Dangerous Alliances: Proponents of Peace, Weapons of War (review)

Why do countries form military alliances? Furthermore, once an alliance is formed, how good are the members at working together? Weitsman addresses both questions and argues that the answers are linked; the initial motivation for an alliance helps to determine the behavior, or what she calls the cohesion, of the alliance.

Whereas other scholars have emphasized the role that external military threats play in bringing about a new alliance, Weitsman highlights the role of threats internal to the alliance. Austria-Hungary, for instance, formed an alliance with Russia and Germany in 1873 because it feared them, not because it feared other states external to the alliance. According to Weitsman, in such situations, states hope that an alliance will help them to manage and control rivals. Not surprisingly, alliances for which internal threats are paramount are less cohesive. Since Austria-Hungary saw its primary rivals as Russia and Germany, it had a harder time working with them within the alliance to shape common goals and policies.

Weitsman offers additional insights on a much-researched topic. A country's alliance with a threatening state to improve its security sometimes unintentionally frightens non-members, who, in turn, form a counter-alliance and truly become security threats. This self-fulfilling prophecy is clearly reminiscent of writings on the security dilemma by Herz, Jervis, and others.¹ She names several different alliance motivations that lead states to seek allies, including hedging (a mixed strategy of "low-level commitment agreements") and tethering (allying with adversaries to "manage their hostility") (29–30). Weitsman then links the motivation to the intensity of the security threat that each country faces, though it is not always apparent how she determines whether the threat level is low, moderate, high, or very high.

From an evidentiary perspective, chapters three through six are the heart of the book. They include case studies of multiple European alliances from 1873 through World War I, based on both archival work and secondary historical accounts, as well as works in both history and political science. Weitsman also uses quantitative measures to assess who threatened whom during this period. Although the quantitative data are presented clearly in the appendix, and the desire to combine case studies with quantitative work is admirable, the scant references to the data in the text leave in question the extent to which she used this material to determine threat levels in the case studies. She should have included more references to it in the text.

Weitsman also clearly sees this work as an effort to integrate a wide array of research on alliances—as she puts it, to "synthesize these contributions into one theoretical framework" (3). Thus, throughout the book, she comments on realist, rationalist, and institutionalist accounts of alliances and how her work both integrates and supplants such thinking. In Dangerous Alliances, Weitsman successfully moves in two directions. The European history of the late 1800s and early 1900s seems more intelligible in light of her theoretical comments, and the presentation of the cases helps to further our understanding of military alliances.