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In 'Does Chain-Ganging Cause the Outbreak of War,' Dominic Tierney critiques our work on alliance politics in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Tierney incorrectly ascribes to us a theory about the outbreak of conflict based on a 'chain-ganging theory' in which war occurs because states become so tightly tied to their allies that they lose volition and find themselves in conflicts not of their own choosing. In fact, we do not try to explain the origins of war, but instead explain why wars in Europe escalated to a continent-wide scale. Here we briefly restate our argument and demonstrate how Tierney misconstrues it. We also show how some of the factors that we discuss in our original work are useful for assessing Tierney's claim that the causes of conflict and alliance dynamics hinge on whether states are hawks or doves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the impact of domestic change on European stability after the Cold War. The three views of the demise of the bipolar division of Europe is presented. They are the so-called end-of-history optimism, Hobbesian realism, and neo-liberal institutionalism. The competing policy prescriptions of these three views of change in the European order is evaluated. It recommends to integrate Eastern Europe's emerging polities into the institutional framework of the European Community and to develop a cooperative pan-European security regime. It argues that the said strategy of institution-building can avert the potential anarchy that is believed could accompany the transformation of the Soviet bloc.

Given the magnitude of the changes during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we were interested in surveying the views of Russian and American elites involved in international relations and national security. Therefore, in June of 1992 we conducted a survey, using parallel questions in Russian and English, among elites in Russia and the United States to inquire about views concerning international relations and foreign policy. The results suggested that Russian and American elites' thinking was organized by shared belief schema that could be labeled cooperative internationalism or support for deterrence, using concepts derived from previous investigations. Also, both Russian and American elites seemed to hold parallel belief structures that could be labeled militant internationalism or support for deterrence. Among the Russians, these two types of beliefs accounted for a significant degree of variance in perceptions of national and international security threats and attributions for liberalization of the Soviet Union toward East Europe. Among the Americans, however, perceptions of national and international security threats and attributions for liberalization of the Soviet Union were seldom related to these 2 types of beliefs. This may help to account for the dramatic differences found by country in perceived security threats and attributions for Soviet liberalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]