I. INTRODUCTION.
1. THE PROBLEM FOR ANALYSIS AND A SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT.
The overall topic of this paper is the relationship between regime type (e.g., democratic or
authoritarian) and foreign policy orientation (i.e., relative proneness towards conflict and
cooperation) for South America’s Southern Cone. Its specific purpose is to offer an
explanation of the relationship between regime type and foreign policy orientation in the
1970s.
The search for the causes of conflict and cooperation between states has been historically
the distinctive contribution of international relations to our understanding of world politics.
The theoretical perspectives which address this problem have traditionally been
distinguished according to the level of analysis on which they focus their attention: the
internal structures of states or the characteristics of the international system
1
.
The perspective which focuses its attention on the characteristics of the international
system, usually associated with the concept of balance of power, has been seen as the
distinctive contribution of international relations as an academic field to the study of inter-
state conflict and cooperation
2
. Since the end of the Second World War, this perspective
1
See Waltz 1959 and Singer 1989.
2
“If there is any distinctively political theory of international politics, balance of power theory is it.
And yet one cannot find a statement of the theory that is generally accepted”.
Waltz 1979, p.117.
This quote from Waltz illustrates a problem that was already obvious for A. F. Pollard almost
seven decades earlier. In his words, “the balance of power may mean almost anything; and it is
used not only in different senses by different people, or in different senses by the same people in
different times, but in different senses by the same person at the same time”.
Pollard 1923, p.58.
What follows, though, comes quite close to what we may call a relatively consensual definition of
the term: “the balance of power has come to mean, at least among scholars of international
relations, an international process that, when operative, tends to create roughly equal distributions
of power between opposing states or coalitions of states or a situation characterized by such a
distribution. Balance of power theory is a set of logical statements specifying when and how this
process or situation is likely to arise”.
Lake 1993, p.66.
However, there is a subtle tautology involved here, for if we try to specify “when and how this
process or situation is likely to arise” based on that definition, the cryptic answer will be “when
operative”. That only reflects the fact that there is no agreement on when and how such a process is
Convention