Smith
Meanwhile, other countries, such as in Southeast Asia, South America and parts of
Africa, have also seemingly transitioned from conflict to stable peace.
With very
different levels of democracy, institutional density and economic development, these
clusters of peaceful states draw into question traditional liberal arguments over necessary
and sufficient conditions for stable peace. Realism, on the other hand, has simply had
little to say about increasingly confined conflict and deeply-held cooperation across
regions.
This paper attempts to shed light on such divergent regional developments and
argues that current explanatory gaps are a result, in part, of wrongheaded assumptions
that states are power-maximizers. In doing so, it reexamines early postwar Europe to
suggest that the seeds of cooperation lie more in a common search for stability, conflict
management and maintaining the status quo than in attempts to balance against power,
military conquest or to pursue opportunistic gains. Indeed, early postwar years—as well
as post-Cold War years—were ones of great instability and uncertainty but also filled
with divergent interests and little efforts for deeper coordination toward addressing the
future of Europe. The outbreak of civil war in Greece (and later in Yugoslavia),
however, had a coalescing effect on West Europe. Not only did the great powers show
incredible restraint so as not to instigate wider war in this region of high strategic value—
rather than seek there own expansive aims—but it brought to light the susceptibility of
Europe to renewed conflict. To address these fears, it became clear to West—if not East
—Europe that meaningful cooperation would be necessary to avoid such an outcome. If
1
See Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, All International Politics is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration and
Democratization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Kalevi J. Holsti, “War, Peace, and the
State of the State”, International Political Science Review 16, pp. 319-339; and, Arie Kacowicz, Zones of
Peace in the Third World: South America and West Africa in a Comparative Perspective (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1998); and, Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones
of Peace and Zones of Turmoil, revised edition (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, Inc. 1996).
2
Convention