Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: Toward a New Theory of Intra-Alliance Fighting
Open AccessMy dissertation offers a new theoretical framework to study why formally allied states engage in militarized disputes. This theoretical framework explicitly links the alliance formation stage to the intra-alliance conflict stage and includes a typology of intra-alliance conflict that broadly distinguishes across two categories: premeditated and situational. This typology of intra-alliance conflict is based on the distinction between alliances in which at least one ally contemplates aggression at the alliance formation stage (i.e., premeditated fighting), and alliances where the fighting is a result of situational changes following the formation of the alliance (i.e., situational fighting). In situational fighting, I propose three types of issues that drive this type of intra-alliance fighting: political disputes over internal organization and leadership of member-states, political and ideological disputes for leadership and control of the alliance, and coalitional disputes that emerge during and after wars. While existing research on why allies fight has contributed to a more sophisticated understanding of alliance dynamics, it nonetheless fails to adequately explain what motivates states to fight their allies. This is in part because existing studies fail to explicitly link the alliance formation stage to the intra-alliance conflict stage. I test these assertions through an empirical evaluation of all cases of intra-allied militarized force initiations as well as a close study of four historically important cases of intra-alliance fighting. To demonstrate the premeditated theory’s empirical relevance, I examine more closely Soviet alliances with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (i.e., the Baltic States) in 1939 and I argue that Moscow entered these alliances with an ulterior motive to politically control and territorially annex its allies. In addition, I show that the alliance terms and provisions provided political and operational benefits that later facilitated annexation. I end the chapter by briefly discussing the ultimately unsuccessful Soviet attempts to establish a similar alliance with Finland, which serves as an unsuccessful example of premeditation. To test the situational theory, I first discuss the Saudi-Egyptian conflict in North Yemen, which demonstrates the first two types of situational intra-alliance fighting. The Saudi-Egyptian conflict is both a conflict between allies rooted in political and ideological disagreements over the leadership of the broader alliance movement consisting of other Arab states, as well as a conflict stemming from internal instability in one of the allied states (i.e. Yemen), following a coup that overthrew the pro-Saudi monarchical regime and brought to power the pro-Egyptian republican regime. I conclude the dissertation by discussing the third situational logic that can lead to intra-alliance quarrels: distributional disagreements over the spoils of war. The Second Balkan War in 1913 between Bulgaria and its erstwhile allies Serbia and Greece shows how two major strategic problems inherent in any alliance – the free-rider problem and the hold-up problem – interact to cause intra-alliance fighting. Ultimately, these two strategic problems are rooted in disagreements about the appropriate division of spoils of war, which is the third logic that drives situational intra-alliance fighting.
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