Intervention Across Bisecting Borders

Abstract

Case studies of the 1828-9 and 1877-8 Russian interventions in Turkey-in-Europe and of the 1947-8 and 1965 Pakistani interventions in Kashmir show that revisionist states which intervene in communal strife across nation-bisecting borders do so at considerable cost to their power/security interests despite minimal opportunity for offsetting or lasting gains at the expense of the target state. These interventions cannot be attributed to miscalculation, as revisionist state leaders are aware of external constraints that limit the possible gains while heightening the risks of intervention. This is contrary to both traditional realist and neorealist theory. The finding is important because it explicitly demonstrates that nationalism and domestic politics are of causal importance in some classes of war that realist theory does not explain. Nationalism influences intervention via a three-stage process in which communal/ethnic strife in the target state diffuses across the bisecting border, then mobilizes public opinion and non-state actors in the revisionist state; finally, it pressures state leaders to adopt hardline policies at odds with their own past policies towards the target state. This process model reveals a more complex nexus between domestic and international politics than conventional second-image models allow for.