Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace

Timothy W. Crawford

Sir Edward Grey’s Ambiguous
Policy and the July Crisis, 1914

This project stems from a larger study of pivotal deterrence policies—that is, attempts by a 3rd party power to deter conflict among others while avoiding firm commitments to one side. That larger study appears in my book Pivotal Deterrence: Third Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace (Cornell University Press, 2003).

This particular component of the study focused on Britain’s pivotal deterrence policy during the July crisis and the effects it had on the behavior of the major European powers—France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. This case was selected because it matched a particular “cell” in a typological framework that provided the backbone for the study’s larger comparative research design. That is, the case embodied a constellation of initial conditions and values on explanatory and control variables. To be specific: the British July Crisis case is an instance in which the pivotal deterrer was a “peer”—in terms of its relative power relative to the targets’—which meant that it would be constrained in its ability to achieve leverage over the targets of its policy. The pivotal deterrer was also—at least at the start—a player in the conflict with secondary interests at stake. That is, when the crisis started, only secondary British interests were at stake in the dispute between Serbia and Austria. These two factors, in some ways, “controlled” the case in the larger study’s comparative research design.

In relation to that latter variable, the British case also captured theoretically important longitudinal change. Once the crisis escalated to near-war between Germany and France, then Britain’s vital interests were engaged. As Britain’s interests shifted over time, its approach to (and the effects of) its pivotal deterrence policy would be expected to change in certain ways anticipated by the theory. So the case analysis examines whether these changes occurred consistent with those expectations.

This is also a “hard case” analysis, because the policy was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing war, and the deck was stacked against success by other theoretically important factors pointing toward war. The empirical analysis—using congruence testing and process tracing methods—shows, nevertheless, that the policy had intermediate effects on the other actors’ policies and actions that are consistent with the “isolation avoidance” dynamic posited in the pivotal deterrence theory (even though, in terms of its ultimate effect, it did not deter them from going to war). In short, the theorized causal mechanics of pivotal deterrence are revealed even in this hard case, where failure of the policy was in many ways over-determined.

Finally, the case offers a “hoop test” of another component of the theory—the conditioning variable of the targets’ “alignment options”. When the targets of pivotal deterrence have strong alignment options, the theory expects that the pivotal deterrer will have little leverage with which to restrain them. In the British case, Germany and France had very strong alignment options embodied in their continental allies. Accordingly, the case analysis shows that these relationships indeed blunted Britain’s pivotal deterrence policy in ways that conform to the political dynamics pivotal deterrence failure posited in the theory.

The data for the case analysis—content analysis and synthesis of existing sources—was collected from primary textual sources--published official collections of documents (British and German volumes of correspondence, the latter translated into English) and autobiographies—and secondary sources (synthetic histories, monographs, and articles). I relied on secondary sources to develop the general narrative elements in the case, and to clarify competing perspectives on matters of controversy. Because I do not read in French, Russian, or German, I relied on secondary histories based on work in the relevant documents and archives, to extract evidence revealing of internal deliberations and relevant to decision process tracing.

The full page (or pages) on which quoted passages, or key evidence for causal process claims, appear are provided so that surrounding context is made transparent; specific passages that pertain to causal process arguments are highlighted. When the connection to the inference is not obvious, an annotated explanation is included. Annotation is also provided when the stipulated causal or historical claim is contested, with references to alternative sources.