Smith
Prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1-
4 September 2005. Please do not cite without author’s permission.
Balancing Turmoil: Containing Conflict and the Rise of Zones of Peace
M. Shane Smith,
University of Colorado at Boulder
Below is a paper that asks the broad question defining an intra-realism debate over the
incentives the international system provides for state behavior: Are states power-
maximizers or are they risk-minimizers? I argue that if they are the former, they will tend to
join a conflict once it erupts in order to exploit the opportunities it presents for positional
betterment or to keep others from gaining advantage. If they are risk-minimizers, they will
seek means for containing not exploiting conflict when it breaks out. I argue that the
potential costs of wider war generally outweigh the potential payoffs of expansive policies
that may threaten regional or global stability. In doing so, I expand defensive realism to
introduce the concept of “balancing turmoil” to help explain why conflict tends not to ignite
boundless hostilities but is instead often met by cooperation of others who seek to avoid
wider war. While this paper is primarily concerned with mapping out the “balancing
turmoil” logic, it draws out some of the corollary arguments this logic leads us to.
Moreover, it presents an alternate view of vertical European cooperation since World War
II. It argues that the impetus for European cooperation—which has overwhelmingly
occurred in the decades following World War II and the Cold War—has been the need to
“balance turmoil” stemming from the outbreak of war in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the early
seeds of European integration lie not so much in the Soviet Union but in the Greek civil
war.
S
tudents of international politics have long sought to account for West Europe’s
transition from conflict to stable peace and cooperation. Realists tend to argue that peace
—in general, and in Europe, specifically—is an ephemeral function of deterrence and
ever-changing distribution of global power. Liberal arguments rest on the ability for sub-
governmental forces to overcome a conflictual tendency of states, often assuming
democratic governance. Neither approach accounts for the ebb and flow of European
cooperation over the last half-century. For instance, why were the main lunges in
European integration in the years following World War II and the 1990s, while
movement toward deeper cooperation virtually stalled during the height of the Cold War?
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