Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century

305 Pages·2017·2.577 MB·English

by  Seva Gunitsky

AFTERSHOCKS
PRINCETON STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL
HISTORY AND POLITICS
Series Editors
G. John Ikenberry, Marc Trachtenberg,
and William C. Wohlforth
For a full list of books in this series,
see http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/psihp.html
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Aftershocks
Great Powers
and Domestic
Reforms in
the Twentieth
Century
Seva Gunitsky
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
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Jacket image: “Gardening amid ruins in front of the Reichstag,” 1947.
© David Seymour / Magnum Photos
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 17233- 0
ISBN (pbk.) 978- 0- 691- 17234- 7
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction: A Century of Shocks and Waves 1
2 From Crests to Collapses: The Sources of Failure in
Democratic Waves 33
3 The Alchemy of War 60
4 A Low Dishonest Decade 101
5 Two Ways of Life 152
6 The Winds from the East 198
7 Conclusion: Beyond the Great Plateau 231
Appendix 1: Regime Classifications, 1900–2000 245
Appendix 2: Regime Impositions 247
Bibliography 253
Index 279
v

ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
1.1. Global levels of democracy, 1900–2000 2
1.2. Communist and fascist shares of global power, 1900–2000 3
1.3. Causal mechanisms linking hegemonic shocks to
regime waves 5
1.4. Average hegemonic volatility, 1900–2000 9
1.5. Impositions of their own regimes by great powers,
1900–2000 14
1.6. External impositions, 1900–2000, classified by type 15
2.1. Hegemonic shocks as drivers of democratic “overstretch” 35
2.2. The number of closed autocracies, hybrid regimes, and liberal
democracies, 1970–2000 42
2.3. The interaction of counterwave forces in Kenya 51
3.1. The postwar democratic wave, 1900–1930
(Polity IV) 62
4.1. The hegemonic shock of the Great Depression 103
4.2. The fascist wave: global proportion of fascist states,
1930–1945 104
4.3. Latin American trade with Nazi Germany, 1933–1938 145
5.1. North and South Korean GDP, 1990–2007 154
5.2. North and South Korean GDP, 1946–2007 155
5.3. Soviet share of hegemonic power, 1930–1960 158
5.4. American share of hegemonic power, 1930–1960 161
5.5. The communist wave 164
5.6. The number of communist states as a proportion of all states in
the international system 165
5.7. The second democratic wave 178
vii
viii IllustratIons
5.8. The number of democratic states as a proportion of all states in
the international system 179
6.1. Average level of democracy in sub- Saharan Africa, 1980–2000
(Polity IV) 213
6.2. Factors contributing to the African democratic wave of the
1990s 222
Tables
1.1. Hegemonic Shocks and Regime Outcomes in the
20th Century 10
3.1. Female Suffrage Expansion, 1917–1924 86
4.1. German Trade with Southeastern Europe, 1933 and 1939 143
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is about the evolution of the modern state. Unlike most theories of
domestic change, I examine twentieth- century state transformations through
the prism of major global cataclysms. I argue that the success and failure of
modern regimes—most notably democracy, but also fascism and commu-
nism—have hinged on the outcomes of tectonic clashes between great powers.
These hegemonic shocks, or moments of abrupt rise and decline of leading
states, create waves of domestic reforms that sweep across borders and deeply
alter the paths of state development. As a result, domestic change during the
twentieth century often cannot be explained by the particularities of local
revolts from below or elite concessions from above. Instead, regime reform
was often embedded in a broader global process—a decades- long confronta-
tion between hegemonic rivals who embodied and promoted competing re-
gime types. Transformations of the international system, not just the internal
attributes of states, have been major and often underexamined drivers of globe-
spanning regime change.
By linking hegemonic shocks to institutional waves, this book combines
two strands of scholarship that have remained largely apart—the literature on
great power transitions in international relations, and the literature on democ-
ratization in comparative politics. Power transition theory has generally ne-
glected the effects of hegemonic transitions on domestic institutions, focusing
instead on the causes of major wars and their effects on the foreign policy of
great powers.1 The study of democracy, by contrast, has traditionally been the
province of comparative scholars who explore the domestic dynamics of re-
gime change, focusing on internal factors like economic development, civil
society, or class relations. As this book shows, the synthesis of these two large
bodies of work can help us understand domestic transformations from a truly
global perspective.
In the course of writing the book I have drawn upon a number of primary
sources such as memoirs, newspapers, and government documents. This book,
1. Ikenberry 2000 is a partial exception, focusing on the effects of hegemonic transitions on
global orders rather than on domestic reforms. The classic texts are Organski 1958 and Gilpin
1981. See also Friedman and Chase- Dunn 2005 and W. Thompson 2009.
ix