Benjamin Miller

With the end of the Cold War, analysts advanced competing expectations about the likely character of the post-Cold War Order. Many expected a far-reaching transformation in the fundamental character of world politics. Some of these predictions were quite optimistic (especially by Liberals and Constructivists in International Relations theory) — believing the changes will lead to more peace and cooperation. Some, however, were Pessimists — predicting the emergence of new types of conflicts (for example, Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”; and Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy”), while others (the Realists in IR theory) remained skeptic regarding the possible transformation (for better or worse) in the fundamental character of international politics, even if taking into account specific changes in the global distribution of capabilities as leading to some important changes in the dynamics of the international system — whether in the direction of a benign hegemon or balance of power politics. The paper will investigate the effects of the “Arab Spring” on security and cooperation in the Middle East according to these competing theoretical perspectives. The paper will then evaluate the explanatory and predictive power of the perspectives.The Optimists underline the positive effects of the liberalization processes in the Arab world on rising prospects for cooperation both inside the Middle East as well as between the democratizing region with the democratic powers based on the pacifying and cooperative effects of liberal mechanisms such as the “democratic peace,” international institutions and the rising economic interdependence with the West and inside the region. The Skeptics (The Realists) minimize the importance of the domestic changes on foreign policy and international outcomes. According to them the key patterns will continue to be around the formation of regional balances of power and struggles over hegemony both inside the Middle East, and among the external powers involved in the region. The Pessimists will focus especially on the danger of the emergence of failed states as a result of the “Arab Revolt” and the spread of civil wars and foreign intervention. The “Clash of Civilizations” will highlight the cultural/religious constraints on the rise of liberal democracy in Arab/Muslim societies. I argue that the combined effect of two factors — state strength and national congruence -- is the most important for assessing the predictive power of the competing approaches. The two key factors are state strength — the effectiveness of the functioning of state institutions; and national congruence — the extent of congruence between geo-political boundaries and national aspirations and identities in the state. States, which are strong and nationally coherent, will tend to meet the Optimists’ predictions and will be good candidates for successful democratization and for the pacifying effects of liberalization. States which are both weak and incongruent -- will follow the Pessimists’ predictions and will tend to be failed states with civil wars and foreign intervention; while strong states but incongruent will tend to produce a revisionist model and pose a potential threat to their neighbors. Finally, the instability prevalent in failed states can be mitigated by the intervention of a benign hegemon in the Middle East, but in highly fragmented regions such interventions might face a lot of problems and have some de-stabilizing effects.

... has become improbable to the extent that this is an anachronism, a relic from the past. ... 29 Michael D. Ward and Kristian S. Gleditsch, “Democratizing for Peace,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 92, No. 1 (March 1998), pp. 51-61. ...

The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical analysis of the conditions affecting the emergence of a great power concert, in order to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. In contrast to some recent important theoretical works which underline the role of various systemic factors in the formation of a concert, I will argue that it isunit-levelfactors that make the difference with regard to great power concerts. The article will also provide historical illustrations for the influence of the explanatory factors on the emergence or non-emergence of concerts. The only historical case of a great power concert to date is the nineteenth-century European Concert. Comparisons will be made between this period and the Cold War, when a great power concert manifestly did not take place.

The objective of this article is to develop a novel distinction among four IR approaches and especially to highlight the approach which will be called here ‘offensive liberalism’. This four fold division is based not only on a distinction between realism and liberalism, but also on an internal division inside each camp between offensive and defensive approaches. Indeed, besides the distinction between offensive and defensive realism, there is also an overlooked parallel distinction between offensive and defensive liberalism. As I will show, this distinction goes deeper and has lasted much longer than the recent debate on the neoconservative agenda during the Bush presidency. While sharing the same liberal objectives, offensive and defensive liberals diverge sharply in the means they are willing to deploy to advance these objectives, especially the use of force to democratise non-democratic societies. I evaluate the advantages and the shortcomings of each approach as an avenue to ful...

... Kagan, Robert Keohane, Dale Copeland, Avi Kober, Hein Goemans, Galia Press-Bar-Nathan, Matthew Randall, Norrin Ripsman, Joe Grieco, Peter Feaver, Jeffrey Taliaferro, Uri Reznick, BenFrankel, Chris Gelpi, Oded Lowenheim, Zeev Maoz, Yoav Gerchek, Boaz Atzili, and ...

ABSTRACT I would like first to thank the three commentators for their thoughtful and constructive reviews of my article in this symposium. This article is based on some of the key theoretical components of my book, States, Nations and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace (Miller, 2007). All of the three commentators highlight important and instructive points and issues, which can be very useful for future studies on this subject and hopefully also for revisions in a potential second edition of the book. I shall start with the most general level—Toft's challenge of the relations between my work and international relations (IR) theory—then refer to the ethnic-conflict level and variations in peace addressed by Saideman, finally commenting on Wolff's empirical test of the theory by the important German Question.

This article focuses on a fourfold distinction among international relations approaches to security and peace (offensive realism, defensive realism, defensive liberalism and offensive liberalism), which is applied to understand differing regional dynamics of conflict resolution, particularly in two key regions: Europe and the Middle East. The shift from realist to liberal assumptions, it is argued here, is the foundation for conflict resolution. The combined effect of the realist mechanisms produced ‘cold peace’ in Europe, while the liberal strategies warmed the peace considerably, eventually producing a ‘high-level warm peace’. More specifically, it was overlooked offensive liberal mechanisms which made an especially major contribution to the emergence of warm peace on the continent through the successful imposition of democratization on the key state for European security, Germany. Defensive liberal strategies then played a very useful supportive role in warming the regional peace. In the Middle East, in contrast, some of the conditions for the application of the realist approaches emerged after the 1973 war, and even then only in the Israeli–Egyptian context, and somewhat more broadly after the end of the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War. But the conditions for liberal strategies are still missing even though a defensive liberal strategy has been tried in the l990s and an offensive liberal strategy was applied since 2003. Thus, only a cold peace could emerge, and even that only partially due to the relative weakness of the realist mechanisms in the Middle East in comparison to the Western European case during the Cold War.