Interstate Rivalry and the Recurrence of Crises:A Comparison of Rival and Nonrival Crisis Behavior,1918–1994

Research on enduring rivalry has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the last few years.(1) As scholars begin to relax assumptions regarding event independence and historical memory, rivalry has emerged to explain dependencies across countries and over time. The Soviet Union and the United States, for instance, engaged in fifty-three disputes over the forty-five or so years of the Cold War and many, if not most, were related to one another. These disputes did not occur in a vacuum, and each one had an impact on the incidence of future crises and on the foreign policy strategies used by decision-makers to resolve the conflicts in the best interests of their respective states. If the vast majority of conflict in the international system occurs within some type of rivalry context, then these nation-states are particularly important for understanding the causes and consequences of interstate violence. Despite the asymmetrical distribution of militarized disputes across countries, Gartzke and Simon challenge the operationalization of rivalry and insist that chance alone can explain the string of disputes used to distinguish enduring rivals from their less-belligerent counterparts.(2) Yet even if the historical frequency of interstate disputes does not differ statistically from a model that randomly distributes disputes over time and over pairs of states, by itself such a finding does not prove that relations between rival states are equivalent to relations between nonrival states. Indeed, while many rivalry scholars expect relations between rival states to become increasingly hostile over time, with future disputes dependent strongly on the severity and outcome of previous disputes, little is known about the crisis behavior of rival states (Leng's research is an exception).(3) Aggregated analyses of dispute involvement or initiation cannot distinguish actions taken during the period of the militarized dispute. Yet, the actions of states in rivalry may be more violent and escalatory than those taken by states without historical animosity. Such an empirical finding would provide additional support for the theoretical conjecture that enduring rivals do represent a distinct category of states. In this article, I empirically examine the crisis behavior of rival and nonrival states. Drawing on Goertz, Diehl, and Hensel, I investigate whether the crisis decision-making of rival nation-states differs from isolated conflict among nonrival nation-states.(4) Indeed, if the pairings of states that define the enduring rivals list of Diehl and Goertz are fundamentally different than other pairings, differences in behavior should be evident in crisis situations.(5) If in fact the six militarized disputes between Honduras and Nicaragua during the years 1909-1927, or the eleven disputes between Pakistan and Afghanistan during the years 1949-1989, are not related to one another, but erupted independent of previous hostilities, then two things should be evident. First, for rival states in crisis, foreign policy strategies should not vary across different conflicts; the likelihood of military action should be the same in dispute one as in dispute six, or eight, or twelve. Second, the foreign policy strategies of rival states in crisis should not differ from the foreign policy strategies of nonrival states in crisis. Using data from the Interstate Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, the empirical evidence supports the conjecture that states in rival contexts tend to behave differently in crises than their nonrival counterparts, although an indirect effect of rivalry is observed as well.(6) Rival states in crisis frequently resort to military action against nonrivals.(7) Further, the likelihood of a military response in crisis situations increases as the number of crises between rivals increases, providing evidence for an evolutionary model of rival behavior.(8). Language: en