Stability in a Fragmenting World: Interstate Military Force, 1946-1988

Six hypotheses, developed from arguments about the fragmentation of the international system, are applied to a data set encompassing 667 interstate uses of armed force between 1946 and 1988. Particular attention is paid to center-periphery and intra-peripheral interventions. The data suggest support for one perspective on fragmentation, imperial disintegration, but not for a model based upon eroding polarization. While center interventionary activity has declined over the 1946-1988 period, peripheral states, focusing much of their activities within regional subsystems, have become more interventionary, at least in terms of absolute numbers. Yet, despite the relatively dramatic alteration of center and periphery intervention patterns, the overall portrait of interstate force supported by our findings is one of stability When normalized for the increasing number of states in the international system, global levels of interstate military force have remained constant. And, in contrast to our collective perception of an increasingly violent periphery, the use of military force across state borders may not have become markedly more severe in that part of the world. A popular perception is that the world has been characterized by peace among states in the center of the international system and continued, if not increased, disruption and conflict in the outlying areas over the past fifty years. Singer, for example, asserts that the level of combat has not diminished since World War II: "It has merely taken a different form and occurred in a different neighborhood" (1991: 59). Kegley summarizes this commonly held view of segmented international conflict well: "The disappearance of large-scale warfare concomitant with the ascendance of small-scale warfare has produced two systems, a stable `central system' and an unstable 'peripheral' system" (1991: 8). For various reasons, such as the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, changed attitudes, economic interdependence, and pacific relations among similar types of governments, many observers view these changes as permanent. For example, Jervis states that, "[Peaceful] changes in the developed world are so deep, powerful and interlocked that they cannot readily be reversed for any foreseeable event." This, he asserts, leads the future of international force into "unmapped territory" (1991/1992: 47, 55). Although these frequently echoed ideas about the nature of international conflict surely possess some claim to validity, a key problem stands out. Few studies have, in fact, attempted to map world wide patterns in the use of force for the post-World War II era. Even fewer studies have questioned how stable these patterns really are. Thus we operate with vague images of dichotomous conflict tendenciesrelatively peaceful at the center and relatively brutal in the hinterlands-without really knowing much about the degree of disparity either spatially or temporally This article will contribute to the filling of this empirical void by tracing the structural shape the international use of force has taken in the post-World War II period. Patterns of forceful interaction within the central and peripheral systems, as well as between them, must be delineated to comprehend fully the changes that have occurred in recent decades and to establish a foundation for projecting the forms that the use of armed force might assume in the years ahead. To guide our empirical mapping, six basic and frequently contradictory hypotheses derived from the literature on structural change will be tested. The empirical outcomethat is, the hypotheses that survive-will add to our slowly growing familiarity with the complex web of political interactions within the international system. Before we present our empirical outcomes, we first need to describe briefly the arguments we have chosen to examine and the respective hypotheses extracted from them. Also, we need to justify how we propose to measure the variables that are important to these hypotheses. …