be on the verge of war with France; I can’t afford to quarrel

with Russia now.”55

With France isolated, the British government could take a very firm stance.

An Anglo-Egyptian army under Lord Kitchener was in the process of reconquering

the Sudan and by mid-September had reached Fashoda. Marchand had arrived

there two months earlier. The British insisted that the French force be withdrawn.

The new French foreign minister, Delcassé, tried to negotiate, but Salisbury would

scarcely throw him a crumb. And on November 3, with their backs to the wall, and

in no position to go to war, the French gave way. Marchand was ordered to

evacuate Fashoda.

The Fashoda crisis is of special interest from the point of view of the audience

costs theory, and indeed to the extent that any historical evidence to given to

support that theory, that support comes largely from an analysis of this episode.56

According to Schultz, Salisbury deliberately “manipulated the popular mood in

55 Quoted in Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, p. 367n. Indeed, “the disunity of France and Russia over the Fashoda crisis,” Robinson and Gallagher say, “seems to show that [Salisbury’s] tactics met with some success.” Ibid., p. 367. Salisbury was evidently willing to incur substantial audience costs in order to achieve that result. After quoting the Salisbury comment just cited in the text, Sanderson (on p. 324 of his book) goes on to say: “The ‘climb-down’ over Port Arthur was bitterly resented by British opinion and cost Salisbury much of his popularity”—and it is hard to believe that Salisbury did not know in advance what the public reaction would be. He might well have calculated that his public standing depended on the success of his policy over the long run, and in any event did not depend on his following public opinion on every issue that came up.56 The section on the crisis in Kenneth Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 175-96, is the most important example. It should be noted, however, that Fearon, on p. 582 of his main on audience costs paper, referred to a handful of cases in which leaders of democratic states were able to generate audience costs, and “Lord Salisbury’s speeches during the Fashoda crisis of 1898” was the first example he cited. Salisbury, however, evidently did not give any important speech on the Upper Nile question during the crisis period—or if he did, it was not considered important enough to be reported in the Times of London, Britain’s most important newspaper during that period, as a search of the Times Digital Archive for “Salisbury” for late 1898 seems to show.

21

order to bolster his bargaining position. By taking advantage of and stoking the

public’s outrage, Salisbury was able to convince the French that he had no leeway

to offer concessions.”57 British leaders, he says, sent signals “designed to arouse

public opinion so that it would be difficult for the government to later back down.”58

The most important step of this sort he took was to release a Blue Book containing

hitherto secret diplomatic documents relating to the affair. The Blue Book, Schultz

writes, “was intended to inflame [Salisbury’s] domestic audience.”59 The French

understood that in taking that step the British government was cutting “itself off

from all retreat” (as their ambassador in London put it). The government would not

survive if it backed down after taking such a clear stance.60 The audience costs

mechanism, the argument runs, thus played a key role in determining how the crisis

ran its course and why it was resolved the way it was.61

But did Salisbury in fact deliberately seek to “stoke the public’s outrage”?

Was that why the Blue Book was published? The conventional view among

historians is that Salisbury personally did not want to draw the line so sharply in

public. But he was not a free agent. Much as he would have liked to conduct policy

without worrying about what was being said in the press, he understood that he

could not ignore public opinion, and it was also obvious to him that the strong

feelings of his colleagues in the Cabinet had to be taken into account.62 The

57 Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 182. 58 Ibid., pp. 186, 190. See also Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” p. 40.59 Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 193. See also Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” pp. 40-41.60 Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” p. 41; Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 189.61 Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, pp. 186-87, 190, 195.62 See, for example, J.A.S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Athlone Press, 1964), p. 218; Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp. 256, 373-374; and Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 400.

22

publication of the Blue Book, as Salisbury himself argued, thus has to be understood

as a defensive act. He had been accused of weakness and his own public needed to

see that he was perfectly able to defend British interests. English opinion, he said,

was “extremely over-excited”; when the facts were made public, he hoped, people

would be able to approach the issue in a more sober way.63 Salisbury thus probably

did not intend to inflame public opinion. His goal, it seems, was not to curtail his

own freedom of action—to deliberately tie his hands in that way—but rather to

safeguard the freedom of action he normally had. But whatever his intentions, the

release of the documents led to a “flood of political oratory” in Britain and the

“vehemence of the speakers” meant that even minor concessions could not now be

made.64

This does not mean, however, that the audience costs mechanism was of

fundamental importance in this affair. The basic Fearon argument was that that

mechanism plays a crucial role because it provides new and compelling information

during a crisis. The idea was that information available before a crisis—information,

for example, about relative military power or about each side’s intrinsic interests—

cannot explain why it ran its course the way it did. Only new information about a

state’s resolve can explain why the crisis ends the way it does.65 So the question

here is whether actions like the release of the Blue Book provided significant new

information about British resolve—or, more precisely, whether such actions had a

major impact on French estimates of Britain’s willingness to go to war over the

issue. And the key point to note here is that the British had made it quite clear to

63 For Salisbury’s explanation for the publication of the Blue Book, see Courcel to Delcassé, October 6, 1898, DDF I:14:633-634, 635. Ambassador Courcel thought that Salisbury’s explanation was correct. See Courcel to Delcassé, October 10, 1898, ibid., p. 651.64 Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 347.65 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 586. See also Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, pp. 177-180.

23

French observers well before the affair reached the crisis stage that a meaningful

French presence in the Nile valley would simply not be tolerated. That policy had

been pursued from 1890 on no matter which party was in power. British warnings

had been unambiguous.66 And French diplomats, well before the affair came to a

head, were under no illusions as to how the British government, and the British

public as well, felt about the subject. As early as 1894, the French chargé in London

reported (in G.N. Sanderson’s paraphrase) that “no British Government, Liberal or

Conservative, will be permitted by public opinion to make serious concessions to

anybody.”67 Ambassador Courcel made a similar point in 1895.68 The strength of

public feeling in Britain, and the firmness of the government’s position, were

certainly quite clear to French diplomats in London in 1898 well before the Blue

Book was published. On September 29, for example, the French chargé referred in

passing to the violent tone of the press in past weeks; instead of blaming the

government for inflaming public opinion, he actually gave it credit for trying to get

the newspapers to take a more sober line. But that moderation was interpreted as

evidence not of the government’s willingness to make concessions, but as an

indicator of its supreme confidence that it would prevail in the crisis; he referred in

this context to the “views expressed on many occasions by the British government

and adopted more or less unanimously as an absolute principle by the English

public.”69 Ambassador Courcel, in fact, had been convinced for some time that the

British government was determined to hold on to Egypt, and public feeling was just 66 See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 403 (for a warning given to the French foreign minister in June 1894); and Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 264 (for an important November 1897 warning). This was the first document published in the Blue Book: “Correspondence with the French Government respecting the Valley of the Upper Nile,” House of Commons Sessional Papers, C.9054 (London: HMSO, 1898). The famous public warning issued in 1895 by Sir Edward Grey (then Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Liberal Rosebery government) appears there as the third document in the appendix.67 Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 209.68 Ibid., pp. 220-221.

24

one part of the picture.70 So as the crisis was brewing, French officials had all the

information they needed—including information from intelligence sources—to assess

the situation accurately.71

The problem was that the authorities in Paris simply refused to believe that

the British would go to war over the issue.72 Even the most important public

warning, the Grey declaration of March 1895, the French foreign minister dismissed

at the time as “not seriously intended”—a point which has a direct bearing on the

audience costs theory.73 France’s leaders could not bring themselves to see the

facts for what they were: in 1898, as A.J.P. Taylor put it, “the French went blindfold

to disaster.”74 It was only during the crisis itself, when the evidence of Britain’s

willingness to go to war became utterly overwhelming and with military action

imminent, that the French gave way. The idea that Salisbury’s hands were tied

played only a minor role in the crisis. Strong public feeling might explain why he

was unable to make even a token concession designed to allow the French to save

face, but this was not the key reason why French leaders concluded that Britain was

not going to give way on fundamentals. A more general picture had taken shape.

Public opinion was certainly one element in that picture. The tough line taken by

political leaders in both parties, and especially by Salisbury’s Cabinet colleagues, 69 Geoffray to Delcassé, September 29, 1898, DDF I:14:601-602. The French representatives in London, in fact, were quite sensitive to what Salisbury was saying, and had no problem interpreting the somewhat oblique allusion he made to the Marchand mission (and to the importance of keeping the Upper Nile in the hands of a friendly power) in a speech he gave in the House of Lords in February 1898. See Courcel to Hanotaux, February 9, 1898, DDF I:14:82-83. The passage appears in the transcript of the speech published in the Times (London), February 9, 1898, p. 8, col. f.70 See, for example, Courcel to Hanotaux, March 27, 1897, quoted in Michel, Mission Marchand, p. 133.71 See Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 73-74.72 See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 462, and Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 361.73 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “Gabriel Hanotaux,” p. 66.74 A.J.P. Taylor review of DDF I:14, in the English Historical Review 74, no. 291 (April 1959), p. 319.

25

also fed into that overall assessment of how far the British were prepared to go in

this affair. But what the French were learning through intelligence channels was

another key element in the equation; in particular, what they were learning about

the military measures the British were taking—above all, the mobilization of the

British fleet on October 28—was a very important indicator. And indeed the news

that the Royal Navy was being put on a war footing in fact proved decisive: it was

this move that led directly to the French decision to evacuate Fashoda.75

But the fact that things had to reach this point before the French drew back—

and even at the peak of the crisis their government was apparently considering a

plan which Courcel viewed as totally insane—suggests that French policy in this

affair is not to be understood in essentially rational terms.76 This, in fact, is the

prevailing view among historians who have studied this episode in some depth.

Behind the policy that had led to the Marchand mission, Sanderson says, “there was

little rational calculation. It rested rather on a quite irrational conviction that a

successful expedition to the Upper Nile must somehow lead to a favourable solution

of the Egyptian question.” Pierre Guillen thinks that the French policy-makers were

appallingly inept and utterly incapable of seeing things for what they were. And

A.S. Kanya-Forstner refers to the “strong current of irrationality running through

French policy” at this time.77

75 See Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 104, 113, 116.76 Geoffray warned Courcel from Paris about what was being considered, and Courcel could scarcely believe what was being contemplated: “Cela me semble de la folie pure, de la folie dangereuse.” Courcel to Geoffray, October 31, 1898, DDF I:14:743-744. See also Sanderson, Upper Nile, pp. 351-352, and Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 115-116.77 Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 391; Guillen, L’Expansion, pp. 461-462; Kanya-Forstner review of the Sanderson book, in the Historical Journal 9, no. 2 (1966), p. 254. See also C. M. Andrew, “The French Colonialist Movement during the Third Republic: The Unofficial Mind of Imperialism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, vol. 26 (1976), esp. pp. 153-154, 161.

26

It is for this reason that a study of the Fashoda crisis does not provide much

support for a “rationalist explanation for war” like the audience costs theory.

Fearon himself put his finger on the problem when he pointed out that if “relative

capabilities or interests” determined outcomes and were accurately assessed, “then

we should not observe crises between rational opponents: if rational, the weaker or

observably less interested state should simply concede the issues without offering

public, costly resistance.” “Crises,” he wrote, “ would occur only when the

disadvantaged side irrationally forgets its inferiority before challenging or choosing

to resist a challenge”—and that was precisely what happened in 1898.78

The Moroccan Crises (1905-1906 and 1911)

During its first two decades, the German empire was a “satiated” state. But

after the fall of Bismarck in 1890 German policy changed dramatically. By the end

of the decade Germany had developed far-reaching imperial ambitions. The goal

now was to become a “world power,” and perhaps even ultimately to displace

Britain as the world’s premier imperial power. The new policy thus had a certain

anti-British cast, which the British were quick to sense.79 Britain was already at

odds with her two traditional imperial rivals, France and Russia, over a whole range

of issues in Asia and Africa, and the emergence of a new German threat deepened

her sense that her resources were overextended and that her old policy of avoiding

commitment was no longer viable. She therefore made an alliance with Japan in

1902 and then entered into negotiations that led to the Anglo-French entente of

1904.80 But the news that the western powers were coming together was for the

78 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 586.79 See especially Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), chap. 13.80 On these developments, see especially George Monger’s wonderful book, The End of Isolation: British Foreign Policy, 1900-1907 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1963).

27

Germans evidence of British hostility; Britain, in fact, was emerging in their eyes as

the arch-enemy. “It cannot be denied,” their emperor said, that England

“underhandedly” was working “to isolate us.”81

The German goal now was to counteract Britain’s “encirclement” policy (as it

was called) by demonstrating to the French that their entente with Britain had

brought them nothing of value. The French, in the 1904 agreement, had recognized

Britain’s preeminent position in Egypt; the British, in exchange, had agreed in

effect that France would have a free hand in Morocco. But the Germans could

prevent France from achieving her goal of transforming Morocco into a French

protectorate. The entente with Britain would be revealed as worthless, and the

French might feel they needed to improve their relationship with Germany, and

perhaps even join with Germany and Russia in a continental bloc directed against

Britain.82

So the Germans took their stand. The emperor went to Tangier in March

1905 and made it clear that Germany supported the independence of Morocco. The

German position was strong, especially in military terms. France’s ally, Russia, was

not doing well in her war with Japan, and indeed that war had led to serious

disturbances at home; the French army was still suffering from the effects of the

Dreyfus affair; and the British Navy could not shield France from a German attack.

The French therefore could not risk a military confrontation with Germany. Their

anti-German foreign minister, Delcassé, was thus forced to resign, and the prime

minister, Rouvier, sought negotiations. But the Germans refused and insisted

instead on convening an international conference which all the major powers

81 Quoted in Norman Rich, Friedrich von Holstein: Politics and Diplomacy in the Era of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 680. 82 See Rich, Holstein, 2:678-745, for a very revealing analysis of German policy in the crisis.

28

(including the United States), and some minor ones as well, would attend,

calculating that the other countries would side with them at the conference. But the

plan backfired. German leaders, and especially the emperor, made it quite clear

that their goal was not war but a better relationship with France; the French

therefore knew they could take a relatively tough line without running any real risk

of a military confrontation.83 And they knew that most of the other powers would

support them even if they took a hard line on the Moroccan question. They were

therefore able to turn the tables on Germany at the conference, and the German

government could scarcely reject the decisions of a conference they themselves had

insisted on convening.84 In March 1906, the Germans in fact decided, as Norman

Rich puts it, “to make whatever concessions were required to settle the Moroccan

crisis in order to prevent the failure of the conference.”85

So despite their favorable military position the Germans ended up suffering a

quite extraordinary diplomatic defeat in 1906, brought on in large part by the policy

choices they themselves had made. But the key point to note here is that they did

not give way because the audience costs mechanism had come into play. It was not

as though they had thought the French were bluffing over Morocco and were

convinced only by strong public statements made by French leaders that France

would not give way in the crisis. That conclusion is scarcely surprising, since the

French were in no position to opt for a strategy of deterrence, and thus had no

interest in adopting tactics designed to enhance the credibility of their deterrent

83 See ibid., esp. pp. 708-710, 718, 722, 724, 726-728 and 741. See also Holstein memorandum, July 31, 1905, in Norman Rich and M.H. Fisher, eds., The Holstein Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 356.84 See Rich, Holstein, esp. pp. 738, 743-744.85 Ibid., p. 740.

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threats. Given the military situation, a more subtle strategy—one that

deemphasized the possibility of armed conflict—was clearly in order.

The agreement worked out at the 1906 conference did not permanently settle

the Moroccan affair. The French were still determined to take over Morocco, and in

the spring of 1911, in pursuit of that policy, they sent a military expedition to the

Moroccan capital of Fez. They had no right to do so under the 1906 agreement and

the Germans responded by sending a gunboat to Agadir in southern Morocco. The

German government was willing to accept what the French were doing in that

country, but demanded compensation. To make sure that the French took that

demand seriously, the Germans felt they needed to “go public”: quiet diplomatic

efforts, they were convinced, would be futile.86 The German government did not

want a war, but the German foreign secretary, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, the

main architect of German policy in the 1911 crisis, felt that Germany could achieve

her goals only if her adversaries felt she was willing to go all the way.87

By way of compensation the Germans asked for the whole French Congo; the

French thought that they were asking for far too much. The British agreed and

worried about the broader implications of the German move. As the foreign

secretary, Sir Edward Grey, put it: Britain could not go to war to “put France in

virtual possession of Morocco,” but an “attempt by Germany to humiliate France

might affect British interests so seriously that we should have to resist it.”88 David

86 See Jean-Claude Allain, Agadir 1911: Une crise impérialiste en Europe pour la conquête du Maroc (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1976), p. 325.87 See Kiderlen to Bethmann, July 17, 1911, quoted in Emily Oncken, Panthersprung nach Agadir: Die deutsche Politik während der Zweiten Marokkokrise 1911 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1981), p. 283. For the point that the German leadership wanted to avoid war and had simply adopted a bluff strategy, see ibid., p. 421. 88 Grey to Bertie, July 20, 1911, in G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley, eds., British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 (London: HMSO, 1926-38), vol. 7, p. 382. Henceforth this source will be cited in the form: BD 7:382. See also Crowe minute, July 18, 1911, and Nicolson minutes, n.d. and July 21, 1911, in ibid., pp. 372, 373, 386.

30

Lloyd George, a key member of the Liberal government, after first getting the green

light from Grey, issued a public warning to Germany in his famous Mansion House

speech of July 21, 1911. Lloyd George’s goal was “to make it clear that if Germany

meant war, she would find Britain against her.”89 Germany, he suggested in that

speech, was treating Britain “as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of

Nations”; “peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country

like ours to endure.” The Germans were furious. Hadn’t they been ignored as the

French pushed ahead in Morocco? Weren’t they the ones who had been treated as

they had been “of no account” in this affair?90 But the British threat could not be

ignored. The emperor and the chancellor very much wanted to avoid war, and again

essentially gave way in the crisis.91

What does this story tell us about the audience costs theory? It is quite clear,

first of all, that Kiderlen sought, in at least a limited way, to exploit the audience

costs mechanism. One distinguished historian claims that “Kiderlen-Wächter tried

to strengthen Germany’s bargaining position by mobilizing public opinion behind

the German cause, deliberately inflaming nationalist passions with all the means at

his disposal.”92 That view is probably too extreme, but Kiderlen certainly did try to

stir up opinion at home.93 This, however, did not turn out to be a wise strategy.

Nationalist feeling was aroused during the crisis and the government ended up

89 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1914 (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), p. 43.90 See Kiderlen to Metternich, July 24 and 25, 1911, Grosse Politik, 29:211 and 212; and Grey to Goschen, July 25, 1911, BD 7: 398.91 See Geoffrey Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon: Anatomy of a Crisis (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 134; and Oncken, Panthersprung, pp. 292, 294-295, 421.92 Wolfgang Mommsen, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in Wilhelmine Germany, 1897-1914,” in Wolfgang Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 1867-1918: Politics, Culture and Society in an Authoritarian State (London: Arnold, 1995), p. 196. See also Klaus Wernecke, Der Wille zur Weltgeltung: Aussenpolitik und Öffentlichkeit im Kaiserreich am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1970), esp. pp. 29-31.93 See Oncken, Panthersprung, pp. 332-350, esp. p. 340.

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paying a huge political price for what was seen as its willingness to accept a

humiliating defeat.94 And Germany’s leaders learned an important lesson: these

sorts of pressures could not be turned on and off like a faucet; they might get out of

hand and could limit their own freedom of action in very unpalatable ways.95

Governments might in principle be able to get a certain bargaining advantage by

exploiting the audience costs mechanism, but that tactic can be quite risky, and is

thus not nearly as attractive to statesmen as audience costs theorists sometimes

suggest.

Lloyd George’s Mansion House speech is also of particular interest from the

point of view of the audience costs theory, since it is clear that the speech had a

major bearing on how the crisis was resolved.96 The speech, however, was no mere

bargaining ploy: British leaders were not trying to tie their own hands by creating a

situation where retreat was impossible for domestic political reasons. The goal was

simply to make it clear that they were willing to go to war if Germany asked for too 94 Paul Kennedy refers to a “veritable explosion of disgust within the German Right at the ‘cowardice’ of the government” and Mommsen goes even further: “The domestic political situation ran completely out of control, and the government found itself being vehemently attacked from almost all political quarters for what was seen as its feebleness.” Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, p. 447 and p. 367, and Mommsen, Imperial Germany, p. 176. See also Goschen to Grey, August 6 and 8, 1911, in BD 7:438-439, 443-444.95 See Mommsen, Imperial Germany, pp. 192-195, and Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich: Deutsche Aussenpolitik von Bismarck zu Hitler, 1871-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1995), p. 263. Note also a well-known passage from a book which Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s advisor Kurt Riezler published under pseudonym J.J. Ruedorffer on the eve of World War I: Grundzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1914), p. 222. Riezler in that passage talked about how a government that tries to bluff its way through a crisis might not be able to back down, even when it would be wise for it to do so; it might be trapped by the domestic political pressures and expectations its own policy had generated: “the danger of war in our time lies in the domestic politics of those countries in which a weak government is faced with a strong nationalist movement.” An English translation of the passage is given in Wayne Thompson, In the Eye of the Storm: Kurt Riezler and the Crises of Modern Germany (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), p. 63. On the role of this sort of thinking in the July Crisis, see Andreas Hillgruber, “Riezlers Theorie des kalkulierten Risikos und Bethmann Hollwegs politische Konzeption in der Julikrise 1914,” Historische Zeitschrift 202, no. 2 (April 1966), esp. p. 339.96 It is in fact one of a small number of cases Fearon refers to in his article on the subject. See Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 582.

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much—and indeed Lloyd George personally, despite his reputation as a moderate,

was amazingly bellicose at the time.97 And it was that policy—a policy which they

knew the government was quite capable of carrying out—that the Germans were

reacting to. The idea that the British government could not draw back now for fear

of paying a domestic political price does not appear to have entered their

calculations.

This does not mean that the Germans failed to understand the political

situation in Britain. Indeed, the British government did not have a domestic

political incentive to hold to the hard line symbolized by the Mansion House speech.

Quite the contrary: the government did back off from that policy, in large part

because it understood it would have paid a price if it had not done so. Many

Liberals, especially in Lloyd George’s own wing of the party, were happy neither

with the speech nor with the general policy it represented. Grey, as one historian

put it, “found himself at the centre of an angry debate within the Liberal Party about

foreign affairs which threatened to undermine the foundations of his foreign policy,

and, indeed, to drive him from office.” The Mansion House speech was a key count

in the critics’ indictment of the government’s policy during the crisis. And by the

97 In August, Arthur Nicolson, a high official in the Foreign Office, described Lloyd George (and his close colleague Winston Churchill as well) as “a little disappointed that war with Germany did not occur.” He was struck by “their belief that the present moment was an exceedingly favourable one to open hostilities.” The following month Lloyd George told a top military officer that he was “quite in favor of war now” and told the king (in Churchill’s words) “that it would be a great pity if war did not come now.” He made much the same point in a conversation with Arthur Balfour. See Nicolson to Hardinge, August 17, 1911, quoted in M.L. Dockrill, “David Lloyd George and Foreign Policy before 1914,” in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Lloyd George: Twelve Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), p. 19; Churchill to his wife, September 24, 1911, quoted in Michael Fry, Lloyd George and Foreign Policy, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), p. 148; Wilson diary entry for September 12, 1911, quoted in Bentley Gilbert, “Pacifist to Interventionist: David Lloyd George in 1911 and 1914: Was Belgium an Issue?” Historical Journal 28, no. 4 (December 1985), p. 874; and Austen Chamberlain’s account of a conversation with Balfour, October 23, 1911, in Austen Chamberlain, Politics from Inside: An Epistolary Chronicle, 1906-1914 (London: Cassell, 1936), p. 363. It is not hard to imagine what historians in the Fischer school would have said if it had been discovered that a German leader of equivalent political importance had been making comments of this sort. But even Kiderlen never went that far.

33

end of the year, in part as a result of that criticism, Grey had changed course and

was now trying, cautiously, to improve relations with Germany.98

But even if the Germans had understood at the time the speech was given

that the British government would not have to pay a major political price if it

softened its policy, it is by no means clear that they would have inferred from that

that the British were bluffing—that because no audience costs would be incurred,

British threats would not have to be taken seriously. Indeed, the Germans in such

circumstances could have made exactly the opposite calculation. They could have

said that the fact that British leaders were prepared to alienate their own political

base and put their own political survival at risk showed that their threats could not

be dismissed as mere bluff—that the fact that they were willing to pay that sort of

price showed how important the issue was to them and that they would probably go

to war if Germany went too far. Costly signaling would still be a major factor here,

but in this case it would be actual rather than potential costs that would play the

key role in communicating resolve.99

98 M.L. Dockrill, “British Policy during the Agadir Crisis of 1911,” in F.H. Hinsley, ed., British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 286 (for the quotation). See also Dockrill, “David Lloyd George and Foreign Policy before 1914,” pp. 17-18; John A. Murray, “Foreign Policy Debated: Sir Edward Grey and His Critics, 1911-1912” in Lillian Wallace and William Askew, eds., Power, Public Opinion, and Diplomacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1959); Gilbert, “Pacifist to Interventionist,” pp. 868-870; and, for some additional evidence relating to Grey’s concerns about domestic opinion and the consequent need to appear conciliatory, Cambon to de Selves, September 5 and 6, 1911, DDF II:14:347, 357-358.99 Indeed, to make this kind of argument there was no need to take British domestic politics into account at all. The mere fact that the British were prepared to alienate the Germans—both the government and the nation as a whole—meant that they were willing to pay a big price in power political terms, and that in itself would be evidence of their seriousness in the crisis. Fearon, incidentally, notes the distinction between the two kinds of costly signals, and says explicitly that “the costs that make signaling informative” in his model “differ somewhat from the ‘classical’ costly signals of Spence. In the classical case, the act of sending the signal is itself costly, whereas here [in Fearon’s model] it is the act of backing down after it has been sent that is costly.” James Fearon, “Signaling versus the Balance of Power and Interests: An Empirical Test of a Crisis Bargaining Model,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, no. 2 (June 1994), p. 243 n4. Zahavi (see n. 1) was also thinking in terms of costs that are actually paid, not of costs that might have to be paid if the signaler had been bluffing.

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The Early Cold War: The Turkish and Iranian Crises (1946) and the Berlin Blockade

(1948-49)

In the summer of 1945, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pinned a map showing

the USSR’s new borders to a wall. He liked what he saw in the Baltic area, his

foreign minister at the time later recalled, and in the Far East as well. But then,

“stabbing a finger at the southern Caucasus, he exclaimed, ‘But here is where I

don’t like our frontiers.”100 And this was not just talk. By late 1945, the Soviets

were promoting the establishment of “friendly” regimes in the part of Iran their

armies controlled. They had agreed to pull their forces out of that country within six

months of the end of the war, but it was clear in early 1946 that they would not be

out by that March 2 deadline. Instead the level of Soviet aggressiveness was

ratcheted up, and what they were doing was major news in the New York Times:

“Heavy Russian Columns Move West in Iran,” the main March 13 headline ran;

“Soviet Tanks Approach Teheran” was headline news the next day.

The U.S. government, which up to that point had not committed itself to the

defense of that area, decided to take a tough line. On March 7, after being briefed

about Soviet military movements in that country, Secretary of State James Byrnes,

“beating one fist into the other,” remarked: “Now we’ll give it to them with both

barrels.”101 President Truman thought the situation might lead to war.102 The U.S.

government made it clear to the Soviets, through both public and private channels,

100 From Sto sorok besed s Molotovym: Iz dnevnika F. Chuyeva [One Hundred Forty Conversations with Molotov: From the Diary of F. Chuyev] (Moscow: Terra, 1991), p. 14, quoted in Woodford McClellan, “Molotov Remembers,” Cold War International History Project [CWIHP] Bulletin, issue 1 (Spring 1992), p. 17.101 Edwin Wright, “Events relative to the Azerbaijan Issue—March 1946,” August 16, 1965, quoted in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS] 1946, 7:347.102 See W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 550.

35

that they expected them to keep their promises and withdraw their troops from

Iran.103 The Iranians, with strong U.S. backing, brought up the issue in the United

Nations Security Council. The Americans at this time placed great emphasis on the

U.N., and Secretary Byrnes stated explicitly on March 16 that “should the occasion

arise, our military strength will be used to support the purposes and principles of

the Charter.”104 The Soviets then began to back off, first announcing on March 24,

right before the Security Council was due to meet, “their willingness to withdraw

troops from Iran within five to six weeks ‘if nothing unforeseen should take place’”;

then reaching an agreement with Iran on April 4 that the withdrawal would be

completed by early May; and finally, on April 14, giving “assurances that evacuation

would be completed unconditionally by May 6.” “There is no doubt,” as one scholar

writes, that that shift in Soviet policy was “induced by the continuous pressure of

the Truman administration.”105 Stalin himself certainly understood why the Soviets 103 U.S. Note to Soviet Government, March 6, 1946, Department of State Bulletin [DOSB] 14, no. 350 (March 17, 1946), pp. 435-436; Kuross A. Samii, “Truman against Stalin in Iran: A Tale of Three Messages,” Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 1 (January 1987), pp. 98-103; “U.S. Accuses Soviet of Violating Word by Staying in Iran,” New York Times, March 8, 1946, p. 1, and “Russian Situation Moves toward Showdown,” ibid., March 10, 1946, p. E3.104 James Byrnes, “United States Military Strength—Its Relation to the United Nations and World Peace,” in DOSB 14, no. 351 (March 24, 1946), p. 483. See also Byrnes’s February 28 address to the Overseas Press Club, “. . . we have pinned our hopes to the banner of the United Nations,” DOSB 14, no. 349 (March 10, 1946), esp. p. 358, a speech which (according to the report in the New York Times two days later) “electrified” the British. On the policy of emphasizing the U.N., see Samii, “Truman against Stalin,” p. 100, and Eduard Mark, “The War Scare of 1946 and its Consequences,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 3 (Summer 1997), p. 400.105 Samii, “Truman against Stalin,” p. 100. Other writers have taken a very different view, denying that American pressure had much to do with the outcome of the crisis. Samii refers to two such works; see ibid., p. 96. Note also McGeorge Bundy, “The Unimpressive Record of Atomic Diplomacy,” in Robert Art and Kenneth Waltz, eds., The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), p. 101. Stalin pulled back, Bundy argues, not because of any American threats—there were none, in his view—but because “he found the Iranian government firm but not belligerent, his Iranian supporters weak, and the rest of the watching world critical.” In support of this he cites Bruce Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey and Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 304-337. The Kuniholm book is in fact the most important scholarly study of the subject, but Kuniholm’s take is rather different from Bundy’s. “Ultimately what counted,” Kuniholm writes, “—even more than the United Nations—was a desire by the United States to take a

36

had decided to pull their forces out of Iran. As he told an Azerbaijani Communist

leader who had played a key role in carrying out Stalin’s policy in northern Iran

when he phoned him to explain the decision: “we cannot start a new war.”106

The USSR during this period was also putting pressure on Turkey. Stalin

clearly had his sights set on getting control of the Turkish Straits. In late 1945, as

Soviet pressure on Turkey began to build, Truman felt he could not do anything

about what was going on there. But by January 1946 his attitude had hardened:

“There isn’t a doubt in my mind that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and the

seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean. Unless Russia is faced with

an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making.”107 There were

growing indications—troop movements, a propaganda campaign, and so on—that

the USSR might move against Turkey, and when in August the Soviets sent that

country a note calling for a joint defense of the Straits, the U.S. government felt it

had to make some fundamental decisions. Truman and his top advisors thought the

only thing that could deter the Russians was the conviction that America was

“prepared, if necessary, to meet aggression with force of arms.”108 An American

naval force was soon sent to the eastern Mediterranean, and again the Soviets

pulled back—in part because they had learned through intelligence channels just

how far the U.S. government was prepared to go.109

firm stand on issues it believed important, and a willingness to support that stand with military power if necessary” (pp. 303-304).106 Georges Mamoulia, “Les crises turque et iranienne 1945-1947: L’apport des archives caucasiennes,” Cahiers du monde russe 45, no. 1/2 (January-June 2004), p. 281.107 Truman to Byrnes (unsent), January 5, 1946, in Monte Poen, ed., Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Letters Harry Truman Never Mailed (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), p. 40.108 Acheson to Byrnes, August 15, 1946, and Acheson-Inverchapel meeting, August 20, 1946, FRUS 1946, 7:840-842, 849-850; and Mark, “War Scare of 1946,” pp. 383, 399-400.109 Mark, “War Scare of 1946,” pp. 387, 401, 408; and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 93.

37

The Near Eastern crises of 1946, however, had a lasting effect, and in fact

played a key role in triggering the Cold War. The main lesson U.S. leaders drew

from those crises was that Europe could not be divided in a more or less friendly

way: there had to be an effective counterweight to Soviet power in Europe; opinion

had to be mobilized at home and western Germany had to be drawn into the western

bloc. But that whole policy of “organizing” the western part of Germany

economically, politically, and ultimately militarily, and integrating it into the

western world—and the policy of winning the Germans over by pointing to the

Soviets as the great enemies of German unity—was bound to be a source of deep

concern in Moscow. So when the western powers decided to move ahead with the

establishment of a west German state, it was natural that the USSR would react. If

western Germany was being “organized” not just without them but against them,

that might lead to very serious problems in the long run. It would be best to nip

them in the bud, by getting the western powers to rethink their German policy and

work out some sort of solution the Soviets could live with. But how could they be

made to do that? Berlin, a land island in the middle of the Soviet zone of Germany,

half of which was garrisoned by the western powers—was the obvious lever. So

when the western governments reached a formal agreement at the beginning of

June 1948 setting up a process that would lead to the establishment of a west

German state, the Soviets responded three weeks later by cutting off surface

communication between Berlin and western Germany.

The U.S. government announced that it would “not be coerced or intimidated

in any way,” and “as a further indication of our firmness” (as Secretary of State

George Marshall told the National Security Council at the time) sent 60 B-29

38

bombers to Britain.110 Its actual policy, however, was fairly moderate. It set up an

airlift to supply the western sectors of the city, but was very reluctant to take

military action if the Soviets interfered with it. Truman, for example, was not

prepared even to shoot down barrage balloons, for fear of starting a war for which

America “did not have enough soldiers.”111 Nor were the Soviets, for their part,

particularly confrontational. They did even not take even non-military measures

(like jamming radars) that could have compromised the effectiveness of the airlift.

Indeed, they continued to work with western representatives at the Berlin Air Safety

Center in managing air traffic around the city.112 Stalin’s goal, as he himself said,

was not to drive the western powers out of Berlin, but to reach a political

understanding with them on the German question. So he went out of his way to

emphasize the common interests of the four victor powers in this area. “After all,”

he told the U.S. ambassador in Moscow on August 2, “we are still Allies.”113 And

each side understood that the other was not especially bellicose.114 To be sure, as 110 Marshall press conference, quoted in Avi Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948-1949: A Study in Crisis Decision-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 252; notes of July 16, 1948, NSC meeting, Declassified Documents Reference System [DDRS], document CK3100454446. Contrary to what is sometimes said, these B-29’s were not nuclear-capable bombers. See Ken Young, “U.S. ‘Atomic Capability’ and the British Forward Bases in the Early Cold War,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (January 2007), pp. 124-125, and Avi Shlaim, “Britain, the Berlin Blockade and the Cold War,” International Affairs 60, no. 1 (Winter 1983-84), p. 9.111 Samuel Williamson and Steven Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1953 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), p. 87.112 Richard Kohn and Joseph Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal and Jack J. Catton (Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1988), pp. 85-86, and Ann and John Tusa, The Berlin Blockade (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), p. 274.113 Walter Bedell Smith, My Three Years in Moscow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950), p. 244. See also Bedell Smith to Marshall, August 3, 1948, FRUS 1948, 2:999-1006.114 See Mikhail Narinsky, “Soviet Policy and the Berlin Blockade 1948,” unpublished paper presented at a 1994 conference in Essen, p. 13: “No matter how sharp the international-political crisis around Berlin was, its participants believed that none of the sides wished it to develop into an armed conflict.” Quoted in Elke Scherstjanoi, “Die Berlin-Blockade 1948/49 im sowjetischen Kalkül,” Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft 46, no. 6 (1998), p. 500n. The Soviets, as the Americans understood, were certainly not making any serious military preparations. See Victor Gobarev, “Soviet Military Plans and Activities during the Berlin

39

long as the blockade lasted, there was a certain sense that things might get out of

hand and that an armed conflict was not entirely out of the question. But, looking

back, the risk of war, after the first few weeks especially, does not seem particularly

great, and the crisis limped along until an agreement was reached and the blockade

was lifted in early 1949.115

What role did the audience costs mechanism play in these episodes? That

question is easiest to answer for the case of the Turkish crisis: it clearly did not play

a significant role in this affair. U.S. leaders made a point of playing down the

importance of what the Soviets were doing with Turkey. As Eduard Mark pointed

out, in what is by far the best scholarly study of the crisis: “There were few public

announcements, and cautious efforts to mobilize public opinion had scarcely begun

before the acute phase of the crisis suddenly ended.”116 What was crucial in

determining the way the crisis was resolved, according to Mark, was not what was

said in public, but rather what the Soviets were learning through secret channels—

above all, the reports they were getting about the U.S. attitude from their spy

Donald Maclean, a British diplomat then based in Washington. Maclean had been

given the job of seeing “how far the West would go” in this area; he reported that

Truman would “never abandon Turkey,” and as a result “Stalin back-pedaled.” 117

Crisis 1948-1949,” also presented at that 1994 conference, and also cited in Scherstjanoi, “Berlin-Blockade,” p. 500; and, for U.S. assessments of Soviet policy at the time, John Barlow, “A Guiding Hand? The CIA and Foreign Policymaking in the Early Cold War,” Ph. D. dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2009 (https://www.barlowlink.com/web_documents/A_Guiding_Hand.pdf), pp. 2, 164, 168, 170, and David Murphy, Sergei Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 3, which also has some information on Soviet intelligence operations in the West at the time.115 One scholar in fact writes that the July 22 decision to rule out an armed convoy and rely instead on diplomacy and the airlift “marked the end of the crisis period.” Shlaim, Berlin Blockade, p. 269.116 Mark, “War Scare of 1946,” pp. 386 (esp. n. 8) and 404. 117 Ibid., pp. 387, 401, 408.

40

Perhaps there was more to it than that. After all, the British were told about

Truman’s decision to go to war if necessary very soon after it was made in mid-

August, and it was only in late September that the Soviets “abruptly turned

conciliatory.” But even if other factors came into play, the key point to note is that

the audience costs mechanism was not a major factor here.

The Iran crisis, on the other hand, was played out in full public view, but that

in itself does not mean that audience costs were a major factor in this case. Perhaps

the U.S. government “went public” mainly to mobilize support for its policy;

perhaps it did so with an eye to scoring points at home by taking a tough line.

Allowing the crisis to play out in public, moreover, could put pressure on the Soviets

in various ways—for example, by making it clear to them that they would pay a price

with American opinion, and with world opinion more generally, if they did not back

off. But the idea that the Soviets would pay a price with American opinion if they

continued is very different from the idea that the U.S. government would incur costs

with the same audience if it backed down. And there is no evidence that U.S.

leaders had any interest in tying their own hands for bargaining purposes, let alone

that they sought to do so by exploiting the audience costs mechanism.

Did the Soviets, however, calculate that U.S. leaders had taken such a strong

stand in public that they could not back down without paying a big price at home,

and was it this that led them to end the crisis? We still do not have anything like the

sort of evidence on Soviet policy-making in this affair that we have for the American

side, but it seems quite unlikely that the Soviet leadership was thinking in those

terms. The more sophisticated members of the Soviet establishment—people like

Maxim Litvinov, for example—understood how important public opinion was in

41

America.118 But the Soviet leadership took a different view: public opinion was not

nearly as important as U.S. leaders claimed; their emphasis on public opinion as a

factor the U.S. government needed to, and the Soviets ought to, take into account

was somewhat disingenuous, and indeed was essentially an argument they liked to

hide behind.

That was certainly the impression of U.S. officials who dealt directly with

Soviet affairs at the time. “Almost all of our people who have dealt with the

Russians,” one State Department officer noted in early 1945, believed that “the high

Soviet officials who are responsible for the formulation of policy do not appreciate

the importance of public opinion in a democracy nor the importance of the press in

the formation of public opinion.”119 The U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Averell

Harriman, had made the same point a few months earlier: he did not feel that the

argument about public opinion carried “any particular weight with the Soviet

Government.”120

The Soviets, in fact, seemed irritated when American officials made that

argument. Harry Hopkins, during his famous meeting with Stalin in May 1945,

spoke at length about American public opinion; the way it had shifted against the

USSR in recent months, he said, was a great source of concern. But Stalin was

dismissive to the point of rudeness. In replying to Hopkins, he said, “he would not

attempt to use Soviet public opinion as a screen.” His anger had gotten the better

of him, and he actually later apologized to Hopkins, but it is clear that he felt the

American attitude had changed and that the U.S. government was just using these

118 Vladimir Pechatnov, “The Big Three after World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post-war Relations with the United States and Great Britain,” CWIHP Working Paper no. 13 (1995), p. 11.119 Llewellyn Thompson to Dunn, February 3, 1945, FRUS 1945, 5:814.120 Harriman to Secretary of State, August 21, 1944, FRUS 1944 4:1183.

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arguments about public opinion as a figleaf.121 Soviet officials in general did not

believe that the criticism of the USSR found in the American press was to be take at

face value. “The primary goal of this anti-Soviet campaign of American ‘public

opinion,’” the Soviet ambassador in Washington wrote in 1946, “consists of exerting

political pressure on the Soviet Union and forcing it to make concessions.”122 The

scare quotes are quite revealing: the Soviet government felt it could see through

what the Americans were doing; the Americans’ argument that their hands were

tied by their own domestic opinion was not taken at face value. One has the sense,

in fact, that in analyzing U.S. policy, the basic Soviet view was that the

government’s policy was crucial—that the press could be guided, that domestic

political pressures in America could be finessed, that “public opinion” was not a

major independent factor the government had to contend with, but was rather

something that could be manipulated for instrumental purposes. It is thus not likely

that Stalin thought that the U.S. government’s public statements were of

fundamental importance—that he calculated that the Americans could not pull back

in the Iran crisis because of the domestic political price the administration would

have to pay if it did so—and that this was the crucial factor that led him to give way

in that affair.

The basic point here—that the audience costs mechanism was not a major

factor in the Iran crisis—is also supported by a comparison of this episode with the

Turkish crisis of the same year. Those two Near Eastern crises—so similar in many

respects, but differing basically in that in one the administration “went public” in a

121 Stalin-Hopkins meetings, May 26 and 27, 1945, FRUS: The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference) 1945, 1:26-28, 32 (for the quotation), 37 (for the apology).122 Novikov to the Soviet leadership, September 27, 1946, on CWIHP website. That Soviet view, I should note, was by no means totally absurd. Fraser Harbutt has argued that the U.S. government did, in fact, seek to manipulate U.S. opinion in order to put pressure on the Soviets, and I personally find that argument persuasive. See n. 198 below.

43

major way while in the other it did not—provide us with as close to a controlled

experiment as we ever get in international relations. And that simple comparison

strongly suggests that audience costs were not a major factor, and that other

factors, common to the two crises, played the key role in determining the very

similar way in which those conflicts were resolved.

Do these points about the unimportance of audience costs also apply to the

third case examined in this section, the Berlin Blockade affair of 1948? The

administration, one might think, might have been particularly tempted to exploit the

audience costs mechanism in this case. The presidential election was only a few

months away, and the public took a relatively tough line when the blockade was

instituted: the price U.S. leaders would have to pay for backing off from a firm

stance would be unusually high. The administration, moreover, had a domestic

political interest in taking a hard line. In a document which, according to one

historian, was to serve as the “blueprint for Truman’s campaign in 1948,” Clark

Clifford argued that (short of war) “the worse matters” got and the more there was

“a sense of crisis,” the better off Truman would be, because “in times of crisis the

American citizen tends to back up his President.”123 But still the administration’s

rhetoric was fairly mild during this affair, mainly because of its sense for American

military weakness at the time.124 It was not interested in taking advantage of the

audience costs mechanism to make its threats credible, since the basic tactic of

threat-making was not particularly appealing at this point.

But the key question here has to do with Soviet calculations in 1948. Was it

the case that prior to the imposition of the blockade, the Soviets thought they could 123 Clifford to Truman, November 19, 1947, quoted in Robert Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (June 1972), p. 93. Divine’s own comment about this becoming the “blueprint” for the campaign is on the same page.124 See Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 87, 90.

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push the western powers out of Berlin, and pulled back only after the U.S.

government had taken a firm line in public, calculating that it would be hard for

American leaders to give way, given the price they would have to pay at home for

doing so? It turns out that there is some evidence to the effect that the Soviets

understood, before the blockade, that many western officials were thinking in terms

of an eventual withdrawal from the city, and it might well have come as a surprise to

them that the western reaction was as firm as it was.125 But the American position

in the crisis was not rock solid—the U.S. government had not decided that if

necessary it would go to war over the issue—and the Soviets probably had a good

sense for what U.S. policy was.126 Given what they knew, there was no reason, for

example, to think that the western powers would use force if they made the airlift

impossible by jamming the radars guiding the planes flying into the city. The fact

that they did not go that route—that they did not even experiment with such tactics

—suggests that their real goal was not to push the western powers out of Berlin, but

rather to pull them back into negotiations on Germany as a whole.

But if that was the case, the sorts of statements the Americans made about

how the United States “would not be coerced” into abandoning Berlin would

scarcely have led the Soviets to change their strategy. It was in fact America’s

reluctance to withdraw form Berlin under Soviet pressure that gave the Russians

the leverage they needed if they were to achieve their political goals. For that

reason, if for no other, the audience costs mechanism was not a major factor in

1948.

The Berlin and Cuban Crises (1958-1962)125 Scherstjanoi, in “Berlin-Blockade” (p. 499) summarizes some conclusions William Stivers reached in an unpublished paper dealing with this issue presented at a conference in Berlin in 1998. See also Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 81-82.126 See Scherstjanoi, “Berlin-Blockade,” p. 500.

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As the Soviet Union developed its military power in the 1950s, many people in

western Europe wondered whether they could rely forever on the United States to

protect them. Would America be willing to go to war for the sake of her NATO allies

once U.S. cities were vulnerable to Soviet attack? But if the Europeans were to

become less dependent on the United States, and perhaps ultimately able to defend

themselves, they needed to build nuclear forces of their own. There was no way

western Europe could stand up to a great nuclear power like the USSR armed only

with conventional weapons.

This logic applied in particular to West Germany. The German chancellor in

the 1950s, Konrad Adenauer, certainly thought his country needed nuclear

weapons.127 The American president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, sympathized

with those European concerns, and unlike many of his subordinates did not even

object to the idea of a nuclear-armed Federal Republic.128 But a strong Germany—a

Germany that would not be dependent on America for her security and would

therefore not be locked into a status quo policy—was a real danger to the USSR. In

the mid-1950s, the Soviets tried to head off this possibility by pushing plans for a

nuclear-free zone in central Europe. When those efforts failed, they felt they needed

to use stronger tactics. “What finally impelled” the Soviet leader, Nikita

Khrushchev, “to resort to what today might be called shock therapy,” Oleg

Troyanovsky, his assistant for international affairs at the time, later wrote, “was

information from various sources that serious discussions were proceeding within

the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and, in particular, between the United States

127 See Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 231-237. The discussion in this section is based largely on chapters seven and eight in that book.128 Ibid., chap. 5 and especially pp. 261-262.

46

and West Germany, regarding the possibility of the Bundeswehr’s being granted

access to atomic weapons in one form or another.”129

By provoking a Berlin crisis, the Soviets would force the western powers to

take their concerns seriously. So in November 1958, Khrushchev declared that he

was going to sign a “peace treaty” with East Germany and that when it was signed

the rights of the western powers in Berlin would be terminated. He would,

however, give the western powers six months to negotiate a settlement that would

make West Berlin a “free city.” If they refused to go along with the plan and tried to

maintain their position through military means, the Soviet Union would “rise in

defense” of its East German ally. The Soviets were thus threatening war; the

Eisenhower government was not going to capitulate to those demands; people thus

felt there was a certain risk of war. But Khrushchev was never prepared to risk a

real military showdown with the West.130 When the U.S. attitude became clear to

the Soviet leader in 1959, he in effect shelved the crisis. But when John Kennedy

took over as president in 1961, Khrushchev again threatened to sign a “peace

treaty” with East Germany that would end western rights in Berlin. If the western

powers used force to maintain those rights, he told Kennedy, that would be

“regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression against a peace loving country,

with all the consequences ensuing therefrom.”131 Again Khrushchev was in effect

threatening war. And again he was bluffing. As Anatoly Dobrynin, who was to serve

129 Oleg Troyanovsky, “The Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 217, and Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 251-256.130 Troyanovsky, “Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” p. 237.131 Kennedy-Khrushchev meetings, June 4, 1961, FRUS 1961-63, 14:87-98; the quotation is on pp. 90-91.

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for years as Soviet ambassador in Washington, later wrote, “the possibility of a

military confrontation” was “absolutely excluded from our plans.”132

But the Americans were worried and felt they had to prepare for a showdown.

Kennedy gave an important televised speech to the nation on July 25, 1961,

stressing America’s resolve and outlining various steps that would be taken to

strengthen the country’s military position. Now it was Khrushchev’s turn to be

alarmed. He had earlier ruled out the idea of sealing the border between the two

parts of Berlin because he had wanted to keep the Berlin issue alive. Now, however,

he authorized the construction of the Berlin Wall. But as the Americans saw it, that

did not mean that the USSR was willing to live with things as they were—that is,

that it was prepared to accept a divided Berlin, with the western part of the city

under the military protection of the western powers. Instead, they saw the building

of the wall as an aggressive act that might foreshadow further aggressive acts; to

avoid a confrontation they now pressed for negotiations, making it clear that they

were willing to make major concessions, relating above all to the status of the East

German regime. In his July speech, the president had said that America could not

“negotiate with those who say ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.’”

But, given that the Soviet position on Berlin was as rigid as ever, that was exactly

what he was now proposing to do. The “audience” at home, however, did not seem

to mind that shift in policy; the administration was certainly not raked over the

coals in the press for having moderated its position.133

132 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962-1986) (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 45.133 Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 322-329. The phrase about “what’s mine is mine” (which had been proposed by the famous broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, then head of the U.S. Information Agency) was in fact used a lot at the time, but mainly by people who wanted to criticize the Soviets for their intransigence. People understood that Kennedy had backed down from the attitude that phrase had come to stand for, but did not really hold it against him. A Washington Post editorial of October 11, 1961, captured what seems to have been the prevailing view: “President Kennedy, in his TV report to the Nation last July,

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The American goal was to stabilize the status quo, not just in Berlin but in

Europe as a whole. In the U.S. plan, West Germany would remain non-nuclear. The

Soviets would thus be getting the one thing they most wanted from the West. In

exchange the USSR would have to accept the status quo in Berlin. But that was

something Khrushchev was not prepared to do. The fact that the Americans had

gone so far so quickly showed how determined they were to avoid war. Maybe that

fear of war could be exploited to draw out further concessions? So in late 1961 and

through most of 1962 the Soviets were utterly intransigent in their talks with the

Americans. The U.S. attitude then hardened. It was coming to seem that a

showdown over Berlin was just a question of time. Khrushchev made it fairly clear

that he would do nothing before the American mid-term elections in November, but

would then bring the crisis to a head. Kennedy by the late summer of 1962 had thus

come to accept a showdown as inevitable. Indeed, in his view, given the way the

nuclear balance was shifting, the sooner the West had it out with the Soviets the

better.134

The climax of the crisis, as it turned out, came not in Berlin but in Cuba. It

was discovered that the Soviets were deploying missiles on the island, perhaps to

improve their position for a showdown over Berlin. The Americans reacted by

insisting in a very public way that the Soviets remove their missiles from Cuba. To

give point to those demands, the island was blockaded and U.S. forces (and

especially the Strategic Air Command) were put on alert. For the Soviets, a real

warned that ‘We cannot negotiate with those who say “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.’” That is, nonetheless, precisely what Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was saying in London Tuesday. . . . If the President now stood on his July position, he would be justified; but the search for some balancing adjustments and concessions in Berlin itself, or within the larger framework of a European settlement must go on, no matter how difficult and discouraging.”134 Ibid., pp. 325-351, and, for the point about the nuclear balance, pp. 351 and 353. On the point about postponing the crisis until after the elections, see also Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 458, 462.

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military confrontation was still totally out of the question. With a U.S. invasion of

Cuba imminent, and with the Soviets being told that the “time of reckoning had

arrived,” they agreed to settle the crisis on the terms the Americans proposed

(which included a secret U.S. promise to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from

Turkey).135 That decision marked the end not just of the Cuban missile crisis but

also of the great Berlin crisis that had begun four years earlier.

What role did audience costs play in this story? For the Eisenhower period, it

is hard to see how they played any role at all. Under Eisenhower U.S. rhetoric was

relatively restrained. American policy, as he saw it, needed to be calm and steady,

and he in fact would have liked to see some kind of negotiated settlement.136 He

thus preferred quiet measures (which he knew Soviet intelligence would pick up) to

overt threats—in large part because he thought they would be less alarming to the

public.137 Insofar as the management of public opinion was concerned, it was not

Eisenhower’s goal to take such a tough line that fear of a hostile public reaction

135 The quotation is from Troyanovsky’s account, quoted in William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 575.136 See Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 194-195, 211-214, and Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 256-263.137 In April 1953, in a discussion of tactics for ending the Korean War, Eisenhower “stated his belief that it was possible to handle the matter in such a way as, on the one hand, to impress the enemy with our determination, without, on the other hand, unduly alarming our allies or our own people. The matter, said the President, should be handled in such a way that a foreign G-2 [Army intelligence], piecing together the bits of information on the transfer [of atomic weapons], would come to the conclusion that he had pierced the screen of the intentions of the United States.” Discussion at the 141st Meeting of the National Security Council, April 28, 1953, DDRS/ CK3100241247, p. 12. During the Berlin crisis, U.S. commanders in Europe took “certain military actions pointed largely toward Berlin,” “visible to Soviet intelligence,” but not such as to “cause public alarm.” JCS to USNMR, Febuary 21, 1959, quoted in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, p. 212. This was in line with a policy Secretary of State Dulles laid out in a meeting with the president and other high officials on January 29, 1959; see FRUS 1958-62 8:301. See also Dulles-Merchant meeting, February 27, 1959, quoted in Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 281-282 n. 152. A British diplomat called for the same sort of thing in 1961, urging that the West “select measures which would give Khrushchev pause without too greatly frightening our own side and the rest of the world; in other words, that steps which he learns about through his secret sources are probably of more value than those which attract public attention.” Caccia to Foreign Office, June 18, 1961, in Documents on British Policy Overseas, series III, vol. 6, doc. 228.

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would prevent him from subsequently pursuing a more moderate policy. He was

instead worried that taking too tough a line in public would scare people and thus

actually prevent him from pursuing a sufficiently firm policy. In his view, people in

the government “would like to think that public opinion pushes us into war,” but

unless it was handled the right way, he was not so sure that the public “would even

follow us into war.”138 His aim, in other words, was not to limit his own freedom of

action (by generating audience costs through tough public statements) but rather to

maintain it (by pursuing a sober policy and cautiously guiding opinion at home).

For the Kennedy period, however, things were not that simple, and a case can

be mae that the audience costs mechanism did play a certain role at that time. First

of all, it is quite clear that some major presidential statements and speeches—the

July 1961 speech on Berlin, the October 22, 1962, speech during the missile crisis,

and some key public warnings issued in September 1962 about a possible

deployment of missiles in Cuba—were important parts of the story.139 Weren’t the

Soviets bound to calculate that the U.S. president, subject to strong right-wing

pressure as it was, could not back down after having taken a very strong stand in

those statements without paying a prohibitive price at home? After all, didn’t the

Americans themselves analyze the situation in that way? Kennedy certainly knew in

late 1961 that his room for maneuver was narrow. “There are limits,” he said, “to

the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period.”140 He had actually

issued the September warnings to protect himself against attacks from the right,

138 Eisenhower meeting with Dulles and other top officials, January 29, 1959, FRUS 1958-60, 8:303. Emphasis in original text.139 On the September warnings, see Jeremy Pressman, “September Statements, October Missiles, November Elections: Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy Making, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Security Studies 10, no. 3 (Spring 2001), pp. 80-81.140 Kennedy, in a conversation with John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted in Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 379. See also Robert Kennedy’s comments, quoted in Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 555.

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and those statements, as Jeremy Pressman points out, “constrained his range of

action once the [missile] crisis began”—in part, because of the domestic political

price he would have to pay if he did not do what he had said he would do.141 And

indeed during the crisis the U.S. government, having made those statements, had to

insist on a withdrawal of the missiles: as McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national

security advisor, put it, “we’re very hard-locked on to” that policy.142 Kennedy

himself also felt that after those warnings had been issued, if America now did

nothing, “I would think that our risks increase.”143 He was probably thinking mainly

of what a failure to act would do to America’s international reputation, but he

certainly realized he would pay a price at home if he now softened his line. He

knew, for example, that “the domestic political heat following his television

appearance would be terrific.”144 And he made a point of keeping his agreement to

withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey secret, in part, for domestic political

reasons. There was, in particular, to be no written document formalizing the

understanding. His brother Robert Kennedy, even though he was essentially just a

messenger here, told Ambassador Dobrynin that he could not “risk getting involved”

with such a document, since it might surface in the future and “cause irreparable

damage to my political career.”145 And on November 7 the president himself seemed

to acknowledge that domestic political concerns had played a significant role during

the crisis. “With this election now over” (the mid-term elections had been held the

previous day), the government, he said, could now play it “very straight”—the

141 Pressman, “September Statements,” p. 82, 92-97.142 Meeting of Kennedy with his main advisors, October 16, 1962, quoted in Sheldon Stern, Averting “The Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 80.143 Ibid., p. 82.144 Notes of NSC meeting, October 20, 1962, FRUS 1961-63, 11:135.145 Dobrynin to the USSR Foreign Ministry, October 30, 1962, on CWIHP website.

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implication being that it had not been able, for domestic political reasons, to play it

very straight before.146

So isn’t it plausible that the Soviets understood the situation—that is, that

they realized how limited Kennedy’s freedom of action actually was, both in 1961

and 1962? Certainly Soviet officials like Ambassador Dobrynin understood that it

would be hard for Kennedy to withdraw from Berlin: a withdrawal, he reported to

Moscow, would be seen as a sign of weakness, not just internationally but

domestically as well.147 And indeed some of Kennedy’s top advisors—Theodore

Sorensen, for example—made it very clear to him in mid-1962 that the president’s

hands were tied, especially since elections would soon be held, and the ambassador

fully accepted that argument. Dobrynin, Sorensen wrote, noted “his agreement and

understanding when I stressed on two different occasions (both relating to the fall

elections, which seemed to be his principal topic of interest) that the President

could not possibly lay himself open to Republican charges of appeasement in his

response to any buildup in Berlin pressures between now and November 6 [election

day].”148 And Khrushchev himself often took the line that Kennedy was too weak to

resist pressure from more bellicose elements within the United States—too weak,

perhaps, to pull back from the brink of war for fear that “he will be called a coward”

at home.149 Didn’t this show he understood the pressures Kennedy had to deal with

146 Tape of November 7, 1962, meeting, quoted in Stern, Averting, p. 405. Emphasis in original text.147 Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 64.148 Sorensen-Dobrynin meeting, August 23, 1962, quoted in Pressman, “September Statements,” pp. 94-95.149 Khrushchev at meeting with Warsaw Pact leaders, August 3-5, 1961, quoted in Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 140. Zubok published extracts from the notes of that meeting in the CWIHP Bulletin, issue 3 (Fall 1993) (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACF1BD.pdf), pp. 59-61; see esp. p. 60. The Soviet leader took the same line at a Presidium meeting on January 8, 1962. See Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, p. 413, and Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War: From the

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—pressures that might prevent him from pulling back once he had committed

himself in public to a particular policy? Didn’t the fact that Khrushchev made such

a point of putting off the Berlin showdown until after the U.S. elections show that he

recognized the role domestic politics played in America, and how it limited

Kennedy’s freedom of action, especially when elections were imminent (as they

were in October 1962)?

But none of this actually proves that a desire to exploit the audience costs

mechanism was a key factor on the American side or that Soviet awareness of the

importance of audience costs played an important role in determining how the

Berlin and Cuban crises ran their course. As Pressman points out with regard to the

September 1962 warnings, “the impact of domestic politics was more unintended

than premeditated.”150 The president would run the risk of incurring audience costs

no matter what course of action he chose; one cannot therefore infer from the mere

fact that a particular policy choice would generate audience costs that the

government, for tactical purposes, had decided to take advantage of the audience

costs mechanism.151 A decision to “go public” might have nothing to do with

audience costs. The decision, for example, to give a major speech to the nation

during the missile crisis (which was one of a handful of examples Fearon cited in his

main article on audience costs) could have been made for all sorts of reasons.152 It

October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 188-189. See also Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), p. 499. 150 Pressman, “September Statements,” p. 86.151 For Kennedy’s awareness of this problem, see Richard Ned Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations Reevaluated,” Diplomatic History 14, no. 4 (October 1990), p. 479, and Stern, Averting, p. 150.152 Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 582. Ted Sorensen, who drafted the speech, talks about why the speech was drafted the way it was and some of the audiences it was aimed at in his memoir Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 298-300.

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was understood from the start that the American insistence that the missiles be

withdrawn would in all probability lead to a major crisis, and Kennedy might have

just felt he needed to explain what he was doing and why to head off criticism both

at home and abroad and to mobilize support for his policy. So his aim might have

been to strengthen his position, not to limit his own freedom of action by generating

audience costs. If his goal in “going public” had been to burn his bridges in order to

gain a bargaining advantage, then one would expect to find some evidence of that in

the documents, which are particularly rich in this case. And yet that evidence is just

not there, nor does one find any evidence of this sort in the documents relating to

the Berlin crisis in 1961. U.S. officials certainly realized that taking action in public

would tie their hands for domestic political reasons, but they tended to view that as

a problem—as a source of weakness in the American position—and not as something

that would strengthen their position in dealing with the Soviets. The “element of

irreversibility that many military measures have in a democratic society,” the

president was told by one of his advisors, was a major factor limiting America’s

ability to “use its military power flexibly and effectively”: “Having once stepped up

the degree of military activity in any situation, we find it difficult indeed in internal

political terms to step it down.” Kennedy himself clearly disliked the idea of actions

that would tie his hands. At one point he requested that information about Soviet

bombers being delivered to Cuba “be withheld at least until after [the] elections,”

since if it came out before then, “a new and more violent Cuban issue would be

injected into the campaign and this would seriously affect his independence of

action.”153

153 Deputy national security advisor Carl Kaysen to Kennedy, September 22, 1961, Berlin – General – 9/17/61-9/22/61, National Security Files, box 83, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. In this memo, Kaysen was commenting on the Berlin crisis game that Thomas Schelling had conducted earlier that month. For the Kennedy comment: McCone memorandum, October 11, 1962, quoted in Pressman, “September Statements,” pp. 98-99.

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But the validity of the audience costs theory in these cases really depends on

the sorts of calculations the Soviets made, and there are a number of problems with

the argument that they understood that Kennedy’s ability to retreat was limited for

domestic political reasons, and that that understanding played a key role in shaping

their policy in these crises. First of all, Khrushchev’s argument that Kennedy was

too weak to stand up to right-wing pressures at home is scarcely to be taken at face

value. If the Soviet leader had really believed his own rhetoric, he would certainly

have pursued a more cautious policy during this period. The proof, he argued, that

Kennedy was weak was that he was unable to settle the crisis on Soviet terms—that

he lacked “the authority and prestige to settle [the Berlin/Germany] issue

correctly.”154 But it is hard to believe that Khrushchev really felt that Kennedy’s

refusal to give way to Soviet threats was proof of weakness; if he did, one could

scarcely argue that he was being rational. In any event, with the crisis building up

in the late summer of 1962, the Soviet leader took a very different line. When told

that Robert Kennedy had informed a Soviet contact (Bolshakov) that it was very

hard for the president to pursue a conciliatory policy toward the USSR for domestic

political reasons, Khrushchev was incredulous: “Told of Robert Kennedy’s fear for

his brother’s position,” William Taubman writes, “Khrushchev retorted, ‘They can’t

mean it. Is he the President, or isn’t he? If he is a strong President, he has no one

to fear. He has full powers of government, and his brother is the Attorney General

in the bargain.”155

To be sure, the more sophisticated Soviet officials, like Dobrynin and

Troyanovsky, understood how the American system worked, and how domestic

political factors influenced what the U.S. president could do. Even the foreign

154 Quoted in Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, pp. 188-189.155 Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 555-556.

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minister, Andrei Gromyko, warned that the deployment of missiles in Cuba, as

Jonathan Haslam points out, “could cause a political explosion in Washington—of

this he was ‘absolutely certain, and this had to be taken into account.’” But

Khrushchev was not particularly interested in what they had to say. The American

political situation was not taken into account in any serious way.156

This point has a direct bearing on the audience costs theory. That theory

stresses the importance of new information about resolve that is revealed when

statesmen “go public” in the course of a crisis. But in the Cuban case the relevant

body of information had been available all along. The problem was that it had been

ignored. In the case of the Berlin crisis in 1961, one cannot go quite that far.

Kennedy’s July speech obviously played a major role, but the tough line he took was

but one element in a larger picture. The military measures that were taken, what

the Soviets were learning through intelligence channels, and what was being said in

private—all this fed into an assessment of how far the Americans were willing to go,

and the same sort of thing was true during the Cuban missile crisis as well.157 From

Khrushchev’s point of view, it was important that every scrap of information be

156 See Zubok, Failed Empire, p. 143; Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 541-542; Troyanovsky, “Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” pp. 235-236; Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 64, 79; and Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, pp. 201-202.157 On the role of intelligence, see (for 1961) Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, pp. 373-374, and (for 1962) Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, p. 209. By breaking the American codes, the Soviets were able to get “direct access to secret U.S. communications during the missile crisis,” and it was that information, Haslam writes, that convinced Khrushchev “just how serious the situation had become.” Dobrynin, however, thinks that it was his report of a conversation of Robert Kennedy at the peak of the crisis to the effect that time was running out that “turned the tide in Moscow.” He also alludes to alarming intelligence reports that were coming in about how military action was imminent, leading to a “frantic search for a solution” in Moscow. Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 88-89; see also Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 564. The Americans, it seems, understood in 1961 that while public threats could be dismissed as mere posturing, what was learned through intelligence channels would in all likelihood be taken more seriously. They knew that at least one Soviet agent had penetrated NATO and they allowed him to continue reporting on NATO’s war plans, calculating that this would have a major impact on Soviet policy. “For reasons which I cannot specify,” then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk later wrote, “we assumed that the Soviet Union would become fully informed of these [contingency plans] and would take such possibilities into full account.” See Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, p. 295 n.39.

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taken into account: “You’ve got to take note of everything,” he told Bolshakov in

September 1962, “—the tone, gestures, conversations. We in Moscow need to know

everything, especially at a time like this.”158 So all sorts of things had to be factored

into the equation, but calculations about audience costs did not rank very high in

that list.

So what conclusion is to be drawn from the discussion in this whole section of

the great power crises won by democratic states? The basic finding is quite simple.

There is little evidence that the audience costs mechanism played a “crucial” role in

any of them. Indeed, it is hard to identify any case in which that mechanism played

much of a role at all. There are all kinds of ways in which new information is

generated in the course of a crisis, and that new information, for the reasons Fearon

outlined, plays a fundamental role in determining how that crisis runs its course.

But audience costs were not a major factor in any of the crises examined here.

WHEN DEMOCRACIES LOSE

The audience costs mechanism was thus much weaker in practice than many

scholars have assumed, but how is that finding to be explained? Why did audience

costs not play a major role in any of the great power crises in which a democracy

prevailed? By looking at the crises in which democratic powers were defeated—the

Fashoda crisis (focusing now on the French side), the Rhineland crisis of 1936, and

the Czech crisis of 1938—we can perhaps get some clues as to why this was so.

Studying those cases (as Schultz noted) might not tell us much about how large

audience costs are in general, but it might give us some sense for the sorts of things

that determine how much of a price would actually be paid if a country suffered a

158 Quoted in Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 556.

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diplomatic defeat, and why that price in many cases might not be nearly as great as

some theorists seem to think.

The Fashoda case is of particular interest in this context because one might

have expected the French government’s political weakness to give it something of a

bargaining advantage—or at least to cancel out the bargaining advantage the

domestic political situation had given the British government. It was not just that

the current French ministry might fall if it gave way during the crisis. The whole

republican system was in danger because of the Dreyfus affair, which was also

going on at that time. Would the British really want to bring down the government

and perhaps even trigger a military coup in France by taking too hard a line? And

with the stakes so high at home, did the French government have much room for

maneuver? It seemed to the British ambassador in Paris that Delcassé’s back was to

the wall and that for domestic political reasons he simply could not withdraw from

Fashoda. But Salisbury was unmoved. The British took naval measures that

suggested that war was imminent, and the French, despite their domestic political

situation, felt they had no choice but to give way.159

The republic survived, but what happened to the French leaders responsible

for the policy that had led to this dramatic diplomatic defeat? The historian Gabriel

Hanotaux had served as foreign minister almost without interruption from 1894 to

June 1898, and the Fashoda affair put an end to his political career.160 But Hanotaux

159 Roger Brown, in Fashoda Reconsidered, stresses the link between the domestic and international crisis. See especially pp. 99-100 for an extract from a letter Ambassador Monson sent Salisbury on October 1 talking about the “utter impossibility” (for domestic political reasons) of the French government backing down. Monson’s report is also referred to in Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 193. That report was an exact counterpart for France of Ambassador Courcel’s report from London about the British government being unable to back down (again, for domestic political reasons) which Schultz had referred to; see p. 17 above. For the fear of a coup, see Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 105-106 and 110, and Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp. 374-375. 160 See Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “Hanotaux,” p. 93, and Michel, Mission Marchand, p. 224.

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had scarcely been the driving force behind the policy. He had in fact at times

opposed a forward policy in the Upper Nile, but with no political base of his own

could easily be overruled.161 Delcassé, on the other hand, had played a key role, as

under-secretary for colonies in 1893, in launching the policy that led to the

Marchand mission; his “grand design,” his biographer Christopher Andrew wrote,

was “to challenge the English presence in Egypt by a Fashoda expedition.”162 In

early 1898 he still championed that policy: “It is not I who am to blame,” he

declared, if “the French flag has yet to be carried to the banks of the Nile.”163 To be

sure, he took a more moderate line after he became foreign minister in June 1898.

But he was not forced to resign when the policy he had for years been so closely

associated with collapsed in November. People, in fact, had to plead with him to

stay in office, and he remained foreign minister until 1905.164

It is no wonder that people like Delcassé were not held accountable for the

Fashoda débâcle. The policy that had led to Fashoda had very broad support in

parliament, even from the Socialists; in one key vote held at the end of 1896, only a

handful of deputies were opposed.165 But if the political class as a whole was to

blame, it was scarcely going to punish itself for what had happened. There was no

way that the parliament as a whole would be held liable, and so no audience costs

would be incurred by those who were really responsible for the policy.

In the crises of the 1930s, somewhat different mechanisms came into play.

The western governments during that period had to deal with certain commitments

161 See Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, p. 53.162 Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy 1898-1905 (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 41, 90.163 Ibid., p. 91, and Guillen, L’Expansion, pp. 412, 418.164 See Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 353.165 See Michel, Mission Marchand, pp. 57-58, Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 462, and Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 391.

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they had made but did not wish to honor. On March 6, 1936, Hitler remilitarized

the Rhineland. The French prime minister announced on the radio the next day that

his government was not prepared to allow “Strasbourg to be exposed to German

cannon fire.”166 The French foreign minister had warned the previous month that

France would not permit the Rhineland to be remilitarized.167 The British, for their

part, had agreed (in the 1925 Locarno treaty) to guarantee the demilitarized status

of the Rhineland, and Foreign Secretary Eden had told Parliament at the end of

March that he was “not prepared to be the first British Foreign Secretary to go back

on a British signature.”168 Yet for France a unilateral use of force was utterly out of

the question for military, financial and domestic political reasons. The assumption

was that to take action France would have to mobilize, but a frightened public was

not prepared to risk war. Elections were imminent, and the voters, it seemed,

would react to strong measures by voting for the anti-militarist left-wing parties. “A

general mobilization six months before elections,” the foreign minister later noted,

“was insane.” The “audience,” in other words, would punish the government for

following through with its threats, not for backing down from them—although it is

only fair to point out that that punishment might have been less severe than it

otherwise would have been because commitments had been made.169

166 Quoted in Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy, 1932-1939 (New York: Enigma Books, 2004), p. 130. This is a translation of Duroselle’s La Décadence, 1932-1939, which was originally published in 1979.167 See Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, “Les milieux gouvernementaux français en face du problème allemand en 1936,” in Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Itinéraires: Idées, hommes et nations d’Occident (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991), p. 315.168 Quoted in R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), p. 65.169 The basic source on French policy in this affair is Stephen Schuker’s extraordinary article “France and the Remilitarization of the Rhineland, 1936,” French Historical Studies 14, no. 3 (Spring 1986); see especially pp. 316 and 322 for the point about mobilization being necessary, and pp. 316-317 and 329 for the role of domestic political considerations. See also the discussion in Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, chapter 5, especially pp. 128-131 (for the points about public attitudes and the elections).

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France could not act without Britain, but for the British the remilitarization of

the Rhineland was not a fighting issue. Despite Eden’s statement to Parliament, the

British were not willing to honor their Locarno pledge, and the prime minister,

Stanley Baldwin, was irritated by the fact that the French seemed to want to force

Britain to choose between risking war and reneging on her commitments.170 But

since practically no one in Britain thought that force should be used in 1936, the

government paid no real domestic political price for failing to live up to its Locarno

pledge.

In the Czech crisis of 1938, the story is less clear-cut. The French had an

alliance with Czechoslovakia and in early September their foreign minister

announced that his government would “remain committed to the pacts it has

entered into.”171 The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, publicly warned

in March of that year that if war broke out, “other countries, besides those which

were parties to the original dispute, would almost immediately be involved”—and

this was “especially true,” he noted, “in the case of two countries like Britain and

France.”172 The problem developed into a crisis in September. To head off what

seemed to be an imminent German attack on Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain flew to

Germany to meet Hitler and came back with a plan to turn over to Germany those

parts of Czechoslovakia in which most of the inhabitants were ethnically German.

The French went along with the plan and the Czechs were made to accept it.

Chamberlain then returned to Germany, thinking that a settlement was at hand.

But Hitler now insisted on more extreme terms: he demanded that specific areas on

a map he displayed be turned over to Germany almost immediately. That was too

170 See Parker, Chamberlain, p. 64.171 Quoted in Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, p. 280.172 Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain, p. 139.

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much for most of Chamberlain’s Cabinet colleagues, although Chamberlain himself

was willing to accept that arrangement; the French, although deeply divided, were

also prepared to face war over the issue.173 An armed conflict seemed imminent, but

then both sides drew back. A conference was held at Munich. Hitler made some

minor concessions and war was avoided—not just a major European war, but also

the localized war with Czechoslovakia which Hitler had very much wanted.

We now think of the Munich agreement as a disaster for the western powers,

but at the time Hitler felt that he himself had been defeated—cheated out of the war

he had craved.174 Did he back down to the extent he had because the western

governments had been able to generate audience costs? Certainly Chamberlain

himself tried to make it clear to Hitler that he was under considerable pressure at

home and that if the Führer wanted to keep such a conciliatory prime minister in

power, he needed to be more accommodating.175 It was not that Chamberlain had

sought to generate audience costs by taking a strong stand in public. He in fact

very much disliked public threats and was quite upset when the Foreign Office

issued a strong public warning to Germany at the peak of the crisis.176 But even

173 See Parker, Chamberlain, pp. 167-173; Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, pp. 287-291; and Anthony Adamthwaite, France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), pp. 217-218.174 See Richard Overy, “Germany and the Munich Crisis: A Mutilated Victory?” Diplomacy and Statecraft 10, no. 2/ 3 (1999).175 See Parker, Chamberlain, pp. 167, 174, 186-187. In a series of meetings with a contact at the German embassy, Chamberlain’s press advisor George Steward explained some of the problems the prime minister had to face at home with the goal of getting Hitler to soften his line. See Richard Cockett, Twilight of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement and the Manipulation of the Press (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), pp. 85-86, and John Ferris, “Intelligence and Diplomatic Signaling during Crises: The British Experiences of 1877-78, 1922 and 1938,” Intelligence and National Security 21, no. 5 (October 2006), p. 688. Note especially Steward’s warning to the Germans (at the time of the the prime minister’s second trip to Germany) that Chamberlain “might not be able to hold out in the face of ‘a revolt of public opinion which is brewing.’” Quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, “The British Government and the Media, 1937-1938,” Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 2 (April 1983), p. 292.176 See Parker, Chamberlain, pp. 157, 174-175, and Cockett, Twilight of Truth, p. 82.

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though he tried to damp down the political pressure for a firm line, he still in effect

sought to exploit the political situation as a way of getting Hitler to see reason. It

does not seem, however, that that tactic had much of an effect. The domestic

political situation in Britain is not cited in the historical sources as a key factor that

led Hitler to pull back at the last minute.177 But even if the political situation within

Britain and France was taken into account, it would not have been because public

statements had locked those countries into a position from which they could not

draw back. It would have been because of substantive changes, not tactical “bridge-

burning” moves: political opinion within the Cabinet, within Parliament, and within

the country at large had shifted, and as a result the British government was now

less inclined to give way.

Chamberlain, however, was still strong enough in late 1938 to get his

colleagues to accept the Munich agreement, but the détente with Germany he had

hoped for never materialized, and relations between Germany and the western

powers rapidly deteriorated. By the beginning of 1939, even Lord Halifax, the

foreign secretary, had concluded that a peaceful accommodation with Hitler was not

in the cards: “the present state of tension,” he told the Cabinet on February 2,

“could not last indefinitely and must result either in war or in the destruction of the

Nazi regime.”178 As far as the broader public was concerned, however, the key

change took place the following month when the Germans seized what was left of

what was now called “Czecho-Slovakia.” Germany was now taking over territories

not inhabited mainly by Germans and the appeasement policy was thoroughly 177 Historians instead talk about the defection of Italy, opposition within Germany, new evidence of the German people’s lack of enthusiasm for war, and especially the general deterrent posture of the western powers. See , for example, Gerhard Weinberg, “Munich after 50 Years,” Foreign Affairs 67, no. 1 (Fall 1988), pp. 171-172, and Overy, “Germany and the Munich Crisis,” pp. 205-210.178 Cabinet Conclusions, February 2, 1939, Cab 23/97, The National Archives, Kew (http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-97.pdf).

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discredited. Opinion had been transformed, Winston Churchill thought, in the

course of a single week. He likened it to “the kindling of a fire which rose steadily,

hour by hour, to an intense furnace heat of inward conviction.”179

The Munich agreement had called upon the powers to guarantee the rump

Czechoslovak state. A British minister, on Chamberlain’s authority, had announced

in October 1938 that the government felt “under a moral obligation to

Czechoslovakia to treat the guarantee as being now in force.”180 But now that the

Germans had moved into Prague, no one thought that that guarantee should be

honored. The government claimed it did not apply to the case at hand, since

Czecho-Slovakia had not been invaded. The Czechs had given in to German threats,

but, as Chamberlain told the Cabinet, “our guarantee was not a guarantee against

the exercise of moral pressure.”181 The government did not pay a major political

price for its failure to honor its commitment in this case, although some people were

annoyed by the hypocritical excuse Chamberlain had given.182 Its behavior in this

episode was just a brushstroke in a larger picture: the public had turned against

the Chamberlain policy as a whole, and his political position at home was not nearly

as strong as it had been.

But Chamberlain was not forced to resign. How was he able to avoid paying

the obvious price for the failure of his policy? The answer is quite simple. He never

really changed his mind about the need for appeasement, but he pretended to

pursue a tougher policy in order to remain prime minister. Chamberlain survived,

R.A.C. Parker writes, “only by appearing to carry out the policies advocated by 179 Quoted in Franklin Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 242.180 See Sidney Aster, 1939: The Making of the Second World War (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), p. 24.181 Ibid., p. 29.182 See Gannon, British Press, pp. 256-257.

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Churchill, especially in the acceleration of rearmament.” After the Germans moved

into Prague, Parker notes, he “was reduced to pursuing his policies by stealth.

When, on 2 September, that became known, he came close to being turned out.”183

But even then, with the failure of his policy manifest, he managed to remain in

office.

The French prime minister, Edouard Daladier, had also signed the Munich

agreement, and he also remained in power until war broke out in September 1939,

and indeed beyond. His political position, in fact, became stronger after Munich.184

This is not too surprising, since the sort of policy Daladier pursued had broad public

support. The simple fact that the French government was backing off from public

threats could scarcely be held against it, given the profound wish of the country to

avoid war. The Chamber of Deputies backed the Munich agreement by an

overwhelming majority, although many deputies voted with a heavy heart.185 The

Socialist leader Léon Blum’s attitude was perhaps typical: a “profound joy” that war

had been avoided was mixed with a “profound sadness” that Czechoslovakia had

been sacrificed.186 It was clear, moreover, that Daladier had scarcely been a free

agent; given the circumstances, he could hardly be blamed for pursuing the policy

he did.

So in these cases when democracies were defeated, the domestic political bill

that leaders had to pay was not very high. To avoid misunderstanding, let me again

stress the point that this does not mean that as a general rule audience costs would

not be incurred if a government backs down in a crisis. There are many cases—the 183 R.A.C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 263; see also pp. 216, 223.184 See Yvon Lacaze, L’opinion publique française et la crise de Munich (Berne: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 609, and Adamthwaite, France, p. 315.185 See Lacaze, Crise de Munich, p. 526.186 Ibid., p. 523. See also Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, pp. 291-299.

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Cuban missile crisis, most obviously—where they would have been substantial

(although that fact does not in itself mean that they played a major role in those

episodes). The findings presented in this section relate to the audience costs

argument in a rather different way. There is a certain tendency in the literature to

treat audience costs as a kind of surtax: certain costs might be incurred for giving

way in a crisis simply because of the intrinsic importance of the interests being

sacrificed, but beyond that an additional price would be paid because people feel

that making threats and then backing down is worse than simply not contesting the

issue in the first place.187 If that “surtax” varies at all, it is mainly because regime

type differs: the effect is assumed to be much greater for democracies than for

other sorts of regimes.188 What the cases discussed here suggest, however, is that

the basic attitude of the “audience”—how hawkish or dovish it is—is a very

important source of variation, as in fact a number of scholars have noted. Leaders

187 “Fearon,” Alastair Smith writes, “assumes that leaders pay a fixed cost in terms of domestic support if they fail to follow through on their policy pledges.” Smith, “International Crises and Domestic Politics,” p. 625. Philip Potter and Matthew Baum, in “Democratic Peace, Domestic Political Audiences, and Political Communication,” Political Communication 27, no. 4 (2010), argue quite effectively that the issue of how much of an additional price would actually be paid is a good deal more complex than the audience costs theorists would have it. The point that audience costs can be understood as a kind of “surtax” also calls to mind Schelling’s distinction between threats and warnings. In a warning, an actor points out what he is going to do in certain circumstances in any case; a threat, on the other hand, constrains the actor’s subsequent choices and might lead him to do “what he would manifestly prefer not to do if the contingency occurred.” In a threat, in other words, the act of communication increases the level of commitment beyond what it would otherwise be, and thus provides a way to convey “true information credibly.” It provides evidence in itself that one would actually do what one has said one would do. See Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, pp. 123-124, esp. n. 5. I am grateful to Robert Jervis for bringing this point to my attention.188 Some scholars simply assume that the strength of the audience costs mechanism is a direct function of how democratic a state is. Christopher Gelpi and Michael Griesdorf, for example, do a statistical analysis based on that assumption and conclude that “democratic political structures are important because of their ability to generate audience costs.” But that conclusion does not follow—indeed, cannot follow—from an analysis based on that premise. See their article, “Winners or Losers? Democracies in International Crises, 1918-94,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (September 2001), pp. 633 and 638. Joe Eyerman and Robert Hart make a similar assumption in their article “An Empirical Test of the Audience Cost Proposition: Democracy Speaks Louder than Words,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 (December 1996), p. 603.

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might not be punished for backing down when the public believes that choice is

correct. In those cases, there might be no “surtax” at all; indeed, the government

might be punished politically if it did not give way.

On the other hand, regime type is less important than many scholars assume

in determining how large the audience costs are. The Tsarist regime had to take

audience costs into account during the Eastern Crisis in the 1870s, and this sort of

factor also had a certain impact on German policy in the period from Agadir to

World War I.189 It played a role in shaping Khrushchev’s policy in 1958, and indeed

his “audience”—the rest of the Soviet leadership—made him pay the price for his

failures when it removed him from power in 1964.190 The idea, Jessica Weeks writes

in a recent article, that because of their greater ability to exploit the audience costs

mechanism “democracies have an advantage over autocracies in signaling their

intentions” is “now axiomatic.” She takes issue with that assumption and the

historical evidence supports her basic conclusion. That “axiom,” it turns out, is

more problematic than many people think.191

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

189 On Russia, see Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, esp. p. 195. On Germany, see Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, pp. 366-367, 447-448, and Mommsen, Imperial Germany, pp. 176-177, 195-197, and 285 n. 28.190 According to Troyanovsky, it was information about West Germany getting access to nuclear weapons that led Khrushchev to provoke the Berlin Crisis in 1958. “If this were to happen,” he wrote, “and there were no meaningful response from the Kremlin, Khrushchev’s prestige would tumble dramatically.” Troyanovsky, “Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” p. 217. With regard to 1964, some scholars used to argue that foreign policy issues had relatively little to do with Khrushchev’s fall from power that year. See, most notably, William Tompson, “The Fall of Nikita Khrushchev,” Soviet Studies 43, no. 6 (1991), pp. 1109-1110. But it is quite clear from evidence that has become available since 1991 that foreign policy was of central importance. See especially Paul Du Quenoy, “The Role of Foreign Affairs in the Fall of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964,” International History Review 25, no. 2 (June 2003), and also Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 79, 93.191 Jessica Weeks, “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization 62 (Winter 2008), p. 35. See also Jonathan Brown and Antony Marcum, “Avoiding Audience Costs: Domestic Political Accountability and Concessions in Crisis Diplomacy,” Security Studies 20, no. 2 (April-June 2011).

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In an article written more than half a century ago, Thomas Schelling

discussed the advantages of basing the study of strategy on the assumption that

behavior was rational. It was not that of “all possible approaches,” he said, this was

the one that stayed “closest to the truth.” The real advantage was that it gave a

“grip on the subject that is peculiarly conducive to the development of theory.” But

whether the theory that takes shape gives us any real “insight into actual behavior”

was a matter for judgment: the results reached, he said, might “prove to be either a

good approximation of reality or a caricature.”192 The implication was that purely

abstract theorizing is just a beginning—that one has to look at the empirical

evidence to see whether a particular theory actually helps us understand how things

work.

That, in fact, was what I tried to do in this article. My goal was to see

whether the theory Fearon had laid out in 1994, and which is still taken quite

seriously by many scholars, holds up in the light of the historical evidence. And the

basic conclusion reached here was that the audience costs mechanism is not nearly

as important as he and many other scholars have assumed. That mechanism is

supposed to play a crucial role in determining how crises, especially those involving

democracies, run their course. But it is hard to point to a single great power crisis

in which a democracy prevailed in which audience costs generated by public threats

were an important factor. And yet those are the cases where one would presumably

have the best chance of seeing the audience costs mechanism at work.

But why exactly does the audience cost mechanism count for so little in

determining outcomes? The key historical finding here—that that mechanism does

not play much of a role in determining how crises are resolved—suggests that there

must be something wrong with the Fearon theory. Perhaps some of the 192 Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, p. 4.

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assumptions on which it was based were mistaken, or maybe it simply failed to take

certain important factors into account. If so, maybe the historical analysis here can

tell us something about which particular assumptions were problematic, and which

particular factors were not taken into account—that is, about why exactly the theory

had gotten it wrong.

The idea that the Fearon theory is not perfect is by no means new. Over the

years even scholars working within the rational choice tradition have pointed to a

number of problems with that theory and have tried to remedy those problems by

developing it in various ways. And very recently a handful of scholars have (as I

have) reached the conclusion that the empirical evidence supporting audience costs

theory is not particularly strong; and a couple of them have tried to explain why the

audience costs mechanism seems to play so slight a role in determining how crises

run their course, in the process questioning some basic assumptions that lie at the

heart of the theory.193 In this section, I want to tackle that fundamental issue

myself. In doing so, I will certainly be making points which other scholars have

made before; a new article by Snyder and Borghard is of particular interest in this

context.194 My aim here, however, is not to lay out a purely original argument, but

rather to try to pull things together and deal with the question in as systematic a

way as I can.

Why then does the audience costs mechanism play such a slight role in

determining the way crises run their course? In part, it is because direct threat-

making (as some theorists have in fact pointed out) is often not a particularly

193 See especially Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 3 (August 2011), and Alexander Downes and Todd Sechser, “The Illusion of Democratic Credibility,” http://irworkshop.sites.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Sechser_IRW.pdf (downloaded September 30, 2011).194 Snyder and Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats.”

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attractive strategy.195 Too explicit a threat may backfire, by engaging the

adversary’s prestige (and provoking the adversary’s own domestic audience) in too

direct a way; even a successful threat of this sort, resulting in a public humiliation

of the adversary, might have unpleasant long-term consequences. It often makes

sense, therefore, to muddy the waters a bit and avoid direct threats; this is

particularly true when political leaders want to avoid alarming their own publics, or

third parties, or when they want to acquire a reputation for responsible,

statesmanlike behavior, which might be of some value both at home and abroad.

Hence threats are often couched in general language, and it is relatively easy to

back off from such threats without paying much of a political price at home. Thus it

might have been “the policy of the United States,” as President Truman proclaimed

in his famous “Truman Doctrine” speech of March 1947, “to support free peoples

who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures,”

but the administration paid no real domestic political price when it did not lift a

finger to prevent the subjugation of Czechoslovakia a year later. The “threat” was

very general; it was not meant to be taken, and was not understood as, a blueprint

for action.

But even when a state does commit itself in a relatively unambiguous way to a

particular policy, backing off from such a policy might not have major political

consequences at home, especially if the “audience” wants to avoid war and prefers a

relatively moderate policy. If, on the other hand, the “audience” is hawkish, the

government might still be able to moderate its position without paying a big political

price at home. It can resort to scapegoating; it can talk tough to cover up its

195 See, for example, Shuhei Kurizaki, “Efficient Secrecy: Public versus Private Threats in Crisis Diplomacy,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (August 2007), p. 554.

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retreat; it can conceal (from the public) the more moderate aspects of its policy and

misleadingly present itself as having taken a harder line than it actually had.196

This, of course, does not mean that there is no way leaders can ever tie their

hands by generating audience costs. There are certainly times when audience costs

can be generated—when a government can take such a tough line that it could not

pull back without paying a major political price at home. The point here is simply

that leaders in practice are often reluctant to go that route. The reason is that

“bridge-burning,” as I have noted a number of times already, is just not a very

attractive tactic.197 Statesmen, generally speaking, do not like to limit their freedom

of action. This is not to say that tactics of that sort are never considered. One in

fact does come across examples of “bridge-burning” from time to time.198 And the

196 I gave a number of examples of this in the text, but Kennedy’s decision to conceal the fact that he had agreed to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey during the Missile Crisis is also worth mentioning here. The president and his associates, as is well known, went out of their way to portray Kennedy as having taken a much tougher line on this issue than was actually the case, and even branded Adlai Stevenson as an appeaser for having supported the idea of a trade involving the Jupiters—an idea the president himself had championed. See Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 321, and Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 157-160. 197 See esp. p. 43 above.198 Public opinion can sometimes be manipulated in a way that would at least appear to limit a government’s options, a situation which could then be exploited for foreign policy purposes. Kiderlen, for example, explained to the leader of the Pan-German League how nationalist agitation at home could be useful in diplomatic terms: “I could then say, ‘yes, of course I’m conciliatory, but public opinion must be taken into account.” Quoted in Wernecke, Wille zur Weltgeltung, p. 29. A similar tactic was used by the German chancellor in 1967 to get concessions in the negotiations on a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Günter Diehl, then head of the Press and Information Office in the West German government, later explained the thinking to Matthias Küntzel. “For tactical reasons,” he said, “a certain amount of resistance was welcomed by the chancellor.” His goal was to “argue to the outside, vis-à-vis the nuclear powers: ‘You should be accommodating towards us because otherwise the NPT will not find a broad majority.’” Matthias Küntzel, Bonn and the Bomb: German Politics and the Nuclear Option (London: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 94. Note also Fraser Harbutt’s argument about President Roosevelt’s policy at and immediately after the Yalta Conference in 1945. See Fraser Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 310-330, esp. p. 316; and Fraser Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 86-92.

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decision to pursue that sort of policy, when it actually is made, does convey

information, as the basic Fearon theory says it should: risk-taking is a form of costly

signaling; a less resolute state would be less likely to run risks; and indeed the more

of a disincentive there is to surrender control and thereby accept a certain risk of

escalation, the more information is conveyed when a government actually chooses

to do so. The problem, however, is that such tactics do not seem to play much of a

role in international political life.199 Governments, of course, often try to guide and

sometimes even whip up domestic political opinion, but normally this is with a view

to maintaining their own freedom of action by mobilizing support for their policies,

and not to limiting it by generating audience costs.

Given all this, it is by no means obvious, from an adversary’s point of view,

that the degree to which a government has “gone public” should be taken as the key

measure of its seriousness in a crisis—that this is a key indicator that would allow

the adversary to judge whether or not that government is bluffing. And indeed one

has the impression that other factors—other sources of information generated

during a crisis—play a much more important role. What is really crucial is the

overall picture that takes shape in your mind about how far your adversary is

prepared to go in the conflict. In forming that picture all sorts of things get taken

into account: what the other power’s leaders are saying, not just in public but in

private as well—among themselves, to your representatives, and to third parties;

what you learn about public attitudes and the attitudes of the government’s political

opponents, most obviously through the press; and what your adversary is actually

doing, especially in the military sphere. You learn what you can through diplomatic

199 Empirical work done in the 1970s in fact showed that statesmen are less interested in abandoning control—that they leaned “more toward caution and prudence”—than leading deterrence theorists seemed to think. See Robert Jervis, “Deterrence Theory Revisited,” World Politics 31, no. 2 (January 1979), p. 303.

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channels and intelligence channels; you try to assess the political situation that

your adversary’s government has to deal with, in part to get some sense for how

much freedom of action its leaders have. You try to figure out how strong an

interest the rival power has in what is at stake; you try to think about what you

yourself would do if the situation were reversed.200 So all sorts of indicators are

generated as a crisis runs its course, each a brushstroke in a larger picture, each

important only in the context of all the others.

Many of these indicators can be understood in costly signaling terms. As a

crisis deepens and the risk of war seems to increase, even a simple willingness to

stay the course can be a costly signal; it is not something that a country that is not

prepared to run a serious risk of war would do. Escalatory actions—indeed anything

that seems to bring the two sides closer to war—are even more significant, and this

is true whether there is a risk of preemptive or accidental war or not. The basic

problem is that the more deeply you commit yourself, the harder it is to pull back—

and not just for domestic political reasons. Even adding in a concern for one’s

international reputation (as some scholars do) would not exhaust the range of

possibilities. Humiliation might be undesirable in its own right; a country might

end up paying a price in terms of how it feels about itself. And it does seem clear

empirically that the sheer momentum of a mounting crisis can constrain the

behavior of even the most powerful dictators and cause them to do things they

200 This is point is not new. Schelling noted years ago that strategic analysis was “vicarious problem-solving. We figure out what a person might do by putting ourselves into his position, adopting for the purpose as much as we know about his preferences, and deciding what he ought to do or what we would do if we were he.” Thomas Schelling, Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 205.

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might not have planned on doing at the start of a crisis. It is quite clear, for

example, that German policy in 1939 is to be understood in these terms.201

Military measures, in particular, can be revealing because they are an

important part of that general picture. In 1962, military actions—like the blockade

of Cuba, the preparations at that time for an invasion of the island, and the fact that

the Strategic Air Command was put on a high level of alert—were important

because the Soviets understood them in the context of what they were learning in

all kinds of ways about how seriously the Americans took the issue and how far they

were prepared to go. Those specific actions, to be sure, had certain direct effects.

It was assumed, for example, that there was a certain risk that the Soviets would

respond to the U.S. blockade of Cuba by imposing a counter-blockade around Berlin,

and that the Americans would then be faced with the problem of how far they were

willing to go in a confrontation over the city. Their willingness to face that Berlin

problem (when they decided to blockade Cuba) could thus be taken as a measure of

a more general willingness to risk war. But the key thing here is that when you saw

all those military preparations, it was hard to think that the Americans were bluffing

—and that would have been true whether the United States was a democracy or not.

Those measures in themselves (and not just because they were, to a certain extent,

201 See Raymond Sontag’s remarkable article, “The Last Months of Peace, 1939,” Foreign Affairs 35, no. 3 (April 1957), esp. pp. 507, 524. In the Czech crisis the previous year, as Richard Evans points out, “it was in the end Hitler who backed down.” That “retreat,” as Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw notes, “was tantamount to a loss of face.” Kershaw cites in this context a comment made at the time by the Abwehr general Helmuth Groscurth: “One can’t grasp this change. Führer has given in, and unexpectedly.” If Hitler had pulled back again in 1939, the blow to his prestige might have been unbearable. As Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary in the German Foreign Office in 1939, later noted—“with some insight,” in Kershaw’s view—Hitler was by now “the prisoner of his own actions. The wagon had begun in the spring to roll towards the abyss. In the last days of August, Hitler ‘could hardly have turned the carriage around without being thrown off himself.’” Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 673, and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1939-45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 119, 228.

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being publicly observed) suggested that the U.S. government was quite serious in

this crisis.

And what a government is saying in private can play a key role in this context.

One does not have to abandon the costly signaling idea to accept that point.202 Mere

talk, of course, is not necessarily to be taken at face value. Deception is obviously

not unheard of in international politics. But, as many scholars have noted, it often

has a price tag. An ability to make one’s true intentions understood, and one’s

explanations believed, can be of enormous value; there is a real cost to debasing a

currency which is almost indispensable in the day-to-day conduct of foreign policy.

When interests overlap—and states generally have a strong common interest in

avoiding war and thus in understanding each other—meaningful communication is

possible even when the costs are relatively low.203 Honest signaling, to be sure,

cannot be taken for granted. Statesmen might at times want to mislead their

202 See Robert Trager, “Diplomatic Calculus in Anarchy: How Communication Matters,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 2 (May 2010), esp. p. 349 n.12.203 A number of theorists, in both economics and evolutionary biology, have argued that “cheap talk” can make a difference in bargaining—that the more completely interests overlap, the more likely it is that direct communication can play an important role. In economics, the key paper was Vincent Crawford and Joel Sobel, “Strategic Information Transmission,” Econometrica 50, no. 6 (November 1982) (see esp. p. 1450), but note also Joseph Farrell and Matthew Rubin, “Cheap Talk,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, no. 3 (Summer 1996), esp. p. 107. In evolutionary biology, the argument about the effectiveness of low-cost signaling in cooperative relationships was laid out in an important article by John Krebs and Richard Dawkins: “Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation,” in J.R. Krebs and N.B. Davies, Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, 2nd edition (Sunderland: Sinauer Associates, 1984), esp. p. 391. See also Searcy and Nowicki, Evolution of Animal Communication, chapter 2. That basic argument is supported by some quite extraordinary experimental findings, to the effect that “face-to-face communication” produces “substantial increases in cooperation,” well beyond what standard rationalist theories might lead one to expect. See Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 140-141, and also Farrell and Rabin, “Cheap Talk,” p. 104n. Scholars, in fact, are sometimes quite surprised to see how important “cheap talk” can be. See, for example, Jervis, Logic of Images, pp. 96-97.

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opponents. But if they go too far, they risk destroying something—the ability to

communicate honestly—which they might very much want to hold on to.204

But beyond that, sometimes new information can be generated during a crisis

which can be credible even if no cost is involved. Years ago Robert Jervis

distinguished between what he called signals and indices. Signals were issued, and

known to be issued, “mainly to influence the receiver’s image of the sender” and

were thus inherently suspect, whereas indices were “believed to be inextricably

linked to the actor’s capabilities or intentions” and so were thought to be (although

not necessarily actually were) “beyond the ability of the actor to control for the

purpose of projecting a misleading image.”205 “Private messages the perceiver

overhears or intercepts,” including documents obtained through espionage, could be

indices; mere talk—the “internal dialogue” within another state—could also

function as an index if the listener feels that the government has no control over

what is being revealed.206 These are strong indicators of intent; they can yield new

204 See Jervis, Logic of Images, pp. 18 n. 2, 70-83 (esp. 78-79) and p. xvii in the preface to the 1989 edition of this book. Honest signaling, as is often noted, can be viewed as a form of cooperation, and much analysis of the problem of deception is based directly on the general arguments one finds in the literature about how cooperation is possible among self-interested actors involved in continuing relationships with each other. The basic idea is that individuals will cooperate because otherwise their partners will stop cooperating with them; a cooperative system can be based on that principle of reciprocity, and that system can be sustained in a variety of ways. See especially Robert Axelrod and William Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science 211 (new series), no. 4489 (March 27, 1981); and also Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Note also Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (March 1971), esp. pp. 47-54 (on the sort of psychological system that evolves to support cooperation and deter cheating; in the case of signaling, “cheating” refers to deception and “cooperation” refers to honest signaling). The idea that deception can be costly when it is discovered, and that this is one of the things that makes honest signaling possible, has also come to play a key role in the biological literature. See, for example, Bergstrom, “Dealing with Deception in Biology,” pp. 27-30, and James Hurford, The Origins of Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 289-290.205 Jervis, Logic of Images, pp. 18-19, 26.206 Ibid., pp. 18-19, 35.

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information that can influence the way a crisis runs its course; yet the costly

signaling perspective does not allow for the role played by indicators of this sort.

Take, for example, the case of Britain in 1939. Certain key indicators of

British resolve—the great increase in armaments spending, for example—can

obviously be understood in costly signaling terms. Britain’s firm diplomatic stance,

and especially the guarantee of Poland—and also the fact that that stance did not

weaken even as the crisis escalated—can also be understood in that way, because of

the mounting price the British government would pay, in both domestic and

international terms, if it backed down. But perhaps the most important indicator

had to do with way people at all levels—in the Cabinet, in Parliament, in the press,

and in the country as a whole—had come to feel about the problem. It was of

fundamental importance that their willingness to accept a showdown with Germany

did not crumble as the threat of war loomed larger. The credibility of that indicator

had little to do with any costs that had been incurred, or would be if the British

attitude softened. It was something that could be observed directly, just by talking

with people and listening to what they had to say. It was a powerful indicator

simply because it could not be faked. And the fact that the British were holding firm

would, in a sense, be new information since the Nazis’ initial assumption had been

that Britain would back down in the crisis—that “in the war of nerves, Nazi nerves

would prove stronger.”207 Yet as the costly signaling idea took hold, the whole idea

of an index in that sense essentially fell between the cracks.208

207 Goebbels remark, paraphrased in Raymond Sontag, A Broken World, 1919-1939 (New York: Harper,1971), p. 341; see also p. 363.208 Spence borrowed the term “index” from Jervis, but used it in a rather different way. For him, indices were “observable, unalterable” attributes, like the sex of a job applicant, as opposed to signals, which were manipulable. See Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” pp. 357, 369, 374. It was thus natural for people like Fearon who adopted Spence’s basic approach to not view indices as playing a role in crisis situations; if they were fixed and unchanging, they should already have been taken into account before the crisis started and could not provide new information. In other words, given that basic approach, it was easy to lose sight

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Given all this, it is not hard to understand why the audience costs mechanism

is not nearly as important in determining how crises get resolved as many theorists

seem to assume. But perhaps the basic conclusion to be drawn here is

methodological in nature. The bottom line here is not that theorizing is devoid of

value. This is obviously not the case, and Fearon’s contributions to the field, in

particular, have been quite extraordinary. The basic problem is simply one of

balance. It is very easy, when you are grappling with a problem on a purely

abstract level, to get carried away with a particular idea, and to lose sight of all the

reasons the particular effect you are focusing on might not count for as much in the

real world as you might think—and this is true, whether you are working in the

rational choice or in some other tradition. The way to control for that kind of

problem is to analyze the theoretical issue you are concerned with in the light of the

empirical, and especially the historical, evidence. Indeed, it is only by doing that

kind of analysis that you can reach a judgment about the value a particular theory

has. It is the only way to see whether a theory is just an interesting intellectual

construct or whether it gives you any real insight into how things actually work.

of the fact that a non-cost-incurring index could provide new information in a crisis and thus play a key role in shaping outcomes.

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