8

Balancing versus
Buck-Passing

Iargued in Chapter 5 that balancing and buck-passing are the main strategies that states employ to defend the balance of power against aggressors, and that threatened states feel a strong impulse to buck-pass. Buck-passing is preferred over balancing because the successful buck-passer does not have to fight the aggressor if deterrence fails. In fact, the buck-passer might even gain power if the aggressor and the buck-catcher get bogged down in a long and costly war. This offensive feature of buck-passing notwithstanding, there is always the possibility that the aggressor might win a quick and decisive victory and shift the balance of power in its favor and against the buck-passer.

This chapter has three aims. First, I explain when threatened states are likely to balance and when they are likely to buck-pass. That choice is mainly a function of the structure of the international system. A threatened great power operating in a bipolar system must balance against its rival because there is no other great power to catch the buck. It is in multipolar systems that threatened states can—and often do—buck-pass. The amount of buck-passing that takes place depends largely on the magnitude of the threat and on geography. Buck-passing tends to be widespread in multipolarity when there is no potential hegemon to contend with, and when the threatened states do not share a common border with the aggressor. But even when there is a dominating threat, endangered rivals will still look for opportunities to pass the buck. In general, the more relative power the potential hegemon controls, the more likely it is that all of the threatened states in the system will forgo buck-passing and form a balancing coalition.

Second, I examine the five most intense cases of security competition in Europe over the past two centuries to test my claims about when threatened states are likely to buck-pass. Specifically, I consider how the great powers responded to the four potential hegemons in modern European history: Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1789–1815), Wilhelmine Germany (1890–1914), Nazi Germany (1933–41), and the Soviet Union (1945–90).¹ I also look at how the European great powers reacted to Otto von Bismarck’s effort to unify Germany with the sword between 1862 and 1870. Bismarckian Prussia, however, was not a potential hegemon. The system was multipolar for all of these cases, save for the bipolar rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Furthermore, all of these security competitions led to great-power wars, except for the conflict between the superpowers.

The evidence from these five cases is largely consistent with my theory on when states buck-pass and when they balance against aggressors. The United States, for example, had no choice but to balance against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, because the system was bipolar. Not surprisingly, the balancing in this case was more timely and more efficient than in any of the multipolar cases. There is significant variation among the four multipolar cases, where passing the buck was an option. Buck-passing is most evident against Bismarck’s Prussia, which is not surprising, since Prussia is the one aggressor under study that was not a potential hegemon. Buck-passing is least evident against Wilhelmine Germany, which had a rather impressive balancing coalition arrayed against it about seven years before the start of World War I. There was considerable buck-passing against Revolutionary France and Nazi Germany in the years before they went to war in 1792 and 1939, respectively, and even after both were at war. The variation among these cases can be explained in good part by the relevant distribution of power and by geography, which facilitated buck-passing against Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, but not against Kaiser Wilhelm.

Third, I hope to illustrate my claim that threatened states are inclined to buck-pass rather than balance in the face of aggressors. The discussion in Chapter 7 of how the United Kingdom and the United States have always looked to buck-pass when confronted with a potential hegemon in Europe (or Northeast Asia) provides substantial evidence of that tendency among states. However, I address the issue more directly in this chapter by focusing on five particularly aggressive European states and how their rivals reacted to them.

My explanation for when states buck-pass is laid out in the next section. The five cases are then discussed in chronological order, starting with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and ending with the Cold War. In the final section, the findings from the different cases are compared and contrasted.

WHEN DO STATES BUCK-PASS?

When an aggressor comes on the scene, at least one other state will eventually take direct responsibility for checking it. Balancing almost always happens, although it is not always successful. This point is consistent with the logic of buck-passing, which is essentially about who does the balancing, not whether it gets done. The buck-passer simply wants someone else to do the heavy lifting, but it certainly wants the threat contained. Buck-passing, on the other hand, does not always occur when an aggressor threatens to upset the balance of power. Passing the buck may be the strategy of choice for threatened great powers, but it is not always a viable option. The task here is to determine when buck-passing makes good strategic sense.

The prospects for buck-passing are largely a function of the particular architecture of the system. What matters most is the distribution of power among the major states, and geography.² Power is usually distributed among great powers in three ways.³ Bipolar systems are dominated by two great powers of roughly equal military might. Unbalanced multipolar systems contain three or more great powers, one of which is a potential hegemon. Balanced multipolar systems have no aspiring hegemon; instead, power is divided rather evenly among the great powers, or at least between the two most powerful states in the system.

No buck-passing takes place among the great powers in bipolarity because there is no third party to catch the buck. A threatened great power has little choice but to balance against its rival great power. It is also not possible to form balancing coalitions with other great powers in a world with just two great powers. Instead, the threatened power has to rely mainly on its own resources, and maybe alliances with smaller states, to contain the aggressor. Because neither buck-passing nor great-power balancing coalitions are feasible in bipolarity, we should expect balancing in this kind of system to be prompt and efficient.

Buck-passing is always possible in multipolarity, because there is always at least one potential buck-catcher in the system. But buck-passing is likely to be rife in balanced multipolar systems, mainly because no aggressor is powerful enough—by definition—to defeat all of the other great powers and dominate the entire system. This means that not every great power is likely to be directly threatened by an aggressor in a counterpoised system, and those that are not in imminent danger of attack will almost certainly opt to pass the buck. States that are directly threatened by the aggressor are likely to try to get another threatened state to handle the problem, so that they can remain unscathed while the buck-catcher defends the balance of power. In short, balancing coalitions are unlikely to form against an aggressor when power is distributed rather evenly among the major states in a multipolar system.

Buck-passing is less likely in an unbalanced multipolar system, because the threatened states have a strong incentive to work together to prevent the potential hegemon from dominating their region. After all, potential hegemons, which are great powers that clearly have more latent power and a more formidable army than any other great power in their region, have the wherewithal to fundamentally alter the balance of power in their favor. Consequently, they are a direct threat to almost every state in the system. Ludwig Dehio, the German historian, maintains that states “seem able to hold together only in one event: when a member of their own circle tries to achieve hegemony,” and Barry Posen notes that, “Those states most often identified as history’s would-be hegemons have elicited the most intense balancing behavior by their neighbors.”⁴

Nevertheless, buck-passing often occurs in unbalanced multipolar systems. Threatened states are reluctant to form balancing coalitions against potential hegemons because the costs of containment are likely to be great; if it is possible to get another state to bear those costs, a threatened state will make every effort to do so. The more powerful the dominant state is relative to its foes, however, the less likely it is that the potential victims will be able to pass the buck among themselves, and the more likely it is that they will be forced to form a balancing coalition against the aggressor. Indeed, at some point, the collective efforts of all the threatened great powers will be needed to contain an especially powerful state. Buck-passing makes little sense in such a circumstance because the buck-catchers are unlikely to be capable of checking the potential hegemon without help.

Whereas the distribution of power tells us how much buck-passing is likely among the great powers, geography helps identify the likely buck-passers and buck-catchers in multipolar systems. The crucial issue regarding geography is whether the threatened state shares a border with the aggressor, or whether a barrier—be it the territory of another state or a large body of water—separates those rivals. Common borders promote balancing; barriers encourage buck-passing.

Common borders facilitate balancing in two ways. First, they provide threatened states with direct and relatively easy access to the territory of the aggressor, which means that the imperiled states are well-positioned to put military pressure on their dangerous opponent. If all the threatened great powers share a border with their common foe, they can readily raise the specter of a multi-front war, which is often the most effective way to deter a powerful aggressor.⁵ On the other hand, if a threatened state is separated from its adversary by water or a territorial buffer zone, it will be difficult for the endangered state to use its army to put pressure on the menacing state. A minor power caught in the middle, for example, is often unwilling to invite a threatened great power onto its territory, thus forcing the threatened state to invade the minor power to get at the aggressor. Projecting power across water is also a difficult task, as discussed in Chapter 4.

Second, great powers that share a border with an aggressor are likely to feel particularly vulnerable to attack, and thus they are likely to take matters into their own hands and balance against their dangerous foe. They are not likely to be in a good position to buck-pass, although the temptation to try that strategy will always be present. On the other hand, threatened states separated from an aggressor by a barrier are likely to feel less vulnerable to invasion and therefore more inclined to pass the buck to an endangered state that has a common border with the menacing state. Thus, among threatened states, those that live next door to the aggressor usually get stuck with the buck, while those more distant from the threat usually get to pass the buck. There is some truth to the dictum that geography is destiny.

In sum, buck-passing among the great powers is impossible in bipolarity, and not only possible but commonplace in multipolarity. Indeed, buck-passing is likely to be absent from a multipolar system only when there is an especially powerful potential hegemon and when there are no barriers between the aggressor and the threatened great powers. In the absence of a dominating threat and common borders, substantial buck-passing is likely in multipolarity.

Let us now consider how well this theory explains the historical record, focusing first on how the European great powers reacted to the aggressive behavior of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France some two centuries ago.

REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC FRANCE (1789–1815)

Background

The European great powers were at war almost continuously from 1792 until 1815. Basically, a powerful and highly aggressive France fought against different combinations of the other regional great powers: Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia. France, which was bent on becoming Europe’s hegemon, reached its expansionist peak in mid-September 1812, when Napoleon’s armies entered Moscow. At that point, France controlled almost all of continental Europe from the Atlantic to Moscow and from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean. Less than two years later, however, France was a defeated great power and Napoleon was exiled to Elba.

There was no balancing against France between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of great-power war in 1792. Austria and Prussia actually went to war against Revolutionary France in 1792 to take advantage of it, not to contain it. France quickly built a powerful army, however, and it was a potential hegemon by late 1793. Nevertheless, it was not until 1813—more than twenty years after the fighting began—that all four of France’s great-power rivals came together in a balancing coalition and decisively defeated France. In the intervening two decades, there was considerable buck-passing as well as inefficient balancing among France’s enemies. In fact, five separate balancing coalitions formed against France between 1793 and 1809, but none contained all of France’s rivals and each collapsed after performing poorly on the battlefield. There were also lengthy periods where Britain fought alone against France.

The behavior of France’s rivals between 1789 and 1815 can be explained in good part by the distribution of power and by geography. Hardly any balancing took place against France before 1793 because it was not a potential hegemon. Although France became a threat to dominate Europe in late 1793, there was a good deal of buck-passing by Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia over the next twelve years, mainly because France, although powerful, was not so powerful that all four of its rivals were needed to prevent it from overruning the continent. By 1805, however, the French army had become such a formidable fighting force under Napoleon that only the collective efforts of all the other European great powers could contain it. Yet those powers did not contain it until 1813, in small part because the buck-passing impulse remained at play, but mainly because of inefficient balancing. In particular, Napoleon quickly knocked Austria out of the balance of power in 1805, and then did the same to Prussia in 1806, making it impossible for his foes to form a unified balancing coalition. That situation changed in late 1812 when France suffered a catastrophic defeat in Russia. With France temporarily weakened, Austria, the United Kingdom, Prussia, and Russia were able to join together in 1813 and bring France’s run at hegemony to an end.

The Strategic Behavior of the Great Powers

A good way to analyze great-power behavior in Europe between 1789 and 1815 is to start with a brief description of the various targets of French aggression, and then look at the interactions between France and its rivals in four distinct periods: 1789–91, 1792–1804, 1805–12, 1813–15.⁶

France sought to conquer territory all across Europe, although it tended to work its way from west to east over time. Its main targets in western Europe were Belgium, which Austria controlled in 1792; the Dutch Republic; the various German political entities opposite France’s eastern border, such as Bavaria, Hanover, and Saxony, which I refer to throughout this chapter as the “Third Germany”⁷; Switzerland; the Italian Peninsula, especially the northern part; Portugal and Spain on the Iberian Peninsula; and Great Britain. France occupied all of those areas at one point or another, save for Britain, which Napoleon planned to invade but never did. In central Europe, France’s main targets were Austria, Prussia, and Poland, which was dominated at the time by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. There was one big target in eastern Europe: Russia (see Map 8.1).

The French Revolution, which broke out in the summer of 1789, did not cause France to launch wars to spread its ideology. Nor did it cause Europe’s other great powers to wage war against France to crush the revolution and restore the monarchy. In fact, there was peace among the great powers until the spring of 1792, when Austria and Prussia provoked a war with France. But that conflict was motivated mainly by balance-of-power considerations, although it was not a case of two threatened states balancing against a mighty France.⁸ On the contrary, Austria and Prussia were ganging up on a weak and vulnerable France to gain power at its expense. Britain was content to sit on the sidelines and watch this happen, while Russia encouraged Austria and Prussia to fight with France, so that it could make gains in Poland at their expense.

France fared poorly in the opening months of the war, prompting a reorganization and enlargement of the French army in the summer of 1792. It then won a stunning victory against the invading Prussians at Valmy on September 20, 1792. Soon thereafter, France went on the offensive and it remained a relentless and formidable aggressor until Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in June 1815.

During the period from 1793 to 1804, France did not attempt to conquer all of Europe. Instead, it sought and achieved hegemony in western Europe. In particular, it gained direct control over Belgium, large parts of Italy, and a portion of the Third Germany. France also dominated the Dutch Republic and Switzerland. But Portugal, Spain, and most important, Britain, were not brought under French control. These gains in western Europe were not made quickly and easily. For example, France won control over Belgium by defeating the Austrians at the Battle of Jemappes on November 6, 1792. But the Austrians won it back at the Battle of Neerwinden on March 16, 1793. France took it back again, however, at the battle of Fleurus on June 26, 1794.

We find a similiar story in Italy. Between March 1796 and April 1797, Napoleon led French armies to victory over the Austrians in northern Italy. France subsequently gained territory and political influence in Italy with the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 18, 1797), which ended the fighting between Austria and France. But they were back at war again on March 13, 1799, and by the fall of that year virtually all French forces had been driven out of Italy. Napoleon returned to Italy in the spring of 1800 and defeated the Austrians in a series of battles, winning back control of much of Italy in the Treaty of Luneville (February 8, 1801), which ended that round of fighting.

France not only had limited territorial ambitions between 1793 and 1804, but also did not make a serious attempt to conquer any of its great-power rivals. France certainly waged successful military campaigns against Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia, but it did not seriously threaten to knock any of them out of the balance of power. In effect, France’s wars before 1805 were limited in scope, much like the canonical “limited wars” of the preceeding century, which rarely produced decisive victories that led to the conquest of one great power by another.⁹

France’s rivals formed two balancing coalitions between 1793 and 1804, but there was still substantial buck-passing among those threatened states. The first coalition was put in place on February 1, 1793, when Britain joined with Austria and Prussia to check French expansion in Belgium and Holland.¹⁰ But Russia did not join the fighting against France, preferring instead to pursue a bloodletting strategy, where Austria and Prussia would wear themselves down fighting against France.¹¹ Prussia tired of the fighting and quit the coalition on April 5, 1795, which was tantamount to passing the buck to Austria and Britain. In fact, Austria wound up catching the buck, because Britain’s small army could not seriously contest the French army on the continent, whereas the Austrian army stood a fighting chance against that powerful aggressor. Austria did not fare well in its subsequent battles with France, however, and it temporarily quit the war in the fall of 1797, leaving Britain to fight alone against France.

A second balancing coalition was in place by December 29, 1798, and its members were Austria, Britain, and Russia, but not Prussia, which preferred to continue buck-passing. The coalition won some battles against France between March and August 1799, but France turned the tables and won impressive victories against the coalition in September and October 1799. Russia quit the coalition on October 22, 1799, leaving Austria and Britain to contain France. Again, the burden fell squarely on Austria, not Britain. After a handful of battlefield defeats by the French army, Austria signed a peace treaty with France on February 9, 1801. The United Kingdom finally quit fighting on March 25, 1802, when it signed the Treaty of Amiens. This was the first time since the spring of 1792 that Europe was free of great-power war. But the peace, which was really just an armed truce, lasted only fourteen months. Fighting broke out again on May 16, 1803, when the United Kingdom declared war against France.

Between 1805 and 1812, Napoleon shattered the limited-war mold that had shaped European conflict for the previous century.¹² Specifically, he sought to conquer all of Europe and make France its hegemon. By the summer of 1809, France held firm control over all of central Europe and it was fighting to conquer Spain and dominate the Iberian Peninsula, the only area on the western part of the continent that France did not dominate.¹³ In June 1812, France invaded Russia in hopes of winning control of eastern Europe, too. In pursuit of European hegemony, Napoleon conquered other great powers and knocked them out of the balance of power, something that had not happened in the wars fought between 1792 and 1804. For example, France decisively defeated and conquered Austria in 1805. Prussia met the same fate a year later in 1806. Austria briefly came back from the dead in 1809, but Napoleon’s armies decisively defeated it again. In essence, the United Kingdom and Russia were France’s only two great-power opponents for much of the period between 1805 and 1812.

Three more balancing coalitions formed against France during this period. There was some buck-passing for sure, but not as much as there had been between 1792 and 1804. The principal problem that Napoleon’s rivals faced after 1805 was that they were rather inefficient in putting together a formidable balancing coalition, which allowed Napoleon to defeat them piecemeal and knock some of them out of the balance. In short, diplomacy was slower than the sword.¹⁴

The third coalition was put in place on August 9, 1805, when Austria joined forces with the United Kingdom and Russia. Prussia initially opted to buck-pass and stay outside the alliance, because it seemed at the time that the combined strength of the three coalition members was sufficient to contain France, which had not fought a major land battle in Europe since late 1800.¹⁵ In fact, Napoleon had been at peace with his three continental foes since early 1801, although he was still highly aggressive on the diplomatic front. “Peace for Napoleon,” as Paul Schroeder notes, “was a continuation of war by other means.”¹⁶ Moreover, after the United Kingdom and France went back to war in the spring of 1803, Napoleon built a powerful army to cross the English Channel and invade the United Kingdom. La Grande Armée, as it was called, never attacked the United Kingdom, but Napoleon used it to attack the third coalition in the fall of 1805. In the opening round of the fighting, it inflicted a major defeat on the Austrians at Ulm (October 20, 1805).¹⁷ Prussia, recognizing that France was now a serious threat to its survival, took steps to join the coalition. Before that could happen, however, Napoleon defeated the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz on December 2, 1805.¹⁸ After its second major defeat in less than three months, Austria no longer counted as a great power.

Less than a year later, on July 24, 1806, the United Kingdom, Prussia, and Russia formed a fourth coalition. There was no buck-passing this time, for Austria was in no shape to join the coalition. But it mattered little: Napoleon conquered Prussia by winning battles at Jena and Auerstadt on October 14, 1806. Both Austria and Prussia had now been knocked out of the ranks of the great powers. After engaging the Russian army in a bloody stalemate at Eylau (February 8, 1807), Napoleon smashed it on the battlefield at Friedland (June 14, 1807). Soon thereafter, a badly wounded Russia signed the Treaty of Tilsit with Napoleon, which ended the fighting between France and Russia and left France free to wage war against an isolated United Kingdom. Russia was effectively pursuing a buck-passing strategy, pushing France to concentrate on fighting the British, while Russia recovered from its defeats and worked to improve its position in central Europe.

Napoleon’s imposing military triumphs after 1805 account in good part for Russia’s buck-passing, which was the only significant case of buck-passing in the decade before 1815. Russia passed the buck to the United Kingdom from 1807 until 1812, not only because Austria and Prussia had been conquered by France, and thus were unavailable to join a balancing coalition, but also because the major defeats the Russian army suffered in 1805 and 1807 left it in no position to engage the French army without allies on the continent. Better to let Britain and France batter each other while Russia remained on the sidelines, recovering and waiting for a propitious shift in the balance of power.

Austria had regained enough strength by the spring of 1809 to join with the United Kingdom in a fifth coalition against France. Still smarting from its defeats in 1805 and 1807, Russia opted to remain on the sidelines. Austria fought major battles against Napoleon’s armies at Aspern-Essling (May 21–22, 1809) and Wagram (July 5–6, 1909), but again it was decisively defeated and conquered. With both Austria and Prussia removed from the balance of power, Russia was France’s only great power rival on the continent. The Treaty of Tilsit notwithstanding, Napoleon turned on Russia in June 1812, hoping to conquer and eliminate it, too, from the balance of power. The French army, however, suffered a catastrophic defeat in Russia between June and December 1812.¹⁹ At the same time, France’s position in Spain was deteriorating rapidly. By early January 1813, Napoleon at last appeared beatable, not invincible.

Not surprisingly, the sixth balancing coalition against France came together in 1813. Prussia, which was given a desperately needed reprieve by Napoleon’s debacle in Russia, formed an alliance with Russia on February 26, 1813, and then went to war against France less than a month later, on March 17, 1813. The United Kingdom joined the coalition on June 8, 1813, and Austria followed suit, declaring war against France on August 11, 1813. For the first time since fighting broke out in 1792, all four of France’s great-power rivals were allied together in a balancing coalition.²⁰

Despite defeat in Russia and the emergence of a powerful enemy coalition, Napoleon was determined to keep fighting. In 1813, war was waged for control of the Third Germany (now called the “Confederation of the Rhine”), which France had dominated for almost a decade. French forces won some impressive victories at Lutzen and Bautzen in May 1813 and even fared well through the summer of 1813, winning a major battle at Dresden on August 26–27, 1813. But France’s successes were due in good part to the fact that the sixth coalition was still in the process of coming together. In mid-October 1813, when the coalition was finally in place, Napoleon encountered formidable Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies at the Battle of Leipzig. France suffered another devastating defeat and lost Germany for good.

By the end of 1813, France’s rivals were invading its territory; the fight in 1814 would be for France itself. Napoleon’s armies performed surprisingly well in some key battles in February 1814, but despite strains in the balancing coalition, it held together and routed the French army in March, causing Napoleon to abdicate on April 6, 1814.²¹ He was eventually exiled to Elba, from which he escaped back to France in early March 1815. The sixth coalition immediately reconstituted itself on March 25, 1815, and defeated Napoleon for the final time at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. France’s run at hegemony was over.

The Calculus of Power

It is difficult to establish firmly that France had more latent power than any of its great-power rivals, mainly because there are not much reliable data on population and especially wealth for the period between 1792 and 1815. Still, when you consider what is known about those building blocks of military power, there is reason to think that France had more potential power than any other European state.

Although hardly any comparative data on overall state wealth can be found for the Napoleonic period, scholars generally agree that Great Britain and France were the richest states in the international system. A good indicator of Britain’s great wealth is the fact that Britain provided large subsidies to Austria, Prussia, and Russia so that they could build armies that could defeat France, which was certainly not being subsidized by the British or anyone else. The relative wealth of Britain and France is difficult to establish, but there are reasons to think that France was wealthier than Britain, although certainly not by much, for the period in question.²² For example, France had a much larger population than Britain did in 1800—28 versus 16 million (see Table 8.1)—and given two prosperous economies, the one with the larger population is more likely to possess greater overall wealth. Furthermore, like Nazi Germany, France garnered considerable wealth from its occupation and exploitation of much of Europe. One scholar estimates that “Napoleon’s conquests provided the French treasury with 10 to 15 per cent of its annual revenue from 1805 onwards.”²³

Turning to population size, France appears to have had an advantage over its rivals, too. The population figures for 1800 and 1816 in Table 8.1 show that the French outnumbered the British by about 1.5:1 and the Prussians by almost 3:1.²⁴ But the French did not outnumber either the Austrians or the Russians. France’s population was roughly the same size as Austria’s, and it was much smaller than Russia’s. Nevertheless, a critical factor at play effectively shifted the population balance in France’s favor in both the Austrian and the Russian cases.

Population size, as emphasized in Chapter 3, is an important ingredient of military power because it affects the potential size of a state’s army.²⁵ Large populations allow for large armies. But rival states sometimes have markedly different policies regarding who serves in the military, and in those cases, simple comparisons of population size are not particularly useful. This point is relevant for France and its rivals between 1789 and 1815. Prior to the French Revolution, European armies were rather small in size and they were composed mainly of foreign mercenaries and the dregs of a state’s society. In the wake of the revolution, nationalism became a mighty force in France, and it led to the introduction of the novel concept of the “nation in arms.”²⁶ The idea that all persons fit to fight for France should serve the colors was adopted, and thereby the percentage of the population that French leaders could tap for military service increased dramatically. Neither Austria nor Russia, however, was willing to imitate France and adopt the nation-in-arms concept, which meant that compared to France, a significantly smaller percentage of their populations was available for military service. Thus, France was able to raise substantially larger armies than either Austria or Russia, as discussed below.²⁷

Let us now consider actual military power. France did not have the most powerful army in Europe from 1789 to 1792, and thus it was not a potential hegemon.²⁸ In terms of numbers alone, Austria, Prussia, and Russia all had larger armies than did France (see Table 8.2). Only Britain maintained a smaller army than France.²⁹ Furthermore, the French army did not enjoy a qualitative edge over its rivals. In fact, it was in such disarray in the years right after the revolution that it was not clear that it could even protect France against invasion.³⁰ This weakness explains why there was no balancing against France before 1793, and why Austria and Prussia ganged up to attack France in 1792.

During the summer of 1792, when the war was going badly for France, it took steps to transform its army into the most powerful fighting force in Europe. By the early fall of 1793, that goal was achieved, and France clearly was a potential hegemon. The French army remained the preeminent army in Europe from 1793 to 1804. Nevertheless, when you consider both relative size and quality, it was not so powerful that all four of its rivals were compelled to ally against it. Instead, its limitations allowed for considerable buck-passing among France’s opponents.

The French army, which had numbered 150,000 before war broke out in April 1792, tripled in size to 450,000 by November of that year (see Table 8.2), at which point it was the largest army in Europe. But the army began to shrink in size soon afterward; it was down to 290,000, by February 1793, which made it slightly smaller than the Austrian and Russian armies. However, the famous levée en masse was put in place on August 23, 1793, and the size of the army skyrocketed to 700,000 by year’s end, making it overwhelmingly larger than any other European army. France could not maintain those large numbers, however, and by 1795, the army had slimmed down to just over 484,000. But it was still the largest army in Europe. Between 1796 and 1804, French army size fluctuated between a low of 325,000 and a high of 400,000, making it always larger than the Austrian army (300,000), but usually not quite as large as the Russian army (400,000).

Numbers, however, tell only part of the story. The French army gained an important qualitative advantage over rival land forces when France became a nation in arms in the summer of 1792.³¹ Not only were the ranks then filled with individuals who were motivated to fight and die for France, but merit replaced birthright as the principal criterion for selecting and promoting officers. Furthermore, moving to an army of citizen-soldiers infused with patriotism permitted the introduction of novel tactics, which gave French forces an advantage over their rivals on the battlefield. It also allowed for an army that had greater strategic mobility than either its predecessor or the rival armies of the day.

Although the French army enjoyed a marked qualitative advantage over its opponents (who all remained hostile to the nation-in-arms concept) and was the most powerful army in Europe between 1793 and 1804, it had some serious deficiencies. In particular, the army was neither well-trained nor well-disciplined, and it suffered from high desertion rates. “Messy massive armies,” as Geoffrey Best puts it, are what France fought with before 1805.³²

During the period from 1805 to 1813, the power gap between the French army and its rivals widened significantly. Napoleon was largely responsible for this development. He sharply increased the size of the French army by refining its conscription system and by integrating large numbers of foreign troops into its ranks.³³ Thus, the French army grew from 450,000 in 1805 to 700,000 in 1808, to 1 million in 1812, the year France invaded Russia. Even after that debacle, the French army still numbered 850,000 in 1813. As Table 8.2 makes clear, there was no comparable increase in the size of the other European armies between 1805 and 1813.

Napoleon also substantially raised the quality of the French army. He did not make radical changes in the way the army did business, but instead corrected many of the “imperfections” in the existing system.³⁴ He improved training and discipline, for example, and he also improved coordination among the infantry, artillery, and cavalry. In short, the French army after 1805 was more professional and more competent than its immediate predecessor had been. Napoleon was also a brilliant military commander, which gave France a further advantage over its foes.³⁵ France’s rivals made minor modifications in their armies in response to Napoleon, but only Prussia adopted the nation-in-arms concept and modernized its army in a fundamental way.³⁶ Even so, the small Prussian army was no match for the much larger French army in a one-on-one engagement.

France’s imposing power advantage over each of its rivals from 1805 until 1813 explains in large part why all four of them came together in 1813 and then remained together until France was defeated and conquered in 1815. One might ask, however, why did that imposing balancing coalition not come together earlier, say in 1806 or 1810? The main reason for the delay, as emphasized earlier in this chapter, was that Napoleon’s stunning victories on the battlefield made it impossible for all four rivals to form an alliance. After Napoleon conquered Austria in late 1805, there was no time before 1813 when all four of France’s great-power opponents were players in the balance of power. Indeed, for much of the period, both Austria and Prussia were great powers in name only.

Finally, a word about the impact of geography on buck-passing. Austria was the only great power that controlled territory abutting France. Austria and France each shared a border with Italy and the Third Germany, which both of those great powers highly valued as targets. As a result, Austria was too threatened by France to opt out of the fighting by passing the buck. Indeed, it was well-placed to play the unenviable role of buck-catcher. And it did, as it was surely the most put-upon of France’s rivals.³⁷ David Chandler, for example, calculates that among France’s rivals on the continent, Austria was at war with it for 13.5 of the relevant 23 years, whereas Prussia and Russia were each at war with France for only 5.5 years.³⁸

Britain, which is separated from the continent by a large body of water, was the least vulnerable to invasion of France’s foes. Yet Britain was at war with France almost continuously from 1793 onward. Chandler estimates that they were locked in conflict for 21.5 of the relevant 23 years.³⁹ But Britain buck-passed to its continental allies in the sense that it never raised a powerful army to fight on the continent against France. It preferred instead to send small armies to fight in peripheral places like Spain, while subsidizing its allies to do the brunt of the fighting against the French army.⁴⁰ In short, Britain’s geographical location allowed it to act as an offshore balancer.

Russia was located on the other end of the continent from France, with Austria and Prussia in between. So a favorable geographic position allowed Russia to buck-pass, too, especially between 1793 and 1804, when France was mainly concerned with winning hegemony in western Europe.⁴¹ In fact, Russia was at war with France for less than one year during that period. Prussia also did a considerable amount of buck-passing, but that behavior cannot be explained by geography, because Prussia was located in the heart of Europe, not far away from France. Prussia’s success as a buck-passer was largely due to the fact that neighboring Austria was an ideal buck-catcher.

In sum, the pattern of balancing and buck-passing displayed by France’s rivals between 1789 and 1815 can be explained in good part by my theory, which emphasizes the distribution of power and the luck of geography.

Europe was relatively peaceful for almost forty years after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. In fact, no war was fought between any of the great powers until the Crimean War started in 1853. Then the War of Italian Unification, which had Austria and France on opposing sides, broke out in 1859. But neither one of these wars altered the European balance of power in any meaningful way. In contrast, Bismarck initiated a series of wars in the 1860s that transformed Prussia into Germany and fundamentally altered the balance of power in Europe. The next section looks at how the other great powers reacted to this Prussian expansion.

BISMARCKIAN PRUSSIA (1862–70)

Background

Prussia did not become a great power until the mid-eighteenth century, but even then it was probably the weakest European great power until the mid-nineteenth century.⁴² The main reason for its weakness was its small population compared to the other great powers. Consider that Prussia’s population in 1800 was about 9.5 million, while Austria and France each had roughly 28 million people, and Russia had about 37 million people (see Table 8.1). Prussia’s strategic situation changed dramatically between 1864 and 1870, when Bismarck led it to victory in three wars. Prussia actually ceased to exist as a sovereign state after 1870 and instead became the core of a unified Germany that was substantially more powerful than its Prussian predecessor had been.

There was no state called “Germany” when Bismarck was appointed Prussia’s minister-president in September 1862. Instead, an assortment of German-speaking political entities were scattered about the center of Europe, loosely tied together in the German Confederation, an ineffectual political organization set up after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. There were two great powers in the confederation: Austria and Prussia. But it also included medium-sized kingdoms such as Bavaria and Saxony, as well as numerous small states and free cities—all of which I refer to as the “Third Germany.” It was apparent after the revolutions of 1848 that German nationalism was a potent force that was likely to cause some combination of those German political entities to come together to form a unified German state. The question of the day was whether Austria or Prussia would be the core of that new state—essentially, which great power would absorb the Third Germany? The wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870–71 resolved that issue in Prussia’s favor.

Besides Austria and Prussia, there were four other great powers in Europe in the 1860s: the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Russia (see Map 8.2). But Italy did not have significant influence on the events surrounding German unification, although it did fight with Prussia against Austria in 1866. Italy was a spanking new state that was especially weak relative to the other great powers. Therefore, the key issue is how Austria, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia reacted to Bismarck’s efforts to transform Prussia into Germany. As will become apparent, buck-passing was their preferred strategy, and although Austria and France balanced against Prussia at different times, they did so only when they had no alternative.

The Strategic Behavior of the Great Powers

Prussia’s first war under Bismarck (1864) was a straightforward case of two great powers, Austria and Prussia, ganging up to attack a minor power, Denmark.⁴³ Their aim was to take the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein away from Denmark. There was widespread sentiment within the German Confederation that those areas should be part of some German political entity, not Denmark, because almost all of Holstein’s and about half of Schleswig’s population spoke German and thus should be considered German nationals. Austria and Prussia had little difficulty defeating Denmark, but they were unable to agree on who should control Schleswig and Holstein. The United Kingdom, France, and Russia stood aside while Denmark went down to defeat.

Prussia fought Austria in 1866, although Italy, which was a bitter rival of Austria, joined with Prussia in that fight.⁴⁴ The war was caused in part by the lingering dispute between Austria and Prussia over what to do with Schleswig and Holstein. But the more important issue at stake was which of these great powers would dominate a united Germany. The Prussian army easily defeated the Austrian army and Prussia gained control of the northern portion of the Third Germany. No other great power intervened to help Austria. Finally, Prussia went to war with France in 1870.⁴⁵ Bismarck engineered the war on the assumption that a military victory could be used to complete German unification. France fought mainly for territorial compensation to offset Prussia’s gains in 1866. The Prussian army decisively defeated the French army, and Prussia took Alsace and part of Lorraine from France. More important, Prussia gained control of the southern half of the Third Germany, which meant that Bismarck had finally created a united Germany. Europe’s other great powers remained on the sidelines while the French army was routed.

It is not surprising that none of the European great powers balanced against Austria and Prussia in 1864, because the stakes were small. Neither Austria nor Prussia was an especially formidable military power, and it was not clear which one of them, if either, would ultimately control Schleswig and Holstein. But the conflicts of 1866 and 1870 are a different matter. Those wars fundamentally altered the European balance of power in Prussia’s favor. At first glance, one would have expected the United Kingdom, France, and Russia to have balanced with Austria against Prussia in 1866, and Austria, the United Kingdom, and Russia to have done the same with France in 1870. Instead, they all pursued buck-passing strategies, and Austria was left standing alone against Prussia in 1866, while France found itself in the same position in 1870.

The buck-passing that took place in Europe between 1864 and 1870 was motivated by two different rationales. The United Kingdom and Russia actually welcomed Prussia’s victories, because they believed that a unified Germany served their strategic interests.⁴⁶ Both felt that France was the most threatening great power in Europe, and that a strong Germany on France’s doorstep would help keep it in check. In essence, the United Kingdom and Russia were pursuing a buck-passing strategy, but their aim was not to get another state to balance against Prussia, which they did not consider a threat, but instead to create a powerful Germany that could balance against France, which they did fear. The United Kingdom also thought that a unified Germany would help keep Russia’s attention focused on Europe, and away from central Asia, where the British and the Russians were fierce rivals. Furthermore, Russia saw a powerful Germany as a check on Austria, which had recently become Russia’s bitter enemy. Still, fear of France was the main driving force behind British and Russian thinking.

Austria and France buck-passed for different reasons. Unlike the United Kingdom and Russia, they feared a unified Germany on their doorstep, because it would pose a direct threat to their survival. Nevertheless, they did not balance together against Prussia; instead they passed the buck to each other, allowing Bismarck to defeat each of them in turn. In fact, there is evidence that France welcomed a bloodletting between Austria and Prussia in 1866, because France believed it would gain relative power in the process.⁴⁷ The main reason for this buck-passing was that each thought the other could stop the Prussian army and thwart Bismarck’s ambitions without help from another great power. Indeed, it was widely believed in Europe that Austria and France each had the military wherewithal to win a war against Prussia.⁴⁸ France not only had Napoleon’s legacy on its side, but more concretely, had recently scored victories in the Crimean War (1853–56) and the War of Italian Unification (1859).

There are other reasons why Austria and France failed to form a balancing coalition against Prussia. For example, Bismarck was remarkably skillful at using diplomacy to isolate his targets. Furthermore, Austria and France had fought against each other in 1859, and residual animosity from that conflict hindered relations in the 1860s.⁴⁹ Austria also worried in 1870 that if it sided with France, Russia might attack Austria from the east.⁵⁰ Finally, the Austrian army was still recuperating in 1870 from the battering it had sustained in 1866, and thus it was not in good shape to take on the Prussian army again. Although these considerations contributed to Austrian and French buck-passing, they would have mattered little if French policymakers had believed Austria needed help against Prussia, and vice versa. In all likelihood, they would have worked togther to stop Bismarck from creating a unified Germany.

The Calculus of Power

This prolific buck-passing during the 1860s can be explained in good part by Prussia’s position in the European balance of power. Prussia was certainly not a potential hegemon, and although its army grew increasingly powerful over the course of the decade, it was never so powerful that rival great powers saw fit to form a balancing coalition against it. A potential hegemon, as emphasized throughout this book, must be wealthier than any of its regional rivals and must possess the most powerful army in the area. But the United Kingdom, not Bismarckian Prussia, controlled the largest share of potential power in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The United Kingdom controlled about 68 percent of European wealth in 1860, whereas France controlled 14 percent and Prussia only 10 percent (see Table 3.3). By 1870, the United Kingdom still controlled roughly 64 percent of European industrial might, while Germany controlled 16 percent and France 13 percent.⁵¹

Regarding the military balance in the 1860s, there is not much doubt that France and Prussia possessed the most powerful armies. France was surely number one between 1860 and 1866, which is why Britain and Russia looked approvingly on Bismarck’s effort to create a unified Germany. Prussia’s army was among the weakest European armies at the start of the decade, but it was the most powerful by 1867, and remained in the top position through 1870.⁵² Austria had a strong army during the first half of the decade, but its power waned after 1866.⁵³ Russia maintained a very large but rather inefficient army that had little power-projection capability but was capable of defending Russia against a major attack by another great power.⁵⁴ Finally, although the United Kingdom had much more latent power than any of its rivals, it maintained a small and inefficient army that counted for little in the balance of power.⁵⁵

Of course, the United Kingdom’s and Russia’s relative military weakness hardly mattered for checking Bismarck, because both states wanted Prussia to transform itself into Germany. What mattered most in 1866 and 1870 was how power was distributed among Austria, France, and Prussia.⁵⁶ Looking at numbers alone in 1866, the Austrian army was certainly a match for the Prussian army (see Table 8.3).⁵⁷ Austria’s standing army had an advantage of 1.25:1. After each side’s reserves were mobilized, Austria enjoyed a similar advantage. At the crucial battle of Koniggratz on July 3, 1866, an Austrian army of 270,000 faced a Prussian army of 280,000.⁵⁸ But the Prussian army was qualitatively better than the Austrian army.⁵⁹ Prussian soldiers employed breech-loading rifles, which gave them an important advantage over their Austrian counterparts, who were armed with muzzle-loading rifles. The Prussian army also had a superior staff system, and the Austrian army’s multi-ethnic makeup was beginning to impair its fighting power, although the problem was still manageable in 1866. On the other hand, the Austrian army had much better artillery and cavalry than the Prussian army. Considering both quantity and quality, the Prussian army held a distinct though not large power advantage over the Austrian army. This rough balance of power between Austria and Prussia encouraged France to buck-pass in 1866.⁶⁰

France still possessed Europe’s most powerful army in 1866, and it could have contained Bismarck by making an alliance with Austria. Unlike Austria and Prussia, France still relied heavily on its standing army, while showing little interest in mobilizable reserves. Nevertheless, France’s standing army in 1866 still outnumbered Prussia’s fully mobilized army by some 458,000 to 370,000. Furthermore, there was little difference in the quality of the two armies at that point. The balance of power, however, shifted against the French army and in the Prussian army’s favor between 1866 and 1870, although that change was not widely recognized at the time.

After observing Prussia’s success with its mobilized reserves in the war of 1866, France shrunk the size of its standing army and began building a reserve system of its own. Four years later, the French army had a formidable reserve structure on paper. It was inefficient in practice, however, especially compared to the Prussian system, and this difference mattered greatly when France declared war on July 19, 1870.⁶¹ By that point, France’s standing army was still more powerful than Prussia’s, but whereas Prussia was able to mobilize 1,183,000 soldiers at the start of the war, France could only muster 530,870 soldiers. France eventually managed to mobilize all of its reserves, and over the course of the war, it mobilized more than half a million more men than Prussia. Prussia had a small advantage in army quality by 1870, mainly because it had a superior general staff system and its reserves were better trained than were the French reserves.⁶² However, French infantrymen were better armed than their Prussian counterparts, although that advantage was offset by Prussia’s breech-loading artillery.

On balance, the Prussian army was markedly more powerful than the French army in 1870, mainly because of the sharp asymmetry between them in short-term mobilization capability. Given this imbalance, Austria should have allied with France against Prussia. But that did not happen, because Austrian and French policymakers miscalculated the balance of power. Both of Prussia’s rivals mistakenly believed that the French army could mobilize reserves as rapidly and effectively as the Prussian army.⁶³ Indeed, France’s leaders thought that Prussia would have difficulty mobilizing its reserves, thus providing France with an important military advantage. However, Prussia correctly recognized that France’s mobilization would be ragged at best, and that the Prussian army would therefore have a significant advantage on the battlefield.⁶⁴ Not surprisingly, Bismarck did not hesitate to go to war against France when the opportunity came in the summer of 1870.

Finally, buck-passing in this case was not heavily influenced by geographical considerations. The United Kingdom was separated from Prussia by the English Channel, but that geographical fact appears to have had little effect on British policy toward Prussia, which was driven mainly by British fear of France. Austria, France, and Russia all shared a common border with Prussia, so geography cannot help account for their different responses to Bismarck’s efforts to create a unified Germany. Prussia’s four potential rivals were certainly well-positioned to strike into Prussian territory, had they seen fit to form a balancing coalition. But they did not, mainly because the distribution of power in Europe between 1862 and 1870 encouraged buck-passing.

WILHELMINE GERMANY (1890–1914)

Background

When Bismarck stepped down as chancellor in March 1890, Germany was not yet a potential hegemon, although it had a large and growing population, a dynamic economy, and a formidable army. Those combined assets caused much anxiety among Europe’s other great powers in the last decade of the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, however, Germany was a full-fledged potential hegemon that was gaining more relative power every year. Not surprisingly, fear of Germany pervaded European politics between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.

Besides Germany, there were five other great powers in Europe during this period: Austria-Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Russia (see Map 6.2).

Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Germany were all members of the Triple Alliance. Austria-Hungary was an especially weak great power with a dim future.⁶⁵ In fact, it disintegrated forever at the end of World War I. Nationalism was the principal source of Austria-Hungary’s weakness. It was a multinational state, and most of its composite ethnic groups wanted independent states of their own. Austria-Hungary and Germany were closely allied before World War I. Austria-Hungary had serious territorial disputes with Russia in eastern Europe and the Balkans, and needed Germany to help protect it from the tsar’s armies. Germany, on the other hand, had a vested interest in keeping Austria-Hungary intact so that it could help block Russian expansion.

Italy was also an especially weak great power. The problem in Italy was not nationalism, which had actually helped unify the country in 1860, but the fact that Italy had little industrial might and an army that was prone to catastrophic defeat.⁶⁶ A key British diplomat was not joking when he said in 1909, “We have no desire to seduce Italy from the Triple Alliance, since she would rather be a thorn in the side than any assistance to France and ourselves.”⁶⁷ Italy was not seriously committed to the Triple Alliance by the early twentieth century, however, because its troubles with France, which are what originally caused the alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, had largely gone away, while its relations with Austria-Hungary had deteriorated.⁶⁸ In effect, Italy was a neutral state before World War I. Not surprisingly, when the war started, Italy remained neutral and then in May 1915 joined with the Allies to fight against its own erstwhile allies, Austria-Hungary and Germany.

The United Kingdom, France, and Russia were all much more powerful than Austria-Hungary and Italy, and they were determined to stop Germany from establishing hegemony in Europe. Therefore, the key issue is how these three great powers reacted to Wilhelmine Germany’s growing might between 1890 and 1914. As will become apparent, there was little buck-passing among the Kaiserreich’s rivals. Instead, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia formed a balancing coalition—the Triple Entente—seven years before the start of World War I.

The Strategic Behavior of the Great Powers

France and Russia, the continental powers sitting across Germany’s western and eastern borders, negotiated an alliance between 1890 and 1894 that was designed to contain Germany.⁶⁹ However, neither partner thought it likely that Germany would attack it at the time or in the immediate future. France and Russia were mainly interested in making sure that Germany did not cause trouble in Europe, so that they could pursue important goals in other regions of the world. Relations between the United Kingdom and Germany experienced a marked chill in the early 1890s, but the United Kingdom showed little inclination to ally with France and Russia against Germany.⁷⁰ In fact, the United Kingdom was frequently at loggerheads with its future allies during the 1890s, and almost went to war with France in 1898 over the Nile fort of Fashoda.⁷¹

There was no significant change between 1894 and 1904 in how the future members of the Triple Entente reacted to the German threat. France and Russia remained allies, committed to containing the Kaiserreich by threatening it with the specter of a two-front war. Anglo-German relations were badly strained at the turn of the century by Germany’s efforts to build a formidable navy with its own version of the British empire (Weltpolitik). But the United Kingdom did not join forces with France and Russia to balance against Germany, although fear of Germany caused a marked improvement in Anglo-French relations between 1903 and 1904.⁷² They signed the Entente Cordiale on April 8, 1904, which effectively put an end to their bitter rivalry in areas outside of Europe. This agreement was not an alliance against Germany in disguise, although it certainly made that alliance easier to consummate after 1905. In effect, the United Kingdom, acting as a classic offshore balancer, was buck-passing; it was relying on France and Russia to contain German expansion on the European continent. Of course, rejecting a continental commitment meant that the United Kingdom did not have to build a powerful army, which allowed it to concentrate on maintaining the world’s most powerful navy.

There was dramatic change in the constellation of forces in Europe between 1905 and 1907, and when the dust had settled, the United Kingdom was allied with France and Russia in the Triple Entente.⁷³ The United Kingdom was pushed toward accepting a continental commitment by the simple fact that Germany had the earmarkings of a potential hegemon by 1905.⁷⁴ But other considerations also affected British calculations. Japan inflicted a devastating defeat on Russia in 1905, effectively knocking it out of the European balance of power and leaving France without its main ally.⁷⁵ To make matters worse, while Russia was going down to defeat, Germany initiated a major diplomatic crisis with France over Morocco. The goal was to isolate and humiliate France, which no longer had a reliable Russian ally and was not allied with the United Kingdom at the time.

British policymakers quickly understood that buck-passing was no longer a viable policy, because France alone could not contain Germany.⁷⁶ Thus, in late 1905, the United Kingdom began moving toward a continental commitment. Specifically, it began organizing a small expeditionary force to fight alongside the French army on the continent, and it initiated staff talks between the British and French armies to coordinate plans for fighting together against Germany.⁷⁷ At the same time, the United Kingdom began working to improve relations with Russia, which were badly strained over their rivalry in Asia. The Anglo-Russian Convention, the third and final leg of the Triple Entente, was consummated on August 31, 1907.⁷⁸ The aim was to make sure that the United Kingdom and Russia did not become involved in a serious dispute outside of Europe (especially in central Asia), so that they could work together inside of Europe to contain Germany.

Although the United Kingdom, France, and Russia had formed a balancing coalition against Germany by the summer of 1907, the British impulse to buck-pass never completely disappeared. For example, the United Kingdom never made an explicit commitment to fight with its allies if Germany attacked them.⁷⁹ The Triple Entente was not a tightly organized and formal alliance like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would be during the Cold War. Furthermore, when it became apparent in 1911 that the Russian army had recovered from its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, it was once again possible to imagine France and Russia checking Germany without help from the British army. Consequently, Anglo-Russian relations became testy again and the Triple Entente wobbled a bit.⁸⁰ Finally, when war broke out, the United Kingdom tried to get France and Russia to pay the awful price of defeating the mighty German army while it remained on the sidelines, preserving itself for the postwar period.⁸¹ These hesitations notwithstanding, the United Kingdom did not abandon its continental commitment after 1907, and it went to war alongside France and Russia in the early days of August 1914. It also committed a mass army to the western front and did its fair share of fighting against the formidable German army.

In sum, we see relatively efficient balancing against Germany in the two and a half decades before World War I. France and Russia joined forces to check Germany between 1890 and 1905, while the United Kingdom buck-passed. There was little buck-passing after 1905, however, as the United Kingdom joined forces with France and Russia to try to keep the Kaiserreich at bay. This pattern of behavior by Germany’s foes can be explained in large part by geography and Germany’s evolving position in the European balance of power from 1890 to 1914.

The Calculus of Power

Let us start with the period between 1890 and 1905. Germany was not a potential hegemon until the end of this period, mainly because the United Kingdom controlled more latent power than Germany did until 1903. For example, the United Kingdom controlled 50 percent of European wealth in 1890, while Germany controlled 25 percent (see Table 3.3). France’s share was 13 percent, and Russia’s was a mere 5 percent. The United Kingdom still held an advantage over Germany in 1900, but it was only 37 percent to 34 percent. Moreover, France’s share had shrunk to 11 percent, although Russia’s had increased to 10 percent. Germany was rapidly reaching the point where it would have sufficient industrial might to be a potential hegemon. Indeed, it reached that point in 1903, when its share of European wealth reached 36.5 percent, and the United Kingdom’s fell to 34.5 percent.⁸² There was never much question that by the early twentieth century Germany had substantially more latent power than did either France or Russia.

Regarding actual military power, France and Germany were clearly the two most powerful armies in Europe between 1890 and 1905. As David Herrmann notes, “the French and German armies dominated the stage in the perceptions of military experts,” in the pre–World War I era.⁸³ But the German army was the more formidable of the two fighting forces. The standing armies of France and Germany, as well as their fully mobilized armies, were of roughly equal size during this period (see Tables 6.1 and 8.4). The key difference, however, was in how each army used its reserves. A large portion of Germany’s reserves was trained for combat and organized into fighting units that were expected to participate in the opening battles of a major European war. The French, on the other hand, did not believe in training their reserves to fight alongside the standing army. Thus, although there was not much difference in the size of the fully mobilized French and German armies, the German army could generate substantially larger combat forces. If war had broken out in 1905, the Germans would have had roughly 1.5 million soldiers in their fighting armies, whereas the French would have had about 840,000, which translates into a 1.8:1 advantage for Germany.⁸⁴ Finally, the German army enjoyed a moderate qualitative edge over its French rival, mainly because of its superior general staff and its advantage in heavy artillery.

Russia possessed Europe’s largest army between 1890 and 1905, but it was plagued with serious problems, which relegated it to a distant third place behind the German and French armies.⁸⁵ Japan’s army took advantage of those deficiencies in the 1904–5 war and inflicted a punishing defeat on the Russian army. The British army was small and ill-prepared for continental warfare before 1905, and thus hardly mattered in the balance of power. As Herrmann notes, “Surveys of the European armies with their strengths and equipment, compiled by general staffs from Paris and Berlin to Vienna and Rome, very often simply left the British out altogether.”⁸⁶

Germany was clearly a potential hegemon in the decade before World War I. Regarding latent power, Germany controlled 40 percent of European industrial might by 1913; the United Kingdom controlled 28 percent (see Table 3.3).⁸⁷ Also, by that point, Germany had more than a 3:1 advantage in potential power over France and Russia, whose shares of industrial might were 12 percent and 11 percent, respectively. Furthermore, the German army remained the dominant army in Europe after 1905. Indeed, it began a serious expansion program in early 1912. When war broke out in 1914, Germany was able to place 1.71 million soldiers in front-line combat units, while France could muster only 1.07 million (see Table 8.4). Of course, Germany’s great advantage in potential power allowed it to mobilize far more men than France over the course of the war: 13.25 million versus 8.6 million. The Russian army was badly crippled by its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and began to show signs of recovery only in 1911. However, it was still far inferior to the French and German armies. The post-1905 British army was small, but it was a high-quality fighting force, especially when compared to the Russian army. The British army was probably the third best in Europe during the decade before World War I, while Russia’s was fourth best, a reverse of the situation before 1905.

Given that Germany was the most powerful state on the continent from 1890 until 1905 but was not a potential hegemon until 1903, it makes sense that France and Russia balanced together against Germany, while the United Kingdom stayed offshore and pursued a buck-passing strategy. By 1905, however, the Kaiserreich was clearly a potential hegemon, and thus a much more serious threat to the balance of power, especially after the Russian defeat that year. Not surprisingly, the United Kingdom stopped passing the buck and balanced with France and Russia against Germany, a commitment it saw through until Germany was finally defeated in November 1918.

Finally, geography was no hindrance to balancing against the Kaiserreich. France and Russia shared a common border with Germany, which made it easy for them to attack or threaten to attack into German territory. Of course, that proximity also made it easy for Germany to invade France and Russia, which certainly provided them with an incentive to form a balancing coalition against Germany. The United Kingdom was separated from Germany by the English Channel, which made buck-passing a more viable option for the United Kingdom than for either France or Russia. But once the United Kingdom abandoned buck-passing and accepted a continental commitment, it could readily bring pressure to bear against Germany by transporting its army to France, which it did in 1914.

NAZI GERMANY (1933–41)

Background

France was the most powerful state in Europe between the end of World War I (1918) and when Hitler became German chancellor on January 30, 1933. It maintained a formidable army and paid serious attention to defending its eastern border against a German attack (see Table 8.5). Germany presented no threat to France during this period, however, because Weimar Germany was barely capable of defending itself, much less attacking into France. Germany certainly had the requisite population and wealth to build the mightiest army in Europe, but it was hamstrung by the Versailles Treaty (1919), which took the strategically important Rhineland away from Germany and placed it under international control and also prohibited Weimar from building a powerful military machine.

The Soviet Union, too, was an especially weak great power in the fifteen years after World War I, which explains in good part why Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union cooperated extensively with each other before 1933.⁸⁸ Soviet leaders faced many problems in the 1920s as they tried to rebuild after the destruction wrought by World War I, revolution, civil war, and a lost war against Poland. But the chief problem they faced was their backward economy, which could not support a first-class military establishment. Josef Stalin initiated a major modernization program in 1928 to rectify this problem. It eventually worked, but the fruits of his ruthless industrialization policy were realized only after the Nazis came to power. The United Kingdom maintained a small army in the 1920s that was probably more concerned with fighting in the British Empire than on the European continent. Italy, which had been under Benito Mussolini’s rule since 1922, was the weakest great power in Europe.

European leaders realized soon after Hitler took the reins of power that Germany would throw off the shackles of Versailles and attempt to alter the balance of power in its favor. But how quickly Hitler would move, in what directions he would move, and just how aggressive Nazi Germany would be were not clear during his first five years in power. Unlike contemporary students of international relations, Hitler’s counterparts across Europe did not have the benefit of hindsight. The picture began to come into focus in 1938, first when he incorporated Austria into the Third Reich, and then when he forced the United Kingdom and France to let him take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. It became crystal clear in 1939. In March 1939, the Wehrmacht conquered all of Czechoslovakia, the first time that Nazi Germany had acquired territory that was not heavily populated with ethnic Germans. Six months later, in September, the Nazis attacked Poland and started World War II. Less than a year later, in May 1940, Hitler invaded France, and a little over a year after that, in June 1941, he sent the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union.

The same three states that worked to contain Wilhelmine Germany before 1914—the United Kingdom, France, and Russia—were Nazi Germany’s principal rivals between 1933 and 1941. Although the cast of characters was essentially unchanged, Hitler’s opponents mainly buck-passed among each other in the face of the Third Reich’s aggressive behavior, rather than forming a balancing coalition, as their predecessors had.

The Strategic Behavior of the Great Powers

Hitler was not in a good position to act aggressively on the foreign policy front during his early years in office. He first had to consolidate his political position at home and revitalize the German economy. Moreover, the German military he inherited was in no shape to fight a major war anytime soon. Consider that the mobilized German army that went to war in 1914 was composed of 2.15 million soldiers and 102 divisions.⁸⁹ The 1933 version of that army had a little over 100,000 soldiers and 7 infantry divisions. Hitler and his generals, however, were determined to rectify that problem by overthrowing the Versailles Treaty and building a formidable military instrument. Still, it took about six years to achieve that goal.

Three major building plans underpinned the growth of the German army.⁹⁰ In December 1933, Hitler mandated that the peacetime strength of the army be increased threefold, to 300,000 soldiers and 21 infantry divisions. New reserve units were also to be created, so that the fully mobilized field army would have 63 divisions. In March 1935, a new law stipulated that the peacetime army would grow to 700,000 with 36 infantry divisions. Conscription was introduced at the same time, although it did not go into effect until October 1, 1935, the same month that Hitler decided to build 3 panzer divisons in addition to the 36 infantry divisions. The projected size of the field army, however, remained “practically unchanged at 63 to 73” divisions.⁹¹ Finally, the August 1936 Rearmament Program called for building a peacetime army of 830,000 with roughly 44 divisions by October 1940. The fully mobilized field army was to comprise 4.62 million soldiers and 102 divisions. When World War II started on September 1, 1939, the German army contained 3.74 million soldiers and 103 divisions.

Hitler also pushed to create a powerful navy and air force during the 1930s.⁹² The development of the German navy was rather haphazard and unimpressive, but the building of the Luftwaffe was a different story. Germany had no combat-ready air squadrons when Hitler took office in 1933, because the Versailles Treaty outlawed a German air force. By August 1939, however, the Luftwaffe could claim 302 combat-ready squadrons. As Wilhelm Deist notes, “The spectacular development of the Luftwaffe in the six years from 1933 until the outbreak of the war aroused the boundless admiration as well as dark forebodings of contemporaries.”⁹³

Until Germany had a powerful army, Hitler was not in a good position to redraw the map of Europe by the threat or use of force. Thus, Nazi foreign policy was relatively tame before 1938. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in October 1933, but he also signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland in January 1934, and a naval treaty with the United Kingdom in June 1935. The Wehrmacht did occupy and remilitarize the Rhineland in March 1936, but that was widely recognized to be German territory, even though the Versailles Treaty mandated that it be permanently demilitarized.⁹⁴ There was no overt German aggression in 1938, but Hitler twice used threats that year to acquire new territory. He compelled German-speaking Austria to join the Third Reich in March 1938 (the infamous Anschluss), and then at Munich in September 1938, he used threats and bluster to get the United Kingdom and France to detach the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia and give it to Nazi Germany. By 1939, Hitler finally possessed a potent military instrument, and he turned to overt aggression that same year.

The United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union all feared Nazi Germany, and they each paid serious attention to devising a viable containment strategy. However, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union, there was little interest among them in putting together a balancing coalition like the Triple Entente that might deter Hitler by threatening Germany with a two-front war. Instead, each preferred buck-passing. Between 1933 and March 1939, there was no alliance between any of Hitler’s great-power rivals. The United Kingdom buck-passed to France, which tried to push Hitler eastward against the smaller states of eastern Europe and possibly the Soviet Union, which in turn tried to pass the buck to the United Kingdom and France. In March 1939, the United Kingdom finally joined forces with France against the Third Reich, but the Soviet Union did not join with its former allies. After Germany knocked France out of the war in June 1940, the United Kingdom tried to ally with the Soviet Union but failed because the Soviets preferred to continue buck-passing.

Although Hitler’s rivals showed little interest in creating an anti-German balancing coalition, both France and the Soviet Union went to considerable lengths in the 1930s to maintain armies that could stand up to the Wehrmacht. They did so to increase the likelihood that buck-passing would work, because the more powerful each was, the less likely that Hitler would attack it. Strong armies were also an insurance policy to protect them in the event that 1) they ended up catching the buck and facing the Nazi war machine alone, or 2) buck-passing worked, but the buck-catcher failed to contain the Wehrmacht.

The United Kingdom’s initial strategy for dealing with Hitler was to pass the buck to France, which probably had the most powerful military in Europe during the mid-1930s.⁹⁵ British leaders recognized that France would get little assistance from the Soviet Union, which was fine by them, but they hoped that France’s alliances with eastern Europe’s minor powers (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia) would help France contain Hitler. The United Kingdom had powerful incentives to buck-pass in Europe, because it also faced threats from Japan in Asia and Italy in the Mediterranean, and its anemic economy could not provide for a substantial military presence in all three of those regions.

Given this dangerous threat environment, the United Kingdom sharply increased defense spending in 1934, more than tripling its defense budget by 1938.⁹⁶ But on December 12, 1937, the United Kingdom decided not to build an army to fight alongside France on the continent. Indeed, the British cabinet decided to starve the army of funds, a move that was certainly consistent with a buck-passing strategy. Spending on the air force was emphasized instead, to deter Hitler from launching the Luftwaffe against the British homeland.

Nevertheless, it became apparent by late 1938 that France needed the United Kingdom’s help to contain Nazi Germany. Not only was the Wehrmacht on the verge of becoming a formidable military instrument, but the Anschluss and Munich had delivered the death blow to France’s already weak alliance system in eastern Europe. The United Kingdom finally abandoned buck-passing and formed a balancing coalition with France in March 1939, shortly after Hitler conquered Czechoslovakia.⁹⁷ At the same time, the United Kingdom began racing to build an army to fight in France in the event of war. The United Kingdom showed a modicum of interest in forging an alliance with the Soviet Union but ultimately found no basis for resurrecting the Triple Entente.⁹⁸

The United Kingdom and France declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939, two days after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. But they did not fight against the German army until the spring of 1940, when Hitler struck in the west and knocked France out of the war. By the summer of 1940, a badly weakened United Kingdom stood alone against Nazi Germany. British leaders tried to form a balancing coalition with the Soviet Union against Hitler, but they failed, mainly because Stalin continued to pursue a buck-passing strategy. He hoped to see the United Kingdom and Germany engage in a long war, while the Soviet Union stayed out of the fighting.⁹⁹ The United Kingdom and the Soviet Union finally came together in an alliance after the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941.

France, too, was committed to buck-passing.¹⁰⁰ During the 1920s, well before Hitler came to power, France formed alliances with some of the small states in eastern Europe for the purpose of containing a future German threat. Those alliances remained in place after 1933, which might seem to indicate that France was not buck-passing but was committed to building a balancing coalition against Nazi Germany. In reality, however, those alliances were largely moribund by the mid-1930s, in good part because France had no intention of coming to the aid of its allies, as it demonstrated when it abandoned Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938.¹⁰¹ Indeed, France hoped to push Hitler eastward, where it hoped the Wehrmacht would get bogged down in a war in eastern Europe or maybe even the Soviet Union. “France’s military policy,” as Arnold Wolfers notes, “tends to prove that, notwithstanding her far-flung commitments on the Vistula and the Danube, she was more concerned about receiving than about giving support, more preoccupied with the defense of her own soil than with the protection of small countries.”¹⁰²

To encourage Hitler to strike first in the East, French leaders went to some lengths during the 1930s to foster good relations with the Third Reich. That policy remained in place even after Munich.¹⁰³ On the other hand, France made no serious effort to form a balancing coalition with the Soviet Union. Geography certainly worked against that alliance (see Map 8.3). The Soviet Union did not share a common border with Germany, which meant that in the event of a Wehrmacht attack against France, the Red Army would have to move through Poland to strike at Germany. Not surprisingly, Poland was categorically opposed to that idea.¹⁰⁴ More generally, a Franco-Soviet alliance would have alienated the minor powers in eastern Europe, since they tended to fear the Soviet Union more than Germany, and it probably would have caused them to ally with Hitler, which would have undermined France’s buck-passing strategy.

France was also discouraged from approaching the Soviet Union by concern that a Franco-Soviet alliance would ruin any chance that the United Kingdom might join forces with France against Nazi Germany. Not only were most British leaders hostile to the Soviet Union because they despised and feared communism, but if France had a reliable Soviet ally, it would not need the United Kingdom, which would then be free to continue buck-passing to France.¹⁰⁵ Finally, France did not form an alliance with Stalin because French leaders sought to encourage Hitler to strike first against the Soviet Union rather than France, and in the event that that happened, they had no intention of coming to the aid of Moscow. In short, France was buck-passing to the Soviet Union as well as to the smaller states of eastern Europe.

France’s interest in passing the buck to the Soviet Union was reinforced by the widespread belief that Stalin was trying to buck-pass to France, which many French policymakers took as evidence that the Soviets were unreliable alliance partners.¹⁰⁶ Of course, many Soviet policymakers recognized what the French were up to, which just reinforced Stalin’s interest in buck-passing, which, in turn, confirmed French suspicions that the Soviets were buck-passing to them.¹⁰⁷ As a consequence of all these factors, France showed little interest in allying with the Soviet Union against Hitler during the 1930s.

The United Kingdom’s buck-passing notwithstanding, French leaders worked hard throughout the 1930s to get the United Kingdom to commit itself to the defense of France.¹⁰⁸ They prized an Anglo-French alliance because it would increase the likelihood that their buck-passing strategy would work. The combination of British and French military might make a German offensive in the west less likely, and thus increased the probability that the Wehrmacht would strike first in the east. Moreover, if buck-passing failed, fighting with the United Kingdom against the Wehrmacht was clearly preferable to fighting it alone. France also mobilized its own resources to facilitate buck-passing and to protect itself in the event of a buck-passing failure. Little was done to increase French defense spending during Hitler’s first two years in office, probably because France had a relatively powerful military when Hitler came to power in 1933. But starting in 1935, the size of the annual defense budget grew constantly and sharply as different French governments sought to maintain a military that could stymie a Wehrmacht offensive. For example, France spent 7.5 billion francs on defense in 1935, 11.2 billion francs in 1937, and 44.1 billion francs in 1939.¹⁰⁹

Scholars disagree substantially about Soviet policy for dealing with Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1938. Stalin’s strategy for the period from 1939 to 1941 is more straightforward and less controversial.

There are three main schools of thought on Soviet policy in the mid-1930s. Some claim that Stalin, not Hitler, was driving events in Europe, and that the Soviet leader pursued a bait-and-bleed strategy. Specifically, it is argued, Stalin intervened in German politics to help Hitler become chancellor because he believed that the Nazis would start a war against the United Kingdom and France, which would work to the Soviets’ advantage.¹¹⁰ Others contend that Stalin was determined to build a balancing coalition with the United Kingdom and France to confront Nazi Germany, but this effort at “collective security” failed because the Western powers refused to cooperate with him.¹¹¹ Finally, some argue that Stalin was pursuing a buck-passing strategy,¹¹² the aim of which was to foster cooperation with Hitler while working to undermine Germany’s relations with the United Kingdom and France, so that Hitler would be inclined to attack them first. That approach would not only facilitate passing the buck to the Western great powers but would also create opportunities for Hitler and Stalin to gang up on small states in eastern Europe, such as Poland.

Although Stalin was certainly a clever strategist at times, there is insufficient evidence to support the bait-and-bleed thesis. There is, however, considerable evidence that he pushed both the collective security and buck-passing strategies between 1934 and 1938.¹¹³ This is not surprising, since the political landscape in Europe was undergoing rapid and fundamental change in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power, and it was not clear where events were leading. Historian Adam Ulam puts the point well: “Confronted with a terrible danger, the Soviets felt a desperate need to keep all the options open, hoping that one of them would enable the [Soviet Union] to postpone or avoid an actual entanglement in war.”¹¹⁴

Nevertheless, on balance, the available evidence from the mid-1930s suggests that buck-passing was Stalin’s preferred strategy for dealing with Nazi Germany. Buck-passing, of course, is an attractive strategy, which is why the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union were all pursuing it.¹¹⁵ If it works as designed, the buck-passer avoids the heavy costs of fighting the aggressor and might even gain relative power. Granted, Stalin’s buck-passing strategy ultimately failed when France fell in June 1940. But Stalin had no way of knowing that would happen. Indeed, there was good reason at the time to think that the United Kingdom and France would hold their own against the Wehrmacht. Buck-passing in Europe was also attractive because the Soviets faced a serious threat from Japan in the Far East throughout the 1930s.¹¹⁶

Furthermore, Stalin surely recognized that there were a host of factors at play in the mid-1930s that made it unlikely that he could resurrect the Triple Entente. For example, the French army was not well-suited for offensive operations against Germany, especially after Hitler took back the Rhineland in March 1936. Therefore, Stalin could not depend on France to attack Germany if Hitler struck first against the Soviet Union. Stalin also had abundant evidence that both the United Kingdom and France were committed to buck-passing, which did not bode well for their reliability as allies. This problem was compounded by the deep-seated ideological hostility between Moscow and the Western powers.¹¹⁷ Finally, as noted, the geography of eastern Europe was a major impediment to the so-called collective security option.

The Soviet Union also mobilized its own resources to protect itself from a German attack and to increase the likelihood that its buck-passing strategy would work. Recall from Chapter 6 that one of the main reasons Stalin began ruthlessly modernizing the Soviet economy in 1928 was to prepare it for a future European war. The Red Army grew substantially in size during the 1930s, almost tripling in size between 1933 and 1938 (see Table 8.6). The quantity and quality of the army’s weaponry also improved markedly. For example, Soviet industry produced 952 artillery pieces in 1930, 4,368 in 1933, 4,324 in 1936, and 15,300 in 1940.¹¹⁸ In 1930, 170 tanks were built; in 1933, 3,509, and in 1936, 4,800. The number dropped to 2,794 tanks in 1940, but that was because the Soviets started producing medium and heavy tanks in 1937, rather than light tanks, which were easier to crank off the assembly line in large numbers. The quality of the fighting forces was good and steadily improving in the mid-1930s. In fact, by 1936, “the Red Army had the most advanced doctrine and the greatest capability for armoured warfare in the world.”¹¹⁹ But Stalin’s purges struck the military in the summer of 1937 and seriously damaged its fighting capacity through the early years of World War II.¹²⁰

There is not much debate about Stalin’s policy between 1939 and 1941: buck-passing coupled with the search for opportunities to gang up with Hitler on the smaller states of eastern Europe. That policy was formalized in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, which not only divided up most of eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, but also virtually guaranteed that Hitler would go to war with the United Kingdom and France while the Soviet Union sat out the fight. One might have expected Stalin to abandon buck-passing after the collapse of France in the summer of 1940 and instead join forces with the United Kingdom against Hitler. As noted, Stalin continued to pursue a buck-passing strategy, hoping that the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany would become involved in a long and costly war. That approach failed, however, when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Only then did the British and the Soviets become allies against the Third Reich.

The Calculus of Power

The distribution of power among the European great powers and geography can account in large part for the buck-passing behavior of Hitler’s adversaries during the 1930s. Germany controlled more latent power than did any other European state from 1930 until 1944 (see Tables 3.3 and 3.4). In 1930, Weimar Germany accounted for 33 percent of European wealth, while the United Kingdom, its nearest competitor, controlled 27 percent. France and the Soviet Union possessed 22 and 14 percent, respectively. By 1940, Germany’s share of industrial might had grown to 36 percent, but its nearest competitor was now the Soviet Union with 28 percent; the United Kingdom, with 24 percent, had fallen to third place.

For purposes of comparison, Germany had controlled 40 percent of European wealth in 1913, prior to World War I, while the United Kingdom was in second place, with 28 percent. France and Russia accounted for 12 and 11 percent, respectively. Based on latent power alone, it is apparent that Germany was almost as well-positioned to be a potential hegemon in the 1930s as it was earlier in the century. It is also clear that the Soviet Union markedly increased its share of European industrial might during the 1930s, which meant that it had the wherewithal to build a much more formidable army by the end of that decade than it had in either 1914 or 1930.¹²¹

Despite all of its latent power, Germany was not a potential hegemon until 1939, because it did not have the most powerful army in Europe before then. Hitler inherited a puny army, and it took time to transform it into a well-organized and well-equipped fighting force with the capability to take the offensive against another great power. The critically important August 1936 Rearmament Program, after all, was not expected to be completed until October 1940. Its goals were realized for the most part a year earlier (in the summer of 1939), because rearmament was pushed at a dizzying pace and because of the resources Germany garnered from the acquisition of Austria and Czechoslovakia.¹²² But rearming at such a rapid pace caused numerous organizational problems, which left the Wehrmacht in no shape to fight a great-power war before 1939.¹²³ This general state of unreadiness was the main reason that army leaders were at odds with Hitler during the Munich crisis in 1938. They feared that he would drag Germany into a great-power war that it was ill-prepared to fight.¹²⁴

While the Wehrmacht was experiencing growing pains between 1933 and 1939, France and the Soviet Union were expanding their militaries to counter the German buildup. Both the Red Army and the French army were more powerful than the German army through 1937, but their advantage eroded over the next two years, and Germany became the dominant military power in Europe by mid-1939. For this reason, many scholars now believe that Hitler’s rivals should have fought the Wehrmacht in 1938 rather than 1939.¹²⁵

The French army, as Table 8.6 makes clear, was substantially larger than its German counterpart as late as 1937. It also enjoyed a qualitative edge, not because the French army was an efficient fighting force (it was not), but because the Wehrmacht’s ongoing expansion severely limited its fighting capacity. By 1938, Germany finally had a peacetime army that was larger than France’s, but as Table 8.7 makes clear, France could still mobilize a larger wartime army: 100 French versus 71 German divisions. By 1939, Germany had erased that French advantage; they now could mobilize about the same number of divisons for war. Moreover, the German army was qualitatively better than the French army, and it had a superior air force supporting it.¹²⁶ Given that Germany possessed significantly more wealth and a much larger population than France, it is hardly surprising that the military power gap between them widened even further by 1940.

The Red Army was also qualitatively and quantitatively superior to the German army between 1933 and 1937. David Glantz is surely correct when he says, “Had the Germans and Soviets fought in the mid-1930s, the Red Army would have had a considerable advantage over its opponent.”¹²⁷ That advantage slipped away in the late 1930s, however, not just because of the German army’s growing strength, but also because of Stalin’s purges (see Table 8.8).

Given that Germany was no potential hegemon before 1939, and given that the French army and the Red Army could each have matched the German army through 1938, it makes sense that a balancing coalition like the Triple Entente did not form against Germany before 1939, and that Hitler’s rivals instead passed the buck to each other. It also makes sense that the United Kingdom and France formed an alliance against Hitler in March 1939, because the day was fast approaching when the German army would be clearly superior to the French army, which would then need help fending off the Wehrmacht.

That the Western powers did not join forces with the Soviet Union to recreate the Triple Entente can be explained by the fact that the United Kingdom and France did not have to fear for the Soviet Union’s survival in 1939 the way they had feared for Russia’s survival before World War I. The Western powers had little choice but to ally with Russia before 1914, because it was barely capable of standing up to a German offensive. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had much more industrial and military might than its Russian predecessor had, and thus the United Kingdom and France were not compelled to defend it. Stalin, for his part, recognized that the United Kingdom and France together were at least as powerful as Germany, and thus he could buck-pass to them.¹²⁸ Finally, the absence of a common border between Germany and the Soviet Union from 1933 until September 1939 greatly hindered efforts to create a united front against the Third Reich. Moreover, it made it likely that France (which bordered Nazi Germany), not the Soviet Union, would end up catching the buck.

The British desire to form an alliance with the Soviet Union after June 1940 needs no explanation, as the United Kingdom was already at war with Nazi Germany and naturally wanted all the help it could get. The more interesting question is why the Soviet Union rejected the United Kingdom’s overtures and continued buck-passing to it. After all, the German army was far superior to what was left of the British army after Dunkirk, which should have allowed Germany to easily defeat the United Kingdom and then turn its guns against the Soviet Union. The stopping power of water, however, saved the United Kingdom and made buck-passing look like a winning strategy for Stalin. The English Channel made it almost impossible for the Wehrmacht to invade and conquer the United Kingdom, which meant that the British were likely to fight a long war with the Germans in the air, on the seas, and in peripheral areas such as North Africa and the Balkans. Indeed, that is mainly what happened between 1940 and 1945. Allying with the United Kingdom was also unattractive for Stalin because not only would the Soviet Union get dragged into war with the Third Reich, but the Red Army would end up doing most of the fighting against the Wehrmacht, since the United Kingdom was in no position to send a large army to the continent. These considerations notwithstanding, there was an important flaw in Stalin’s thinking: he mistakenly assumed that Hitler would not invade the Soviet Union until he decisively defeated the British and solidified his western flank.¹²⁹

Let me conclude with a final word about the contrasting behavior of Germany’s rivals in the years before the two world wars. Three key differences account for why the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union tended to buck-pass against the Third Reich but formed a balancing coalition against the Kaiserreich seven years before World War I. First, Nazi Germany was not a formidable military threat until 1939, whereas the kaiser’s army was the most powerful fighting force in Europe from at least 1870 until the end of World War I. Indeed, Hitler’s Germany was not a potential hegemon until 1939; Wilhelmine Germany achieved that status in 1903. Second, the Soviet Union controlled considerably more potential as well as actual military power during the 1930s than did pre–World War I Russia. Thus, the United Kingdom and France had less cause to worry about the survival of the Soviet Union than about tsarist Russia. Third, Germany and Russia shared a common border before 1914, but did not before 1939, and separation encouraged buck-passing.

THE COLD WAR (1945–90)

Background

When the Third Reich finally collapsed in April 1945, the Soviet Union was left standing as the most powerful state in Europe. Imperial Japan collapsed four months later (August 1945), leaving the Soviet Union also as the most powerful state in Northeast Asia. No other great power existed in either Europe or Northeast Asia that could stop the mighty Red Army from overrunning those regions and establishing Soviet hegemony. The United States was the only state powerful enough to contain Soviet expansion.

There were reasons, however, to think that the United States might not balance against the Soviet Union. The United States was neither a European nor an Asian power, and it had a long history of avoiding entangling alliances in those areas. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt had told Stalin at Yalta in February 1945 that he expected all American troops to be out of Europe within two years after World War II ended.¹³⁰ Furthermore, given that the United States and the Soviet Union were allies in the fight against Nazi Germany from 1941 until 1945, it was difficult for American policymakers to do a sudden 180-degree turn and tell the public that the Soviet Union was now a deadly foe, not a friendly state. There was also a powerful imperative after the war for Stalin and Harry Truman to work together to deal with the defeated Axis powers, especially Germany.

These considerations notwithstanding, the United States acted to check Soviet expansion almost immediately after World War II ended, and it maintained a formidable containment policy until the Soviet threat disappeared some forty-five years later. Marc Trachtenberg puts the point well: “The policy of containment, as it came to be called, was adopted at the beginning of 1946. It was adopted even before the term was coined, certainly well before the rationale for the policy was developed by its chief theoretician, George Kennan.”¹³¹ The United States balanced with such alacrity and effectiveness because it was in America’s national interest to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Europe and Northeast Asia, and because there was no other great power that could contain the Soviet army in the bipolar world of the mid-1940s. Simply put, the United States had no buck-passing option, and thus it had to do the heavy lifting itself.¹³²

The Strategic Behavior of the Great Powers

Iran and Turkey were important targets of Soviet expansion in the early days of the Cold War.¹³³ The Soviet Union had occupied northern Iran during World War II but had promised to pull its troops out no later than six months after the war in the Pacific ended. When there was no evidence in early 1946 that the Soviet army was leaving, the United States put pressure on the Soviets to live up to their promise. It worked: Soviet troops were gone from Iran by early May 1946.

Stalin was also interested in expanding into the eastern Mediterranean area. His main target was Turkey. In the summer of 1945, he demanded territory in the eastern part of Turkey and the right to build bases in the Dardanelles, in order to have naval access to the Mediterranean Sea. Furthermore, a powerful communist insurgency raged in Greece between 1944 and 1949, when that country was consumed by civil war. Stalin did not directly support the Greek Communists, but he surely would have benefited if they had won the civil war and ruled Greece.¹³⁴ The United States initially relied on the United Kingdom to protect Greece and Turkey from the Soviet Union, but worried throughout 1946 that the British could not do the job. When it became apparent in late February 1947 that the United Kingdom’s economy was too weak to provide the necessary economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey, the United States rapidly filled the void.

President Truman went before a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, and laid out the famous doctrine that bears his name. He argued in no uncertain terms that it was time for the United States to stand up to the threat of communism, not just in the Mediterranean, but all around the globe. He also requested $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey. Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) told Truman beforehand that if he wanted that money he would have to “scare hell out of the country.”¹³⁵ He did, and Congress approved his request. The Greek communists were subsequently defeated and the Soviets got no Turkish territory or bases in the Dardanelles. Greece and Turkey eventually joined NATO in February 1952.

American policymakers also worried throughout 1946 and early 1947 that the Soviet Union would soon dominate Western Europe. Their fear was not that the Soviet army would drive its way to the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, U.S. leaders feared that powerful communist parties with close ties to Moscow might come to power in France and Italy, because their economies were in terrible shape and their populations were deeply dissatisfied with their destitute status. The United States responded to this problem in early June 1947 with the famous Marshall Plan, which was explicitly designed to fight “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” in Western Europe.¹³⁶

At the same time, the United States was also deeply concerned about the future of Germany. Neither the Americans nor, it appears, the Soviets had clear-cut views on the subject when World War II ended.¹³⁷ During the early Cold War years the West showed little fear that the Soviets would try to conquer Germany by force. Indeed, there is evidence that Stalin was content to live with a permanently partitioned Germany, provided that the United Kingdom, France, and the United States did not merge their occupation zones and create an independent West German state. But American policymakers came to believe over the course of 1947 that if communism was to be kept out of Western Europe (including the Allied occupation zones in Germany), it was essential to build a prosperous and powerful West Germany that would have close ties with the other states of Western Europe. That outcome was effectively sealed at the London Conference in December 1947; the plan was put into effect over the next two years. The Federal Republic of Germany came into being on September 21, 1949. In short, the United States sought to contain Soviet expansion by building a powerful bulwark in Western Europe, anchored on West Germany.

Not surprisingly, the Soviets viewed the American decision about Germany’s future with utter alarm. As Melvyn Leffler notes, “Nothing, of course, agitated the Kremlin more than Anglo-American initiatives in western Germany. The specter of west German self-government horrified the Russians, as did the prospect of German integration into a Western economic bloc.”¹³⁸ In response, the Soviets facilitated a communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and made that country part of their own bulwark against the West. More important, the Soviets started a major crisis in late June 1948 by blockading Berlin, closing the roads and waterways that connected it with the Western occupation zones in Germany.

The United States responded quickly and forcefully to these Soviet actions. In the wake of the coup in Czechoslovakia, the United States began thinking seriously about creating a Western military alliance to deter a future Soviet military threat against Western Europe.¹³⁹ Planning began in earnest in May 1948 and eventually led to the creation of NATO on April 4, 1949.¹⁴⁰ Although many in the West thought that Berlin was a strategic liability and should be abandoned, the United States initiated a major airlift of supplies into the beleaguered city.¹⁴¹ Recognizing that the United States had trumped them, the Soviets lifted the blockade in May 1949.

Stalin also pushed to expand Soviet influence in Northeast Asia during the early Cold War.¹⁴² The Soviets had promised during World War II to pull their troops out of Manchuria by February 1, 1946, but they were still there when that date arrived. The United States protested and the Soviet army was withdrawn by early May 1946. American policymakers were also deeply concerned that Mao Zedong’s Communists might defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in their long-running civil war and make China an ally of the Soviet Union. Mao and Stalin had complicated relations, but the Soviets were providing modest assistance to the Chinese Communists. The United States, for its part, provided limited aid to the Nationalists. The United States could do little, however, to rescue Chiang’s forces from their ultimate defeat in 1949, because they were so corrupt and inefficient. Secretary of State Dean Acheson put the point well in his July 30, 1949, letter transmitting the State Department’s famous “White Paper” on China to President Truman: “Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces which this country tried to influence but could not.”¹⁴³

North Korea’s invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, was widely believed at the time to have been approved and supported by Stalin. The Truman administration reacted immediately to the attack and fought a three-year war against North Korea and China to restore the status quo ante. One consequence of the conflict was that the United States kept a substantial number of troops in South Korea for the remainder of the Cold War. But more important, the Korean War caused the United States to substantially increase defense spending and become even more vigilant in its efforts to contain the Soviet Union. The United States built formidable deterrent structures in Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf that kept the Soviets at bay in those critically important areas from 1950 until 1990. The only places that the Soviets could expand during those four decades were in the Third World, where not only were the gains dubious, but the United States met the Soviets at every turn.¹⁴⁴

Nevertheless, the American impulse to buck-pass never completely disappeared during the Cold War.¹⁴⁵ For example, to secure Senate approval for the NATO treaty in 1949, Acheson had to emphasize that the United States had no intention of sending large military forces to Europe on a permanent basis. Throughout the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower was seriously interested in bringing American forces home and forcing the Western Europeans to defend themselves against the Soviet threat.¹⁴⁶ Indeed, this impulse explains the forceful U.S. support for European integration in the early Cold War. Furthermore, there was strong sentiment in the U.S. Senate in the late 1960s and early 1970s to reduce, if not eliminate, America’s continental commitment. Even during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, influential voices called for significant reductions in American troop levels in Europe.¹⁴⁷ But buck-passing was not a serious option for the United States in the bipolar world that existed between 1945 and 1990. From the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, the United States pursued a tough-minded balancing policy against the Soviet Union that achieved remarkable success.

The Calculus of Power

A brief look at the distribution of power in the wake of World War II shows clearly that no great power or combination of great powers existed in either Europe or Northeast Asia that could prevent the Soviet army from overruning those regions, and therefore the United States had no choice but to check Soviet expansion. In Northeast Asia, Japan was disarmed and devastated, while China, which had little potential power to start with, was in the midst of a brutal civil war. In Europe, Germany had just been decisively defeated by the Soviet army and was in ruins. It certainly was in no position to build an army in the foreseeable future. Italy’s army was wrecked and not likely to recover anytime soon; even when it was intact, it was among the most incompetent fighting forces in modern European history. France had been knocked out of the war in 1940 and then plundered by Germany until the late summer of 1944, when it was finally liberated by the American and British armies. France had a tiny army when the war ended in the spring of 1945, but it was in no position—either economically or politically—to build a mass army as it had before 1940.¹⁴⁸ The United Kingdom built a substantial army in World War II, and it played an important role in defeating the Wehrmacht. But it is apparent on close inspection that the United Kingdom did not have the economic and military wherewithal after 1945 to lead a balancing coalition against the Soviet Union. Only the United States was powerful enough to assume that demanding task.

From the relative size of the American, British, and Soviet military establishments in World War II we can see why the United Kingdom was not in the same league as the Soviet Union and the United States. Between 1939 and 1945, the United Kingdom mobilized about 5.9 million troops, the United States mobilized roughly 14 million, and the Soviet Union mobilized approximately 22.4 million.¹⁴⁹ When World War II ended in 1945, the United Kingdom had about 4.7 million troops under arms, the Americans had roughly 12 million, and the Soviets had about 12.5 million.¹⁵⁰ Regarding army size, the United Kingdom raised 50 divisions over the course of World War II, while the United States raised 90 divisions. The Soviets raised 550 divisions, although they were somewhat smaller than American and British divisions.¹⁵¹

Of course, all three military establishments shrunk quite drastically in size after World War II. But the United Kingdom was still no match for the Soviet Union. The Soviets had 2.87 million men under arms in 1948, whereas the United Kingdom had only 847,000. The United States figure for that year was 1.36 million.¹⁵² Furthermore, both the American and the Soviet military establishments grew significantly in size after 1948, while the British military shrunk in size.¹⁵³ The United Kingdom’s economy was so weak in early 1947, as we saw earlier, that it could not provide aid to Greece and Turkey, prompting the United States to promulgate the Truman Doctrine. The United Kingdom was certainly in no position to defend Western Europe from the Soviet army.

The United Kingdom’s problem was not a failure to recognize the Soviet threat, or a lack of will to contain it. On the contrary, British leaders were just as gung-ho as their American counterparts about thwarting Soviet expansion.¹⁵⁴ But the British simply did not have sufficient material resources to compete with the Soviets. In 1950, for example, the Soviet Union had a gross national product (GNP) of $126 billion, and it spent $15.5 billion on defense. The United Kingdom had a GNP of $71 billion and spent $2.3 billion on defense.¹⁵⁵ To make matters worse, the United Kingdom still possessed a far-flung empire that demanded a large percentage of its precious defense dollars. Not surprisingly, British leaders understood from the beginning of the Cold War that the West would need Uncle Sam to organize and direct the containment of the Soviet Union.

CONCLUSION

Having analyzed each case in detail, let me now step back and summarize the results. Offensive realism predicts that states will be acutely sensitive to the balance of power and will look for opportunities to increase their own power or weaken rivals. In practical terms, this means that states will adopt diplomatic strategies that reflect the opportunities and constraints created by the particular distribution of power. Specifically, the theory predicts that a threatened state is likely to balance promptly and efficiently in bipolarity, because neither buck-passing nor great-power balancing coalitions are feasible when there are only two great powers in the system. The Cold War case appears to support that claim. The Soviet Union emerged from World War II as by far the most powerful state in Europe (and Northeast Asia), and only the United States was capable of containing it.

When confronted with potential European hegemons earlier in the century—Wilhelmine Germany and Nazi Germany—the initial U.S. reaction had been to pass the buck to the other European great powers—the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. But buck-passing was not an option in the Cold War, because there was no great power in Europe that could contain the Soviet Union. So right after World War II ended, the United States moved quickly and forcefully to balance against the Soviet threat, and it stayed the course until the Cold War ended in 1990. Nevertheless, the American impulse to buck-pass was evident throughout the period.

Regarding multipolarity, the theory predicts that buck-passing is most likely in the absence of a potential hegemon but still likely to occur even when there is an especially powerful state in the system. The evidence appears to bear out these claims. Among the four multipolar cases, Bismarck’s Prussia was the only aggressor that was not a potential hegemon. France probably had the most powerful army in Europe between 1862 and 1866, while Prussia was number one from 1867 to 1870. But neither threatened to overrun the continent. As my theory would predict, buck-passing was more widespread here than in any of the cases involving a potential European hegemon. Indeed, no balancing coalition—not even one limited to two states—formed against Prussia while it was winning three wars over an eight-year period. The United Kingdom and Russia actually welcomed Bismarck’s efforts to create a unified Germany, which they hoped would serve them in the future as a buck-catcher! The Prussian army directly threatened both Austria and France, making them likely candidates to balance together against Prussia. But they buck-passed instead, allowing Bismarck’s army to clobber Austria’s in 1866 while France looked on, and then to clobber France’s army in 1870 while Austria looked on.

Balancing coalitions did form against the potential hegemons: Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, and Nazi Germany. Still buck-passing was tried in each case, albeit with significant variations. According to my theory, the balance of power and geography should explain the differences among these cases. Specifically, the more relative power the aspiring hegemon controls, the less likely we are to see buck-passing; common borders are also likely to discourage buck-passing. These arguments appear to account for the different patterns of buck-passing in these three cases of unbalanced multipolarity.

We see the least amount of buck-passing against Wilhelmine Germany. The Triple Entente, which included the United Kingdom, France, and Russia and which was designed to contain Germany, was largely in place by 1907, some seven years before World War I broke out. France and Russia actually formed the first leg of that balancing alliance in the early 1890s, about twenty years before the crisis that sparked World War I. The United Kingdom, although it initially passed the buck to France and Russia, joined the coalition between 1905 and 1907. Power calculations largely account for the formation of the Triple Entente. Germany had an imposing army in the early 1890s, which forced France and Russia to ally. But Germany was not yet a potential hegemon, and the French and Russian armies together seemed capable of containing the German army. So the United Kingdom was able to remain on the sidelines. But that all changed in the first five years of the twentieth century, when Germany became a potential hegemon (1903) and Russia was dealt a devastating defeat by Japan (1904–5). In response, the United Kingdom stopped buck-passing and the Triple Entente came into being.

Much more buck-passing arose against Nazi Germany than there had been against Wilhelmine Germany. Hitler came to power in January 1933 and almost immediately began building a powerful military. The Third Reich’s main rivals—the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union—never formed a balancing coalition against Nazi Germany. In fact, all three pursued buck-passing strategies during the 1930s. Not until March 1939 did the United Kingdom and France come together to oppose Hitler. Nevertheless, the Soviets continued to buck-pass. When the Wehrmacht knocked France out of the war in the spring of 1940, leaving the British to fight alone against the Nazi war machine, Stalin worked to foster a long war between the United Kingdom and Germany while he remained on the sidelines. Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 finally brought the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union together, and the United States joined the Anglo-Soviet coalition in December 1941. That alliance hung together for the next three and a half years to defeat the Third Reich.

All that buck-passing in the 1930s was due in good part to the fact that Germany did not possess a formidable army until 1939, and thus no compelling reason drew Hitler’s foes together before then. When Nazi Germany became a potential hegemon in 1939, the United Kingdom and France formed an alliance, mainly because the British recognized that France alone was no match for the Wehrmacht. Yet neither the British nor the French formed an alliance with the Soviet Union, mainly because the Soviet Union was much more powerful than Russia had been before 1914; the Soviets stood a good chance of surviving without help from the United Kingdom and France. After the fall of France, Stalin refused to join forces with the United Kingdom against the Third Reich because he thought that the stopping power of water would make it difficult for Germany to defeat the United Kingdom quickly and decisively, thus guaranteeing a long war between them that would work to the Soviets’ advantage.

Buck-passing was most prevalent in the case of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which faced four rival great powers: Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia. France actually did not become a potential hegemon until 1793, a year after war broke out. France’s rivals passed the buck constantly between 1793 and 1804, mainly because France was not yet so powerful that all of its rivals would have to act in tandem to prevent it from overrunning the continent. By 1805, however, Napoleon had an army in place that threatened to make France Europe’s first hegemon. But before all of Napoleon’s rivals could form a unified balancing coalition, he knocked Austria and Prussia out of the balance of power and forced Russia to quit fighting and sign a peace treaty. Inefficient balancing, commonplace in multipolarity, allowed Napoleon to win a series of stunning victories between 1805 and 1809 that gave him control of much of Europe. France’s rivals got a reprieve in late 1812, when Napoleon suffered a major defeat in Russia. This time they balanced efficiently and decisively defeated France between 1813 and 1815.

Geography also worked to discourage buck-passing against Wilhelmine Germany but to encourage it against Nazi Germany and Napoleonic France. The United Kingdom fought against all three potential hegemons, but it was separated from each of them by the English Channel. Thus, there is no variation in geography across the British cases, so they can be left out of the analysis. The situation on the continent, however, varies markedly among the three cases. Wilhelmine Germany shared a lengthy border with both France and Russia, which made it difficult for either to buck-pass and easy for them to form a balancing coalition, since both were well-positioned to strike directly into Germany. France shared a common border with Nazi Germany, but the Soviet Union was separated from the Third Reich for most of the 1930s by minor powers such as Poland. This buffer zone encouraged buck-passing and made it difficult for France and the Soviet Union to form a balancing coalition to contain Germany. Although the map of Europe changed frequently between 1792 and 1815, Napoleon’s rivals often had no common border with France, a situation that facilitated buck-passing and complicated the formation of an effective balancing alliance.

In sum, both geography and the distribution of power play a key role in determining whether threatened great powers form balancing coalitions or buck-pass against dangerous aggressors. The next chapter will switch gears and look at how aggressors behave, focusing on when they are likely to initiate a war with another state. As will become apparent, the distribution of power is also important for explaining the outbreak of great-power war.