Audience Costs: An Historical Analysis
Marc Trachtenberg
Department of Political Science
University of California at Los Angeles
October 4, 2011
It used to be taken for granted that relative power and relative interest were of fundamental
importance in determining how international crises run their course—that the weak would defer to the strong
and the side that cared less about the issues at stake would tend to give way in the dispute. But in an important
article published in 1994, James Fearon argued that in a rational world relative power and relative interest and
indeed anything observable in advance should already have been taken into account as the policies that led up
to a crisis were being worked out. Outcomes would therefore be determined by new information revealed
during the crisis about how far each state was willing to go. And information of that sort, he said, could not be
effectively conveyed through “quiet diplomatic exchanges,” given that states “have strong incentives to
misrepresent their willingness to fight in order to get a better deal.” The rival powers would have to do things
that “allow them credibly to reveal their own preferences.” “Cheap talk” could not convey new information,
since “a state with low resolve may have no disincentive to sending” such signals; a move made during a crisis
had to be “costly signal” if it was to “warrant revising beliefs.” Only costs “generated in the course of the crisis
itself” could “convey new information about a state’s resolve”; only costly signaling could enable the receiver
of the signal to distinguish between low-resolve and high-resolve adversaries.1
James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes, American Political Science Review
88, no. 3 (September 1994), pp. 578, 586, 579; note especially the repeated use of words like “must” and “only” on p. 579.
Fearon builds here on the well-known work of Michael Spence. See especially Spence’s important article, “Job Market
Signaling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (August 1973). A similar idea was developed independently at roughly the
same time by the Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi: “Mate Selection: A Selection for a Handicap,” Journal of Theoretical Biology
53 (1975). For a discussion and additional references, see Carl Bergstrom, “Dealing with Deception in Biology,” in
Brooke Harrington, ed., Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 2425, and William Searcy and Stephen Nowicki, The Evolution of Animal Behavior: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 6-13 and 207-224. Spence, for his part, built to a certain extent on the
work of Robert Jervis, who, in his The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970),
had dealt with somewhat similar problems a bit earlier. (See n. 208 below.) Jervis, in fact, had referred (on p. 18 n. 2 of
that book) to the costs that would be incurred if it was later discovered that signals had been designed to be misleading,
and went on to note that “if there were no such costs associated with issuing misleading signals, there would be no reason
for receivers to place any faith in them.” More recently, Jervis has emphasized some of the problems with the costly
signaling approach. See especially his short but quite important article “Signaling and Perception: Drawing Inferences and
Projecting Images,” in Kristen Monroe, ed., Political Psychology (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002). His basic
argument here is that, for both the signaler and the perceiver, subjective factors—the factors that determine how the
signaler thinks the other side will interpret its signals and how the perceiver actually does interpret them—loom much
larger than one think, and that the whole process of signaling is therefore not nearly as straightforward as many theorists
seem to believe.
1
2
What then allows a state to make its true preferences known? Fearon argued that one particular
mechanism played a key role in this regard. Crises take place in public, and a government might well have to
pay a domestic political price if it backed down in the dispute. In such circumstances, it would be less likely to
make threats that it did not intend to follow through on than if it could bluff with impunity; those threats it
did make would therefore be taken more seriously. This audience costs mechanism, as it was called, thus
allowed states to make credible commitments in this kind of conflict. And indeed the claim was that this
mechanism was of fundamental importance—that it played a “crucial role” (as Fearon put it) in “generating the
costs that enable states to learn” during a crisis.2 Or as Alastair Smith, another leading audience costs theorist,
put the point: public foreign policy statements “are only credible when leaders suffer domestically if they fail to
fulfill their commitments.”3
It follows, these theorists argue, that democracies probably have a bargaining advantage in
international crises. Relative audience costs, in Fearon’s model, matter a great deal: “the side with a stronger
domestic audience (e.g., a democracy) is always less likely to back down than the side less able to generate
audience costs (a nondemocracy).”4 Fearon himself, to be sure, was quite cautious in developing that
argument. The idea that democratic leaders “have an easier time generating audience costs” he advanced
simply as a “plausible working hypothesis.”5 But other writers have made stronger claims, and the basic idea
that the audience costs mechanism gives democracies a certain bargaining advantage, especially in crisis
situations, is taken quite seriously in the international relations literature.
Fearon and other scholars who argued in that vein were basically making a theoretical argument, and
they developed that argument by showing how particular models work. But a theory is of value only to the
extent that it rings true when one examines the empirical evidence. And clearly their assumption was that the
“audience costs story” was empirically plausible—that it was empirically true that many crises appear “as
2
Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 579. See also ibid., pp. 577-578.
Alastair Smith, “International Crises and Domestic Politics,” American Political Science Review 92, no. 3 (September 1998), p.
623. Emphasis added.
3
4
Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 577.
5
Ibid., p. 582.
3
competitions in creating domestic political audience costs.”6 Fearon’s argument, as he himself pointed out, was
rooted in an “empirical claim, namely that crises are public events carried out in front of domestic political
audiences and that this fact is crucial to understanding why they occur and how they unfold.”7
But does the audience costs theory in fact hold up in the light of the empirical evidence? It is not
obvious how one should go about answering that question. Direct statistical tests, as Kenneth Schultz has
pointed out, “are fraught with methodological difficulties.”8 The more effective the audience costs mechanism
is, the less likely it is that audience costs themselves would actually be incurred (since the opposing side would
back down). “This creates a problem for statistical inference,” Schultz notes, “because the outcomes that we
observe should be associated with lower domestic costs, on average, than the outcomes that we do not
observe.”9 It is hard, therefore, to draw inferences about how powerful the audience costs mechanism is by
just studying the audience costs that are actually incurred—and yet statistical inference deals with observables.
If direct tests are impossible, one can always try to infer additional propositions from the model and
subject them to empirical analysis. But the problem here is that those propositions might also be consistent
with very different sets of assumptions. Hypotheses inferred from an audience costs model might thus make
perfect sense to people who do not find the audience costs theory plausible, so even if a statistical analysis
supports those hypotheses, that finding would not convince these skeptics that the theory is basically valid.
Given these problems, perhaps the best way to get a handle on this issue is to do historical analysis. “Where
large sample statistical tests come up short,” Schultz writes, historical cases studies “may be the most effective
way of deciding whether the search for audience costs is a fruitful enterprise.”10
So my goal here is to examine the audience costs theory in the light of the historical evidence—that is,
to see how much of a role the audience costs mechanism, as Fearon defined it, plays in determining the way
international crises run their course. I will be looking at a set of crises—episodes in which there was a
James Fearon, “Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, no.
1 (February 1997), p. 68, and also p. 87.
6
7
Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 577.
8
Kenneth Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 45, no. 1 (February 2001), p. 35.
9
Ibid., p. 33.
10
Ibid., p. 53.
4
significant perceived risk of war—involving great powers, at least one of which was a democracy, and which
were settled without war.
These criteria were chosen for the following reasons. The cases are all crises because the Fearon
theory explicitly deals with crises. But I will be looking only at great power crises for essentially practical reasons.
In crises between minor powers, or between a great power and a minor power, the possibility of intervention
on the part of an outside great power is often very real, and this considerably complicates the analysis. Great
power crises generally have a simpler structure, so their logic should stand out more clearly. And that means
that if audience costs play a key role in shaping outcomes, that role should be easier to see in such cases.
The focus here, moreover, is on crises in which at least one of the contending parties is a democracy,
since much of the debate on this issue has to do with whether the audience costs mechanism gives democracies
an advantage over non-democratic regimes. This means that the crises to be examined all took place after
1867. It was in that year, with the passage of the Second Reform Act, that Great Britain became a democracy,
or at least that is what both historians and political scientists commonly argue.11 No other great power (if
certain brief revolutionary periods in France are ignored) could be considered a democracy before that point.
Finally, only those crises that did not terminate in war will be examined here. The rationale has to do
with the basic thrust of the Fearon theory. His argument, both in his audience costs paper and in his very
important article “Rationalist Explanations for War,” is that rational states in a sense should be able to reach a
bargain that would enable them to avoid war, but sometimes cannot do so because they suspect each other of
bluffing.12 It follows that anything that would allow them to credibly reveal their actual preferences might
point the way to a clear outcome and thus allow them to credibly head off an armed conflict, and the audience
costs mechanism, in Fearon’s view, provides an effective way for them to do so. What this means is that if that
mechanism is as important as Fearon suggests, we are more likely to see it in operation in crises that end
peacefully than in those that end in war.
“The Reform Act of 1867,” Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example, writes, “was one of the decisive events, perhaps the
decisive event, in modern English history. It was this act that transformed England into a democracy . . .” Gertrude
Himmelfarb, “The Politics of Democracy: The English Reform Act of 1867,” Journal of British Studies 6, no. 1 (November
1966), p. 97.
11
12
James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995).
5
That set of criteria generates a list of about a dozen crises: the “War-in-Sight” crisis of 1875; the
Eastern Crisis of 1877-78; the Fashoda crisis; the two Moroccan crises; the Rhineland crisis of 1936; the Czech
crisis of 1938; the Turkish and Iranian crises of 1946; the Berlin Blockade of 1948; and the Berlin and Cuban
crises of 1958-62. This is not a long list, and all of those episodes will be examined here. But there is nothing
sacrosanct about that set of crises. One could easily argue, for example, that China was a great power in the
1950s and that the Sino-American crises of that decade should be included in the list. I have no fundamental
quarrel with arguments of that sort. I assume only that if the audience costs mechanism is as powerful as many
scholars believe, we should see it at work in crises that unambiguously meet the criteria laid out here, and
especially the crises discussed in the next section.
That section will deal with crises in which a democratic power prevailed—that is, with crises in which
its opponent backed down. These were the cases in which the audience costs mechanism is most likely to have
played an important role, but how important was it in reality? Did the democratic state deliberately try to
exploit it, and (more importantly) did its opponent pull back because it could now see that that state’s threats
were credible because audience costs would be incurred if it gave way in the dispute? The section after that,
much shorter and less systematic, will look at what happens when democracies lose. How much of a price do
their leaders pay in such cases and how does it compare with the price paid by leaders in non-democratic
regimes? Finally, in a concluding section, I will discuss the basic points that emerge from this analysis and what
the findings here imply about the way this sort of issue needs to be studied.
WHEN DEMOCRACIES PREVAIL
In this section we will look at great power crises that were won by democracies: five cases from the
pre-World War I period and five from the Cold War period. We will be interested in two main questions. The
more minor question has to do with the tactics employed by the democratic power. Audience costs theorists
sometimes suggest—and in this regard they build on Thomas Schelling’s argument about the importance in
bargaining of the “power to bind oneself”—that the leaders of those countries choose to “go public” in a crisis
with the deliberate goal of “burning their bridges” or “tying their hands” in order to gain a bargaining
6
advantage.13 But how often do those leaders in fact opt for tactics of that sort? The second and far more
important question focuses on the calculations of their adversaries. Whatever the intentions of the leaders of
the democratic state, the audience costs mechanism can be decisive only if the opposing power understands
why it would be hard for them to back down. Unless it was able to see why their hands were tied, it would
have no reason to conclude that they were not bluffing. So for the audience costs argument to hold, the
adversary power has to understand that the democratic leaders would find it hard to give way for fear of
incurring audience costs. But do governments confronting democratic states actually make this kind of
calculation?
The “War-in-Sight” Crisis (1875)
On April 9, 1875, the Berlin Post published an article called “Is War in Sight?” arguing that because of
developments in France, a Franco-German war might well be imminent. The Post was closely linked to the
German government, and other newspapers with official connections sounded similar themes. It was
commonly assumed at the time that the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was behind the press
campaign, and it seems quite clear in retrospect that that assumption was correct.14 Certainly Bismarck himself,
both at the time and earlier, and both openly and in private, had argued that a preventive war against France
would be justified as soon as it became clear that an armed confrontation was inevitable. General Helmuth von
Moltke, Germany’s top military officer, and Joseph Maria von Radowitz, one of Bismarck’s closest
collaborators at the Foreign Office, also defended the idea of a preventive war in talks with foreign diplomats.15
Fearon talks, for example, about why leaders “would want to be able to generate significant audience costs in
international contests.” Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 585. States, he says on p. 578 of that article, “resort to
the risky and provocative actions that characterize crises,” such as making public threats, “because less-public diplomacy
may not allow them credibly to reveal their own preferences.” This certainly suggests that governments deliberately pursue
a strategy of this sort. Other audience costs theorists also argue that statesmen deliberately exploit the audience costs
mechanism. See p. 17 below. For Schelling’s argument, see his article “An Essay on Bargaining,” in Thomas Schelling,
The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 22-28; on p. 28 Schelling had in fact presented the
basic idea that lies at the heart of the audience costs theory.
13
See James Stone, The War Scare of 1875: Bismarck and Europe in the Mid-1870s (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010), pp. 212-224.
There is a large literature on this episode (which Stone discusses in his first chapter), but this book—to my mind a model
of how historical analysis should be done—is the most important study of the subject ever published.
14
For a general account, see Stone, War Scare, pp. 224-245. For Bismarck’s views on preventive war, see Bismarck
Reichstag speech, November 1871, quoted in ibid., p. 37; Bismarck to von Arnim, October 30, 1873, Die Grosse Politik der
Europäischen Kabinette 1871-1914, ed. Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Friedrich Thimme (Berlin :
15
7
What was Bismarck up to? Following her defeat in 1871, France had been forced to cede Alsace and
much of Lorraine to Germany, but the French never accepted that arrangement as final. France was rebuilding
her military strength, but unless she had allies she could pose no real threat to Germany. The danger was that a
strong France might ally with one or more of Germany’s neighbors, and that danger would be particularly great
if, as seemed possible, the monarchists, who in 1875 controlled the French government, seized power in that
country. Strong pressure therefore had to be brought to bear to prevent that from happening: Germany’s
threatening behavior might convince the French to pursue a non-provocative policy. It might persuade French
voters to back the republicans, or at least keep the monarchists from attempting a coup.16
But if Germany had an interest in keeping France as weak and as isolated as possible, the other main
powers had an interest in a relatively strong France as a counterweight to Germany. “Bismarck is really another
old Bonaparte again,” the British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, thought, “and he must be bridled.”17 He
explained to the foreign secretary, Lord Derby, what needed to be done: “We should construct some
concerted movement to preserve the peace of Europe. . . There might be an alliance between Russia and
ourself for this special purpose; and other powers, as Austria, and perhaps Italy, might be invited to accede.”18
Derby agreed that Britain and Russia could jointly pursue that kind of policy. It could not be to “the interest of
Russia,” he thought, “to have France destroyed and Germany omnipotent.”19 The Russians were, in fact,
approached to see if the two countries could work together in this affair; indeed, Disraeli suggested to them
Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1922-1927), 40 vols. in 54, 1:221; Odo Russell to Granville,
December 22, 1873, and Odo Russell to Derby, April 27, 1875, in Winifred Taffs, Ambassador to Bismarck: Lord Odo Russell,
First Baron Ampthill (London: Frederick Muller, 1938), pp. 66, 86-87. On Moltke, see Stone, War Scare, pp. 236-239;
Andreas Hillgruber, “Die ‘Krieg-in-Sicht’ Krise 1875—Wegscheide der Politik der europäischen Grossmächte in der
späten Bismarck-Zeit,” in Ernst Schulin, ed., Gedenkschrift Martin Göhring: Studien zur europäischen Geschichte (Wiesbaden:
Franz Steiner, 1968), p. 244 and the references cited in n. 13 there; and Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of
Germany, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 261, 268-269. Radowitz’s comments in meeting with the
French ambassador in Berlin are reported in Gontaut-Biron to Decazes, April 21, 1975, Documents diplomatiques français
(1871-1914), series I, vol. 1, pp. 417-418, henceforth cited in the form: DDF I:1:417-418.
This is basically Stone’s argument. See also the passage from an April 1875 letter from Bismarck to State Secretary
Bülow quoted in Johannes Janorschke, “Die ‘Krieg-in-Sicht’ Krise von 1875: Eine Neuebetrachtung,” Historische
Mitteilungen 20 (2007), p. 121 n. 23.
16
Quoted in William Monypenny and George Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (New York:
Macmillan, 1929), vol. 2, p. 761.
17
18
Disraeli to Derby, May 6, 1875, ibid., p. 762.
Derby to Odo Russell, May 3, 1875, in Lord Newton, Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy, vol. 2 (London: Edward
Arnold, 1913), p. 75.
19
8
that if a Franco-German war did break out, other countries—meaning Britain and Russia—would intervene.20
The Russian leaders—both the Tsar and the chancellor, Prince Gorchakov—were about to visit Berlin. It was
taken for granted that they would try to preserve the peace and the British ambassador was instructed to
support their efforts. The Russian and British governments had little trouble getting the assurances they
wanted, since the German emperor had never been willing to sanction a preventive war against France and
Bismarck had been bluffing.21 When his bluff was called, he had little choice but to give way, and that was the
end of the crisis.
What does this story tell us about the audience costs theory? Audience costs were not the crucial
factor in 1875. The audience costs mechanism, in fact, played no real role at all. The one clearly democratic
power, Britain, intervened, but in a fairly low-key way, especially as far as the public was concerned. It had not
engaged in “costly signaling”: “what we did,” Lord Derby wrote, “involved no risk and cost no trouble.”22
And even after the crisis had been settled, the government did not try to cash in on its “victory” in domestic
political terms. It sought to play down what it had done, and to stress how “unostentatious” its policy had
been; the details of its action were deliberately not revealed to the nation.23 Indeed, it is hard to see how the
fact that Britain was now a democracy made any difference at all—how the democratic system gave British
leaders more effective tools for the conduct of foreign policy than those they had long possessed.
So this particular case does not provide much support for the audience costs theory. But it does not
count heavily against that theory either. Bismarck’s bluff was called rather easily, if only because of the
emperor’s attitude. Britain and Russia were pushing on an open door. It did not take much to get the German
chancellor to back down—to see that his own freedom of action was perhaps more limited than he had
Shuvalov to the Tsar, May 13, 1875 (two documents), in R.W. Seton-Watson, “Russo-British Relations during the
Eastern Crisis,” part I, Slavonic Review 3, no. 8 (December 1924), pp. 424-425 (docs. 54 and 55).
20
See the emperor’s very interesting comment of May 16, 1875, laying out his reasons for opposing a preventive war
strategy, in Grosse Politik 1:282. A French translation can be found in La Politique extérieure de l’Allemagne 1870-1914, vol. 1
(Paris: Alfred Costes, 1927), pp. 264-265.
21
22
Derby to Disraeli, May 20, 1875, in Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, 2:764.
Disraeli to Derby, May 30, 1875, ibid.; and Lord Derby’s May 31, 1875, speech in Parliament, Parliamentary Debates:
House of Lords, series 3, vol. 224, col. 1098.
23
9
realized. There was no need, in other words, for Britain to engage in “costly signaling.” And that leaves open
the possibility that in a more serious crisis, the audience costs mechanism might play a more important role.
But there is one point bearing on the theory that should be noted. The audience costs theorists think
that states profit in bargaining terms from an ability to generate audience costs—that taking a tough public
stand (when that would generate audience costs) strengthens a country’s position and gives it the upper hand in
a crisis. But the 1875 case shows why “going public” might not always be a good idea: public threats might
alienate third powers and might lead them to take action that weakens one’s general political position. Public
threat-making, in other words, is not necessarily an effective instrument of statecraft.
The Eastern Crisis, 1877-78
In April 1877, Russia declared war on Turkey. That action came after prolonged efforts, especially by
the three eastern empires, to get Turkey to end the mistreatment of her mainly Christian subjects in
southeastern Europe, and only after Russia had reached an important agreement with Austria governing the
outcome of the war. The Russian aim at first was to pursue only limited goals and to avoid conflict with the
two other great powers, Austria and Britain, with strong interests in the area. But in the course of the war
Russian objectives escalated, especially after the fall of Plevna and the collapse of Turkish resistance in
December 1877. The government, carried away by or unable to resist strong nationalist and pan-Slav feeling,
was tempted to end Turkish rule in the Balkans, liberate the Christian populations there, and even seize control
of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits. But that program was utterly unacceptable to the British
government, and it seemed increasingly likely that Austria would side with Britain in a showdown.24
From January through March 1878, Russia and Britain seemed to be on the verge of war. In 1877,
before it had become apparent just how far Russia was going to go, British opinion had been divided about
how strong a line to take. Prime Minister Disraeli was quite warlike even then, but the foreign secretary, Lord
The account here is based mainly on two extraordinary works published in the 1930s: B.H. Sumner, Russia and the
Balkans, 1870-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), and R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern
Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics (London: Macmillan, 1935). On Russian policy, see also David MacKenzie,
“Russia’s Balkan Policies under Alexander II, 1855-1881,” in Hugh Ragsdale, ed., Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), and for British side see also Marvin Swartz, The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era
of Disraeli and Gladstone (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1985). On the role of nationalist and pan-Slav opinion in Russia, see
Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, esp. pp. 194-197, 380, 390.
24
10
Derby, wanted very much to head off a conflict with Russia.25 So the actions the British government took in
1877 were relatively restrained. When the Russians crossed the Danube at the end of June, the British fleet was
ordered to Besika Bay, just south of the Turkish Straits, and in July the Russian ambassador was told by the
British that (in B.H. Sumner’s paraphrase) “in the event of a Russian occupation of Constantinople the
government would be free to adopt any measures they might think fit.”26 By the beginning of 1878, however,
it seemed quite possible that Russia might actually occupy that city, and British policy hardened. The fleet was
sent up the Dardanelles and anchored within sight of the Turkish capital, near the island of Prinkipo;
Parliament approved supplementary appropriations and “military and naval preparations were pressed on with
yet more urgent haste.”27 The Russians, as it turned out, did not occupy Constantinople, but their armies did
move to within a few miles of the city, and at the beginning of March they were able to dictate peace terms to
the Turks—terms which were not in line with what the Austrians had been promised before the war, and
which neither the British nor the Austrians could accept.
It thus seemed (for about ten weeks) that “violent nationalist feelings” in both Russia and Britain
would sweep both countries into war.28 The British, at the end of March, “called up the reserves and decided
to bring a contingent of Indian troops to the Mediterranean.”29 That decision led to the resignation of Lord
Derby and his replacement at the Foreign Office by Lord Salisbury. Derby’s departure was seen by the
Russians as a sign that Britain was heading toward war—and that in fact a military conflict was imminent.30
The immediate effect was to lead to a hardening of the Tsar’s attitude: it was important to preempt a British
move to seize Constantinople.31 But his brother, the military commander in the theater, did not do what the
Tsar wanted. He was replaced in April, but by then the whole political situation had changed.
This is one of the basic themes in the Seton-Watson book. The evidence presented there about Disraeli’s bellicosity is
quite extraordinary: Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, pp. 216-219. On political divisions in Britain, see ibid., esp. p. 272.
25
26
Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 317-318.
27
Ibid., p. 374.
28
Ibid., pp. 374, 380, 406.
29
Ibid., p. 389. See also Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 364.
30
Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 393.
31
Ibid., pp. 374, 393-395.
11
The pan-Slav tide had by that point receded, and Russian leaders were now prepared to approach the
problem in a more sober, less emotional way. Russia was in no position militarily, financially or politically to go
to war against Britain, and probably against Austria as well.32 Britain, on the other hand, was then at the peak
of her power: “England will hardly feel the war,” the German ambassador in London noted, “while it will ruin
Russia and throw back for at least a quarter of a century the development of this half-barbaric state.”33 But the
situation in Britain had also changed and the British were now ready to make a bargain with the Tsar’s
government. Disraeli was now willing to allow Salisbury to call the shots, and Salisbury was prepared to make a
reasonable peace with Russia: to compromise on the Balkan issues and to accept some Russian territorial gains
in both Europe and Asia. On that basis he and the Russian ambassador in London, Count Peter Shuvalov,
were able in May to reach an agreement that essentially settled the crisis; the details were worked out at the
Congress of Berlin later that year.
What light does this story throw on the audience costs question? Do you see governments stirring up
opinion at home to strengthen their bargaining position in confrontations with other powers? Did
governments interpret their adversaries’ public moves as creating situations in which, for domestic political
reasons, they would find it hard to pull back? And did that calculation play a crucial role in convincing them
that the other side was not bluffing and that they themselves would therefore have to give way if war was to be
avoided?
It turns out that the audience costs logic did come into play during the Eastern Crisis, albeit in a fairly
limited way . For Gorchakov, Sumner writes (referring to a relatively early stage of the crisis), “patriotic
effervescence in Russia was in one sense far from unwelcome. It could be used to strengthen his hand abroad,
provided that it did not go beyond controllable limits.”34 And Disraeli, in October 1877, did consider a
maneuver based on stirring up public opinion at home. Britain, he thought, could in effect recommend terms
for ending the Russo-Turkish War. If Russia rejected those terms, “she would put herself much more in the
32
Ibid., pp. 396-397, 406.
Münster to Bennigsen, April 11, 1878, quoted in Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 378. Britain at the time accounted
for over 22 percent of world manufacturing output, as compared to under eight percent for Russia. See the table in Paul
Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 149.
33
34
Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 197.
12
wrong, and if the terms were publicly acknowledged by England as just and satisfactory, it would be very difficult
for us to adhere to our present neutrality. Opinion at home would force us to action.”35 But he soon dropped the
idea, and the Russians did not really believe that the British government’s hands were tied by a bellicose public
opinion. Indeed, Lord Derby told the Russian ambassador not to take Britain’s warlike moves too seriously. “I
know my colleagues well: they do not want war, but to satisfy their party by demonstrations.” If the Russians
did not allow themselves to be provoked, war might yet be avoided. And Shuvalov, after some reflection,
advised his government that Derby might well be right.36
The Russians, in fact, were not impressed when the British government claimed at the Congress of
Berlin that its hands were tied for domestic political reasons. The issue here, which had to do with the status of
the port of Batum, was fairly minor. The British sought to convince the Russian government that because of
Jingo feeling in Britain, the Russians should take a relatively moderate line on that issue. They should be told,
Disraeli thought, that if they were “not wise, they will have a Jingo Govt. & war with England in a month.”
Salisbury agreed to “do all that I can to frighten” Shuvalov. But his heart was not in it, and the real purpose of
the effort was to demonstrate the government’s “firmness to their Jingo followers” at home.37 Salisbury,
writing from Berlin, was in fact quite irritated by the “extravagant nonsense talked at home” about Batum and
Turkey’s Asiatic border.38
And looking at the crisis as a whole, it is quite clear that the he British government did not calculate
that it had to “go public” in order to tie its own hands for bargaining purposes. Disraeli and Salisbury did not
seek to limit their own freedom of action; their goal was simply to make it clear, to both the country and the
world, that Britain would go to war if Russia did not moderate her position. The Russians, for their part,
understood that the Disraeli government had the power to carry out that policy, and they did not doubt that
35
Disraeli to Layard, October 11, 1877, quoted in Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 234. Emphasis in the original text.
Shuvalov to Gorchakov, March 29 and 30, 1878, quoted in ibid., p. 378. For the original documents, see R.W. SetonWatson, “Russo-British Relations, 1875-1878,” part 2, Slavonic and East European Review 28, no. 70 (November 1949), docs.
433 and 434, p. 226.
36
Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 456; Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 540; Swartz, Politics of British Foreign Policy, pp.
94-96. The term “Jingo,” which came into use at this time, derived from a famous music-hall song sung during this crisis:
“We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!” A clip
from an early recording of this song is available at http://www.archeophone.org/Berliner5inch/berliner-040.php.
37
38
Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 540.
13
that government would carry it out if no settlement were reached. That judgment was based on all sorts of
indicators; what Shuvalov was able to learn, especially from Lord and Lady Derby, about the views of key
British leaders, was of particular importance in this context.39 The whole question of whether Disraeli would
be unable to pull back for domestic political reasons was of no great importance, for the simple reason that he
clearly was not interested in pulling back if the terms were not satisfactory. It was scarcely as though the
Russians were trying hard to see whether the British were bluffing and were only convinced that they were not
when they realized the government would incur significant audience costs if it gave way during the crisis. If
anything, they thought Disraeli government was more bellicose than it in fact was.40
Thus the audience costs mechanism did not play a key role during the crisis, and this particular story
helps us understand why that mechanism might be weaker than some theorists think. Tough talk tended to be
vague. Disraeli’s Guildhall address of November 1876 is a good case in point. “Although the policy of
England is peace,” he said, “there is no country so well prepared for war as our own.” Britain’s resources were
“inexhaustible,” and if she went to war, “she will not terminate till right is done.”41 But this gave no clear sense
for the terms Britain would insist on; there was no precise commitment that Disraeli could be blamed for not
honoring. The same point could be made about the speech the Tsar gave in Moscow two days later, in which
he referred to Russia’s “sacred mission” in the Balkans.42 This was tough language, but it did not mean much
in operational terms, and in particular it did not foreclose the possibility of a moderate peace.
And even if the thrust of a policy is relatively clear, a government that wants to draw back can often
finesse the situation in various ways. One is struck in this context by R.W. Seton-Watson’s interpretation of
Disraeli’s policy in 1878. In allowing Salisbury to work out a compromise with Shuvalov, Disraeli was actually
retreating from his earlier hard line. The warlike measures he took at the time served to “conceal his retreat
and pacify the impatient Jingoes” and the way he packaged the Berlin settlement as a defeat for Russia served
Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, pp. 250, 298; Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 29-30, 321; Swartz, Politics of British
Foreign Policy, pp. 48-49, 70-72. See also Shuvalov’s reports to Gorchakov in Seton-Watson, “Russo-British Relations,”
parts 1 and 2.
39
40
See Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, esp. pp. 472, 475.
41
Quoted in ibid., p. 226.
42
Quoted in ibid., p. 226-227.
14
the same purpose.43 The Jingoes had to be “calmed in their own language,” Salisbury said, and Disraeli was the
only one who could do it because he “speaks it fluently.”44
The Russians had a different way to avoid paying audience costs. They had pursued a very ambitious
policy in early 1878, “in reckless disregard,” as Sumner puts it, of the probable reactions of Britain and
Austria.45 Shuvalov was appalled by that policy—he called the treaty Russia had imposed on Turkey “the
greatest act of stupidity we could have committed”—and it was largely thanks to his rather extraordinary
efforts that Russia was able to avoid what would certainly have been a disastrous war with Britain, and probably
with Austria as well.46 But Russian public opinion was deeply disappointed by the Berlin settlement, and
Shuvalov, the main architect of that settlement on the Russian side, was held responsible for what had
happened. His political career was ruined, and the German government was also blamed. The Tsar spoke of a
“European coalition against Russia, under the leadership of Prince Bismarck.” In that way, those responsible
for the failed policy—the Tsar especially—were able to limit the audience costs they had to pay.47
The Fashoda Crisis (1898)
For much of the nineteenth century, Britain sought to prevent Russia from getting control of the
Turkish Straits. A Russian presence in the eastern Mediterranean would weaken Britain’s position in what was
for her a region of central strategic importance. When Russia formed an alliance with France in the early
1890s, the problem became acute: the British could not risk a conflict with Russia if their fleet could be
attacked from behind by France. One possible solution was for Germany to threaten to attack France if she
Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, p. 397. See also ibid., pp. 379, 530-531, 535, and 560-561, for related arguments and
evidence.
43
44
Swartz, Politics of British Foreign Policy, p. 96.
45
Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, p. 425.
46
Quoted in ibid., p. 471.
See Seton-Watson, Eastern Question, pp. 461-471, and Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 554-556. One should also note
in this context Bismarck’s not-too-successful method for evading accountability in 1875: indirect threat-making (especially
via the press) with “plausible deniability” (to use a term from a later period) followed by the scapegoating of those who
had served as the instruments of that strategy. See Stone, War Scare, pp. 22, 284-311.
47
15
joined with Russia in such a case; Britain would then be able to pursue with Germany’s ally Austria a policy
directed at the containment of Russia. But the Germans were not willing to go along with the idea.48
So by the mid-1890s the old strategy of defending Constantinople was becoming increasingly
untenable—all the more so, since after the Armenian massacres of 1894-96 a policy of siding with the Turks
against Russia was scarcely viable in domestic political terms. The British would instead consolidate their
position in Egypt, which they had originally occupied in 1882; the corollary was that they would also have to
dominate the entire Nile valley. Indeed, Lord Salisbury, who in the late 1890s was once again foreign secretary,
had long understood that Britain might have to go this route: as Robinson and Gallagher put it in their classic
work on the subject, it had been Salisbury’s “set policy since 1889 to exclude European rivals” from the upper
Nile.49
The French, on the other hand, very much wanted to end the British occupation of Egypt.50 Key
officials thought that by sending a military expedition to the upper Nile, France could reopen the Egyptian
question. An international conference would be convened and Britain would be made to withdraw from
Egypt. Some French leaders thought this policy was insane.51 But the government, under strong pressure
from the so-called parti colonial, approved the plan, and in late 1896 the parliament, by a vote of 477 to 18,
See William Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1935), vol. 1, pp. 52-54. See also Arthur
Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880-1905 (New York:
Knopf, 1940), chap. 11.
48
See C.J. Lowe, The Reluctant Imperialists: British Foreign Policy 1878-1902 (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 196-204 (esp. pp.
203-204), and the extract from Salisbury to Currie, October 19, 1897, on pp. 377-378 (doc. 115); Ronald Robinson and
John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968), pp. 254-273,
and p. 354 (for the quotation); and C.J. Lowe, Salisbury and the Mediterranean, 1886-1896 (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1965). The two most important books on the British side of what was to become the Fashoda affair are the
Robinson and Gallagher book just cited, a brilliant analysis, and G.N. Sanderson’s more detailed study, England, Europe and
the Upper Nile, 1882-1899 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965).
49
See Pierre Guillen, L’Expansion 1881-1898 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1985), pp. 397-425 and 461-462. For the
French side of the Fashoda affair, see also Roger Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered: The Impact of Domestic Politics on French Policy in
Africa, 1893-1898 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970); Marc Michel, La Mission Marchand, 1895-1899 (Paris: Mouton,
1972); and C.M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, “Gabriel Hanotaux, the Colonial Party and the Fashoda Strategy,” in
E.F. Penrose, ed., European Imperialism and the Partition of Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1975).
50
This was the view expressed by Colonies Minister Chautemps in testimony before a parliamentary committee in 1895,
quoted in A.S. Kanya-Forstner’s review of Sanderson’s England, Europe, and the Upper Nile, in the Historical Journal 9, no. 2
(1966), p. 251.
51
16
agreed to fund what was to become the Marchand Mission. Marchand’s arrival at Fashoda on the upper Nile,
the foreign minister said, would be a “pistol shot”: it would force Britain to negotiate.52
But the French had totally misread the situation and were in a much weaker position than they had
realized. The other continental powers would not go to war over the issue. Given the Alsace-Lorraine
problem, true political intimacy between France and Germany was out of the question.53 French leaders had
hoped, however, that their Russian ally would support their Egyptian policy, but it was clear by early 1898 that
no real support would be forthcoming.54 This was in part because they themselves were unwilling to support
Russia in other areas, but was also because the shift in British strategy away from the defense of Constantinople
meant that Britain was in a better position to strike a deal with Russia. Salisbury, in fact, made a point of
staying on good terms with that country: “in six months’ time,” he said in early 1898, “we shall be on the verge
of war with France; I can’t afford to quarrel with Russia now.”55
With France isolated, the British government could take a very firm stance. An Anglo-Egyptian army
under Lord Kitchener was in the process of reconquering the Sudan and by mid-September had reached
Fashoda. Marchand had arrived there two months earlier. The British insisted that the French force be
withdrawn. The new French foreign minister, Delcassé, tried to negotiate, but Salisbury would scarcely throw
him a crumb. And on November 3, with their backs to the wall, and in no position to go to war, the French
gave way. Marchand was ordered to evacuate Fashoda.
See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 409, and Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “Gabriel Hanotaux,” p. 77. On the parti colonial, see
C.M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, “The French ‘Colonial Party’: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1885-1914,”
Historical Journal 14, no. 1 (March 1971), and L. Abrams and D.J. Miller, “Who Were the French Colonialists? A
Reassessment of the Parti Colonial, 1890-1914,” Historical Journal 19, no. 3 (1976).
52
The French foreign minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, told the President of the Republic when he left office in mid-1898 that
French opinion was opposed to cooperation with Germany against Britain. See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 449.
53
See ibid., pp. 428-440, esp. p. 439; Michel, Mission Marchand, pp. 130-131, 135; Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 327. See also
A.J.P. Taylor’s reviews of the two volumes in the DDF dealing with this episode, in the English Historical Review, vol. 69,
no. 273 (October 1954), and vol. 74, no. 291 (April 1959).
54
Quoted in Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, p. 367n. Indeed, “the disunity of France and Russia over
the Fashoda crisis,” Robinson and Gallagher say, “seems to show that [Salisbury’s] tactics met with some success.” Ibid.,
p. 367. Salisbury was evidently willing to incur substantial audience costs in order to achieve that result. After quoting the
Salisbury comment just cited in the text, Sanderson (on p. 324 of his book) goes on to say: “The ‘climb-down’ over Port
Arthur was bitterly resented by British opinion and cost Salisbury much of his popularity”—and it is hard to believe that
Salisbury did not know in advance what the public reaction would be. He might well have calculated that his public
standing depended on the success of his policy over the long run, and in any event did not depend on his following public
opinion on every issue that came up.
55
17
The Fashoda crisis is of special interest from the point of view of the audience costs theory, and
indeed to the extent that any historical evidence to given to support that theory, that support comes largely
from an analysis of this episode.56 According to Schultz, Salisbury deliberately “manipulated the popular mood
in order to bolster his bargaining position. By taking advantage of and stoking the public’s outrage, Salisbury
was able to convince the French that he had no leeway to offer concessions.”57 British leaders, he says, sent
signals “designed to arouse public opinion so that it would be difficult for the government to later back
down.”58 The most important step of this sort he took was to release a Blue Book containing hitherto secret
diplomatic documents relating to the affair. The Blue Book, Schultz writes, “was intended to inflame
[Salisbury’s] domestic audience.”59 The French understood that in taking that step the British government was
cutting “itself off from all retreat” (as their ambassador in London put it). The government would not survive
if it backed down after taking such a clear stance.60 The audience costs mechanism, the argument runs, thus
played a key role in determining how the crisis ran its course and why it was resolved the way it was.61
But did Salisbury in fact deliberately seek to “stoke the public’s outrage”? Was that why the Blue Book
was published? The conventional view among historians is that Salisbury personally did not want to draw the
line so sharply in public. But he was not a free agent. Much as he would have liked to conduct policy without
worrying about what was being said in the press, he understood that he could not ignore public opinion, and it
was also obvious to him that the strong feelings of his colleagues in the Cabinet had to be taken into account.62
The publication of the Blue Book, as Salisbury himself argued, thus has to be understood as a defensive act.
The section on the crisis in Kenneth Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), pp. 175-96, is the most important example. It should be noted, however, that Fearon, on p. 582 of his main on
audience costs paper, referred to a handful of cases in which leaders of democratic states were able to generate audience
costs, and “Lord Salisbury’s speeches during the Fashoda crisis of 1898” was the first example he cited. Salisbury,
however, evidently did not give any important speech on the Upper Nile question during the crisis period—or if he did, it
was not considered important enough to be reported in the Times of London, Britain’s most important newspaper during
that period, as a search of the Times Digital Archive for “Salisbury” for late 1898 seems to show.
56
57
Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 182.
58
Ibid., pp. 186, 190. See also Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” p. 40.
59
Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 193. See also Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” pp. 40-41.
60
Schultz, “Looking for Audience Costs,” p. 41; Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 189.
61
Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, pp. 186-87, 190, 195.
See, for example, J.A.S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Athlone
Press, 1964), p. 218; Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp. 256, 373-374; and Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 400.
62
18
He had been accused of weakness and his own public needed to see that he was perfectly able to defend British
interests. English opinion, he said, was “extremely over-excited”; when the facts were made public, he hoped,
people would be able to approach the issue in a more sober way.63 Salisbury thus probably did not intend to
inflame public opinion. His goal, it seems, was not to curtail his own freedom of action—to deliberately tie his
hands in that way—but rather to safeguard the freedom of action he normally had. But whatever his
intentions, the release of the documents led to a “flood of political oratory” in Britain and the “vehemence of
the speakers” meant that even minor concessions could not now be made.64
This does not mean, however, that the audience costs mechanism was of fundamental importance in
this affair. The basic Fearon argument was that that mechanism plays a crucial role because it provides new
and compelling information during a crisis. The idea was that information available before a crisis—
information, for example, about relative military power or about each side’s intrinsic interests—cannot explain
why it ran its course the way it did. Only new information about a state’s resolve can explain why the crisis ends
the way it does.65 So the question here is whether actions like the release of the Blue Book provided significant
new information about British resolve—or, more precisely, whether such actions had a major impact on
French estimates of Britain’s willingness to go to war over the issue. And the key point to note here is that the
British had made it quite clear to French observers well before the affair reached the crisis stage that a
meaningful French presence in the Nile valley would simply not be tolerated. That policy had been pursued
from 1890 on no matter which party was in power. British warnings had been unambiguous.66 And French
diplomats, well before the affair came to a head, were under no illusions as to how the British government, and
the British public as well, felt about the subject. As early as 1894, the French chargé in London reported (in
For Salisbury’s explanation for the publication of the Blue Book, see Courcel to Delcassé, October 6, 1898, DDF
I:14:633-634, 635. Ambassador Courcel thought that Salisbury’s explanation was correct. See Courcel to Delcassé,
October 10, 1898, ibid., p. 651.
63
64
Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 347.
65
Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 586. See also Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, pp. 177-180.
See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 403 (for a warning given to the French foreign minister in June 1894); and Sanderson, Upper
Nile, p. 264 (for an important November 1897 warning). This was the first document published in the Blue Book:
“Correspondence with the French Government respecting the Valley of the Upper Nile,” House of Commons Sessional
Papers, C.9054 (London: HMSO, 1898). The famous public warning issued in 1895 by Sir Edward Grey (then UnderSecretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Liberal Rosebery government) appears there as the third document in the
appendix.
66
19
G.N. Sanderson’s paraphrase) that “no British Government, Liberal or Conservative, will be permitted by
public opinion to make serious concessions to anybody.”67 Ambassador Courcel made a similar point in
1895.68 The strength of public feeling in Britain, and the firmness of the government’s position, were certainly
quite clear to French diplomats in London in 1898 well before the Blue Book was published. On September
29, for example, the French chargé referred in passing to the violent tone of the press in past weeks; instead of
blaming the government for inflaming public opinion, he actually gave it credit for trying to get the newspapers
to take a more sober line. But that moderation was interpreted as evidence not of the government’s willingness
to make concessions, but as an indicator of its supreme confidence that it would prevail in the crisis; he
referred in this context to the “views expressed on many occasions by the British government and adopted
more or less unanimously as an absolute principle by the English public.”69 Ambassador Courcel, in fact, had
been convinced for some time that the British government was determined to hold on to Egypt, and public
feeling was just one part of the picture.70 So as the crisis was brewing, French officials had all the information
they needed—including information from intelligence sources—to assess the situation accurately.71
The problem was that the authorities in Paris simply refused to believe that the British would go to war
over the issue.72 Even the most important public warning, the Grey declaration of March 1895, the French
foreign minister dismissed at the time as “not seriously intended”—a point which has a direct bearing on the
audience costs theory.73 France’s leaders could not bring themselves to see the facts for what they were: in
1898, as A.J.P. Taylor put it, “the French went blindfold to disaster.”74 It was only during the crisis itself, when
67
Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 209.
68
Ibid., pp. 220-221.
Geoffray to Delcassé, September 29, 1898, DDF I:14:601-602. The French representatives in London, in fact, were
quite sensitive to what Salisbury was saying, and had no problem interpreting the somewhat oblique allusion he made to
the Marchand mission (and to the importance of keeping the Upper Nile in the hands of a friendly power) in a speech he
gave in the House of Lords in February 1898. See Courcel to Hanotaux, February 9, 1898, DDF I:14:82-83. The passage
appears in the transcript of the speech published in the Times (London), February 9, 1898, p. 8, col. f.
69
70
See, for example, Courcel to Hanotaux, March 27, 1897, quoted in Michel, Mission Marchand, p. 133.
71
See Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 73-74.
72
See Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 462, and Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 361.
73
Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “Gabriel Hanotaux,” p. 66.
74
A.J.P. Taylor review of DDF I:14, in the English Historical Review 74, no. 291 (April 1959), p. 319.
20
the evidence of Britain’s willingness to go to war became utterly overwhelming and with military action
imminent, that the French gave way. The idea that Salisbury’s hands were tied played only a minor role in the
crisis. Strong public feeling might explain why he was unable to make even a token concession designed to
allow the French to save face, but this was not the key reason why French leaders concluded that Britain was
not going to give way on fundamentals. A more general picture had taken shape. Public opinion was certainly
one element in that picture. The tough line taken by political leaders in both parties, and especially by
Salisbury’s Cabinet colleagues, also fed into that overall assessment of how far the British were prepared to go
in this affair. But what the French were learning through intelligence channels was another key element in the
equation; in particular, what they were learning about the military measures the British were taking—above all,
the mobilization of the British fleet on October 28—was a very important indicator. And indeed the news that
the Royal Navy was being put on a war footing in fact proved decisive: it was this move that led directly to the
French decision to evacuate Fashoda.75
But the fact that things had to reach this point before the French drew back—and even at the peak of
the crisis their government was apparently considering a plan which Courcel viewed as totally insane—suggests
that French policy in this affair is not to be understood in essentially rational terms.76 This, in fact, is the
prevailing view among historians who have studied this episode in some depth. Behind the policy that had led
to the Marchand mission, Sanderson says, “there was little rational calculation. It rested rather on a quite
irrational conviction that a successful expedition to the Upper Nile must somehow lead to a favourable solution
of the Egyptian question.” Pierre Guillen thinks that the French policy-makers were appallingly inept and
utterly incapable of seeing things for what they were. And A.S. Kanya-Forstner refers to the “strong current of
irrationality running through French policy” at this time.77
75
See Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 104, 113, 116.
Geoffray warned Courcel from Paris about what was being considered, and Courcel could scarcely believe what was
being contemplated: “Cela me semble de la folie pure, de la folie dangereuse.” Courcel to Geoffray, October 31, 1898,
DDF I:14:743-744. See also Sanderson, Upper Nile, pp. 351-352, and Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 115-116.
76
Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 391; Guillen, L’Expansion, pp. 461-462; Kanya-Forstner review of the Sanderson book, in the
Historical Journal 9, no. 2 (1966), p. 254. See also C. M. Andrew, “The French Colonialist Movement during the Third
Republic: The Unofficial Mind of Imperialism,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, vol. 26 (1976), esp. pp.
153-154, 161.
77
21
It is for this reason that a study of the Fashoda crisis does not provide much support for a “rationalist
explanation for war” like the audience costs theory. Fearon himself put his finger on the problem when he
pointed out that if “relative capabilities or interests” determined outcomes and were accurately assessed, “then
we should not observe crises between rational opponents: if rational, the weaker or observably less interested
state should simply concede the issues without offering public, costly resistance.” “Crises,” he wrote, “ would
occur only when the disadvantaged side irrationally forgets its inferiority before challenging or choosing to
resist a challenge”—and that was precisely what happened in 1898.78
The Moroccan Crises (1905-1906 and 1911)
During its first two decades, the German empire was a “satiated” state. But after the fall of Bismarck
in 1890 German policy changed dramatically. By the end of the decade Germany had developed far-reaching
imperial ambitions. The goal now was to become a “world power,” and perhaps even ultimately to displace
Britain as the world’s premier imperial power. The new policy thus had a certain anti-British cast, which the
British were quick to sense.79 Britain was already at odds with her two traditional imperial rivals, France and
Russia, over a whole range of issues in Asia and Africa, and the emergence of a new German threat deepened
her sense that her resources were overextended and that her old policy of avoiding commitment was no longer
viable. She therefore made an alliance with Japan in 1902 and then entered into negotiations that led to the
Anglo-French entente of 1904.80 But the news that the western powers were coming together was for the
Germans evidence of British hostility; Britain, in fact, was emerging in their eyes as the arch-enemy. “It
cannot be denied,” their emperor said, that England “underhandedly” was working “to isolate us.”81
The German goal now was to counteract Britain’s “encirclement” policy (as it was called) by
demonstrating to the French that their entente with Britain had brought them nothing of value. The French, in
78
Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 586.
See especially Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1980), chap. 13.
79
On these developments, see especially George Monger’s wonderful book, The End of Isolation: British Foreign Policy, 19001907 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1963).
80
Quoted in Norman Rich, Friedrich von Holstein: Politics and Diplomacy in the Era of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, vol. 2
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 680.
81
22
the 1904 agreement, had recognized Britain’s preeminent position in Egypt; the British, in exchange, had
agreed in effect that France would have a free hand in Morocco. But the Germans could prevent France from
achieving her goal of transforming Morocco into a French protectorate. The entente with Britain would be
revealed as worthless, and the French might feel they needed to improve their relationship with Germany, and
perhaps even join with Germany and Russia in a continental bloc directed against Britain.82
So the Germans took their stand. The emperor went to Tangier in March 1905 and made it clear that
Germany supported the independence of Morocco. The German position was strong, especially in military
terms. France’s ally, Russia, was not doing well in her war with Japan, and indeed that war had led to serious
disturbances at home; the French army was still suffering from the effects of the Dreyfus affair; and the
British Navy could not shield France from a German attack. The French therefore could not risk a military
confrontation with Germany. Their anti-German foreign minister, Delcassé, was thus forced to resign, and the
prime minister, Rouvier, sought negotiations. But the Germans refused and insisted instead on convening an
international conference which all the major powers (including the United States), and some minor ones as
well, would attend, calculating that the other countries would side with them at the conference. But the plan
backfired. German leaders, and especially the emperor, made it quite clear that their goal was not war but a
better relationship with France; the French therefore knew they could take a relatively tough line without
running any real risk of a military confrontation.83 And they knew that most of the other powers would
support them even if they took a hard line on the Moroccan question. They were therefore able to turn the
tables on Germany at the conference, and the German government could scarcely reject the decisions of a
conference they themselves had insisted on convening.84 In March 1906, the Germans in fact decided, as
Norman Rich puts it, “to make whatever concessions were required to settle the Moroccan crisis in order to
prevent the failure of the conference.”85
82
See Rich, Holstein, 2:678-745, for a very revealing analysis of German policy in the crisis.
See ibid., esp. pp. 708-710, 718, 722, 724, 726-728 and 741. See also Holstein memorandum, July 31, 1905, in Norman
Rich and M.H. Fisher, eds., The Holstein Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 356.
83
84
See Rich, Holstein, esp. pp. 738, 743-744.
85
Ibid., p. 740.
23
So despite their favorable military position the Germans ended up suffering a quite extraordinary
diplomatic defeat in 1906, brought on in large part by the policy choices they themselves had made. But the key
point to note here is that they did not give way because the audience costs mechanism had come into play. It
was not as though they had thought the French were bluffing over Morocco and were convinced only by
strong public statements made by French leaders that France would not give way in the crisis. That conclusion
is scarcely surprising, since the French were in no position to opt for a strategy of deterrence, and thus had no
interest in adopting tactics designed to enhance the credibility of their deterrent threats. Given the military
situation, a more subtle strategy—one that deemphasized the possibility of armed conflict—was clearly in
order.
The agreement worked out at the 1906 conference did not permanently settle the Moroccan affair.
The French were still determined to take over Morocco, and in the spring of 1911, in pursuit of that policy,
they sent a military expedition to the Moroccan capital of Fez. They had no right to do so under the 1906
agreement and the Germans responded by sending a gunboat to Agadir in southern Morocco. The German
government was willing to accept what the French were doing in that country, but demanded compensation.
To make sure that the French took that demand seriously, the Germans felt they needed to “go public”: quiet
diplomatic efforts, they were convinced, would be futile.86 The German government did not want a war, but
the German foreign secretary, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, the main architect of German policy in the 1911
crisis, felt that Germany could achieve her goals only if her adversaries felt she was willing to go all the way.87
By way of compensation the Germans asked for the whole French Congo; the French thought that
they were asking for far too much. The British agreed and worried about the broader implications of the
German move. As the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, put it: Britain could not go to war to “put France in
virtual possession of Morocco,” but an “attempt by Germany to humiliate France might affect British interests
See Jean-Claude Allain, Agadir 1911: Une crise impérialiste en Europe pour la conquête du Maroc (Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 1976), p. 325.
86
See Kiderlen to Bethmann, July 17, 1911, quoted in Emily Oncken, Panthersprung nach Agadir: Die deutsche Politik während
der Zweiten Marokkokrise 1911 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1981), p. 283. For the point that the German leadership wanted to
avoid war and had simply adopted a bluff strategy, see ibid., p. 421.
87
24
so seriously that we should have to resist it.”88 David Lloyd George, a key member of the Liberal government,
after first getting the green light from Grey, issued a public warning to Germany in his famous Mansion House
speech of July 21, 1911. Lloyd George’s goal was “to make it clear that if Germany meant war, she would find
Britain against her.”89 Germany, he suggested in that speech, was treating Britain “as if she were of no account
in the Cabinet of Nations”; “peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours
to endure.” The Germans were furious. Hadn’t they been ignored as the French pushed ahead in Morocco?
Weren’t they the ones who had been treated as they had been “of no account” in this affair?90 But the British
threat could not be ignored. The emperor and the chancellor very much wanted to avoid war, and again
essentially gave way in the crisis.91
What does this story tell us about the audience costs theory? It is quite clear, first of all, that Kiderlen
sought, in at least a limited way, to exploit the audience costs mechanism. One distinguished historian claims
that “Kiderlen-Wächter tried to strengthen Germany’s bargaining position by mobilizing public opinion
behind the German cause, deliberately inflaming nationalist passions with all the means at his disposal.”92 That
view is probably too extreme, but Kiderlen certainly did try to stir up opinion at home.93 This, however, did not
turn out to be a wise strategy. Nationalist feeling was aroused during the crisis and the government ended up
paying a huge political price for what was seen as its willingness to accept a humiliating defeat.94 And
Grey to Bertie, July 20, 1911, in G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley, eds., British Documents on the Origins of the War, 18981914 (London: HMSO, 1926-38), vol. 7, p. 382. Henceforth this source will be cited in the form: BD 7:382. See also
Crowe minute, July 18, 1911, and Nicolson minutes, n.d. and July 21, 1911, in ibid., pp. 372, 373, 386.
88
89
Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1914 (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), p. 43.
See Kiderlen to Metternich, July 24 and 25, 1911, Grosse Politik, 29:211 and 212; and Grey to Goschen, July 25, 1911, BD
7: 398.
90
See Geoffrey Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon: Anatomy of a Crisis (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p.
134; and Oncken, Panthersprung, pp. 292, 294-295, 421.
91
Wolfgang Mommsen, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in Wilhelmine Germany, 1897-1914,” in Wolfgang
Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 1867-1918: Politics, Culture and Society in an Authoritarian State (London: Arnold, 1995), p. 196.
See also Klaus Wernecke, Der Wille zur Weltgeltung: Aussenpolitik und Öffentlichkeit im Kaiserreich am Vorabend des Ersten
Weltkrieges (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1970), esp. pp. 29-31.
92
93
See Oncken, Panthersprung, pp. 332-350, esp. p. 340.
Paul Kennedy refers to a “veritable explosion of disgust within the German Right at the ‘cowardice’ of the government”
and Mommsen goes even further: “The domestic political situation ran completely out of control, and the government
found itself being vehemently attacked from almost all political quarters for what was seen as its feebleness.” Kennedy,
94
25
Germany’s leaders learned an important lesson: these sorts of pressures could not be turned on and off like a
faucet; they might get out of hand and could limit their own freedom of action in very unpalatable ways.95
Governments might in principle be able to get a certain bargaining advantage by exploiting the audience costs
mechanism, but that tactic can be quite risky, and is thus not nearly as attractive to statesmen as audience costs
theorists sometimes suggest.
Lloyd George’s Mansion House speech is also of particular interest from the point of view of the
audience costs theory, since it is clear that the speech had a major bearing on how the crisis was resolved.96
The speech, however, was no mere bargaining ploy: British leaders were not trying to tie their own hands by
creating a situation where retreat was impossible for domestic political reasons. The goal was simply to make it
clear that they were willing to go to war if Germany asked for too much—and indeed Lloyd George personally,
despite his reputation as a moderate, was amazingly bellicose at the time.97 And it was that policy—a policy
Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, p. 447 and p. 367, and Mommsen, Imperial Germany, p. 176. See also Goschen to Grey,
August 6 and 8, 1911, in BD 7:438-439, 443-444.
See Mommsen, Imperial Germany, pp. 192-195, and Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich: Deutsche Aussenpolitik von
Bismarck zu Hitler, 1871-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1995), p. 263. Note also a well-known passage from a
book which Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s advisor Kurt Riezler published under pseudonym J.J. Ruedorffer on the eve
of World War I: Grundzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1914), p. 222. Riezler in that
passage talked about how a government that tries to bluff its way through a crisis might not be able to back down, even
when it would be wise for it to do so; it might be trapped by the domestic political pressures and expectations its own
policy had generated: “the danger of war in our time lies in the domestic politics of those countries in which a weak
government is faced with a strong nationalist movement.” An English translation of the passage is given in Wayne
Thompson, In the Eye of the Storm: Kurt Riezler and the Crises of Modern Germany (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980),
p. 63. On the role of this sort of thinking in the July Crisis, see Andreas Hillgruber, “Riezlers Theorie des kalkulierten
Risikos und Bethmann Hollwegs politische Konzeption in der Julikrise 1914,” Historische Zeitschrift 202, no. 2 (April 1966),
esp. p. 339.
95
It is in fact one of a small number of cases Fearon refers to in his article on the subject. See Fearon, “Domestic Political
Audiences,” p. 582.
96
In August, Arthur Nicolson, a high official in the Foreign Office, described Lloyd George (and his close colleague
Winston Churchill as well) as “a little disappointed that war with Germany did not occur.” He was struck by “their belief
that the present moment was an exceedingly favourable one to open hostilities.” The following month Lloyd George told
a top military officer that he was “quite in favor of war now” and told the king (in Churchill’s words) “that it would be a
great pity if war did not come now.” He made much the same point in a conversation with Arthur Balfour. See Nicolson
to Hardinge, August 17, 1911, quoted in M.L. Dockrill, “David Lloyd George and Foreign Policy before 1914,” in A.J.P.
Taylor, ed., Lloyd George: Twelve Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), p. 19; Churchill to his wife, September 24, 1911,
quoted in Michael Fry, Lloyd George and Foreign Policy, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), p. 148;
Wilson diary entry for September 12, 1911, quoted in Bentley Gilbert, “Pacifist to Interventionist: David Lloyd George in
1911 and 1914: Was Belgium an Issue?” Historical Journal 28, no. 4 (December 1985), p. 874; and Austen Chamberlain’s
account of a conversation with Balfour, October 23, 1911, in Austen Chamberlain, Politics from Inside: An Epistolary
Chronicle, 1906-1914 (London: Cassell, 1936), p. 363. It is not hard to imagine what historians in the Fischer school would
have said if it had been discovered that a German leader of equivalent political importance had been making comments of
this sort. But even Kiderlen never went that far.
97
26
which they knew the government was quite capable of carrying out—that the Germans were reacting to. The
idea that the British government could not draw back now for fear of paying a domestic political price does not
appear to have entered their calculations.
This does not mean that the Germans failed to understand the political situation in Britain. Indeed,
the British government did not have a domestic political incentive to hold to the hard line symbolized by the
Mansion House speech. Quite the contrary: the government did back off from that policy, in large part
because it understood it would have paid a price if it had not done so. Many Liberals, especially in Lloyd
George’s own wing of the party, were happy neither with the speech nor with the general policy it represented.
Grey, as one historian put it, “found himself at the centre of an angry debate within the Liberal Party about
foreign affairs which threatened to undermine the foundations of his foreign policy, and, indeed, to drive him
from office.” The Mansion House speech was a key count in the critics’ indictment of the government’s policy
during the crisis. And by the end of the year, in part as a result of that criticism, Grey had changed course and
was now trying, cautiously, to improve relations with Germany.98
But even if the Germans had understood at the time the speech was given that the British government
would not have to pay a major political price if it softened its policy, it is by no means clear that they would
have inferred from that that the British were bluffing—that because no audience costs would be incurred,
British threats would not have to be taken seriously. Indeed, the Germans in such circumstances could have
made exactly the opposite calculation. They could have said that the fact that British leaders were prepared to
alienate their own political base and put their own political survival at risk showed that their threats could not
be dismissed as mere bluff—that the fact that they were willing to pay that sort of price showed how important
the issue was to them and that they would probably go to war if Germany went too far. Costly signaling would
M.L. Dockrill, “British Policy during the Agadir Crisis of 1911,” in F.H. Hinsley, ed., British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward
Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 286 (for the quotation). See also Dockrill, “David Lloyd George
and Foreign Policy before 1914,” pp. 17-18; John A. Murray, “Foreign Policy Debated: Sir Edward Grey and His Critics,
1911-1912” in Lillian Wallace and William Askew, eds., Power, Public Opinion, and Diplomacy (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1959); Gilbert, “Pacifist to Interventionist,” pp. 868-870; and, for some additional evidence relating to Grey’s
concerns about domestic opinion and the consequent need to appear conciliatory, Cambon to de Selves, September 5 and
6, 1911, DDF II:14:347, 357-358.
98
27
still be a major factor here, but in this case it would be actual rather than potential costs that would play the key
role in communicating resolve.99
The Early Cold War: The Turkish and Iranian Crises (1946) and the Berlin Blockade (1948-49)
In the summer of 1945, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pinned a map showing the USSR’s new borders
to a wall. He liked what he saw in the Baltic area, his foreign minister at the time later recalled, and in the Far
East as well. But then, “stabbing a finger at the southern Caucasus, he exclaimed, ‘But here is where I don’t like
our frontiers.”100 And this was not just talk. By late 1945, the Soviets were promoting the establishment of
“friendly” regimes in the part of Iran their armies controlled. They had agreed to pull their forces out of that
country within six months of the end of the war, but it was clear in early 1946 that they would not be out by
that March 2 deadline. Instead the level of Soviet aggressiveness was ratcheted up, and what they were doing
was major news in the New York Times: “Heavy Russian Columns Move West in Iran,” the main March 13
headline ran; “Soviet Tanks Approach Teheran” was headline news the next day.
The U.S. government, which up to that point had not committed itself to the defense of that area,
decided to take a tough line. On March 7, after being briefed about Soviet military movements in that country,
Secretary of State James Byrnes, “beating one fist into the other,” remarked: “Now we’ll give it to them with
both barrels.”101 President Truman thought the situation might lead to war.102 The U.S. government made it
clear to the Soviets, through both public and private channels, that they expected them to keep their promises
Indeed, to make this kind of argument there was no need to take British domestic politics into account at all. The mere
fact that the British were prepared to alienate the Germans—both the government and the nation as a whole—meant that
they were willing to pay a big price in power political terms, and that in itself would be evidence of their seriousness in the
crisis. Fearon, incidentally, notes the distinction between the two kinds of costly signals, and says explicitly that “the costs
that make signaling informative” in his model “differ somewhat from the ‘classical’ costly signals of Spence. In the
classical case, the act of sending the signal is itself costly, whereas here [in Fearon’s model] it is the act of backing down
after it has been sent that is costly.” James Fearon, “Signaling versus the Balance of Power and Interests: An Empirical
Test of a Crisis Bargaining Model,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, no. 2 (June 1994), p. 243 n4. Zahavi (see n. 1) was also
thinking in terms of costs that are actually paid, not of costs that might have to be paid if the signaler had been bluffing.
99
From Sto sorok besed s Molotovym: Iz dnevnika F. Chuyeva [One Hundred Forty Conversations with Molotov: From the
Diary of F. Chuyev] (Moscow: Terra, 1991), p. 14, quoted in Woodford McClellan, “Molotov Remembers,” Cold War
International History Project [CWIHP] Bulletin, issue 1 (Spring 1992), p. 17.
100
Edwin Wright, “Events relative to the Azerbaijan Issue—March 1946,” August 16, 1965, quoted in U.S. Department of
State, Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS] 1946, 7:347.
101
See W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 (New York: Random House,
1975), p. 550.
102
28
and withdraw their troops from Iran.103 The Iranians, with strong U.S. backing, brought up the issue in the
United Nations Security Council. The Americans at this time placed great emphasis on the U.N., and Secretary
Byrnes stated explicitly on March 16 that “should the occasion arise, our military strength will be used to
support the purposes and principles of the Charter.”104 The Soviets then began to back off, first announcing
on March 24, right before the Security Council was due to meet, “their willingness to withdraw troops from
Iran within five to six weeks ‘if nothing unforeseen should take place’”; then reaching an agreement with Iran
on April 4 that the withdrawal would be completed by early May; and finally, on April 14, giving “assurances
that evacuation would be completed unconditionally by May 6.” “There is no doubt,” as one scholar writes,
that that shift in Soviet policy was “induced by the continuous pressure of the Truman administration.”105
Stalin himself certainly understood why the Soviets had decided to pull their forces out of Iran. As he told an
Azerbaijani Communist leader who had played a key role in carrying out Stalin’s policy in northern Iran when
he phoned him to explain the decision: “we cannot start a new war.”106
The USSR during this period was also putting pressure on Turkey. Stalin clearly had his sights set on
getting control of the Turkish Straits. In late 1945, as Soviet pressure on Turkey began to build, Truman felt he
U.S. Note to Soviet Government, March 6, 1946, Department of State Bulletin [DOSB] 14, no. 350 (March 17, 1946), pp.
435-436; Kuross A. Samii, “Truman against Stalin in Iran: A Tale of Three Messages,” Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 1
(January 1987), pp. 98-103; “U.S. Accuses Soviet of Violating Word by Staying in Iran,” New York Times, March 8, 1946, p.
1, and “Russian Situation Moves toward Showdown,” ibid., March 10, 1946, p. E3.
103
James Byrnes, “United States Military Strength—Its Relation to the United Nations and World Peace,” in DOSB 14,
no. 351 (March 24, 1946), p. 483. See also Byrnes’s February 28 address to the Overseas Press Club, “. . . we have pinned
our hopes to the banner of the United Nations,” DOSB 14, no. 349 (March 10, 1946), esp. p. 358, a speech which
(according to the report in the New York Times two days later) “electrified” the British. On the policy of emphasizing the
U.N., see Samii, “Truman against Stalin,” p. 100, and Eduard Mark, “The War Scare of 1946 and its Consequences,”
Diplomatic History 21, no. 3 (Summer 1997), p. 400.
104
Samii, “Truman against Stalin,” p. 100. Other writers have taken a very different view, denying that American pressure
had much to do with the outcome of the crisis. Samii refers to two such works; see ibid., p. 96. Note also McGeorge
Bundy, “The Unimpressive Record of Atomic Diplomacy,” in Robert Art and Kenneth Waltz, eds., The Use of Force:
Military Power and International Politics (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), p. 101. Stalin pulled back, Bundy argues,
not because of any American threats—there were none, in his view—but because “he found the Iranian government firm
but not belligerent, his Iranian supporters weak, and the rest of the watching world critical.” In support of this he cites
Bruce Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey and Greece
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 304-337. The Kuniholm book is in fact the most important scholarly
study of the subject, but Kuniholm’s take is rather different from Bundy’s. “Ultimately what counted,” Kuniholm writes,
“—even more than the United Nations—was a desire by the United States to take a firm stand on issues it believed
important, and a willingness to support that stand with military power if necessary” (pp. 303-304).
105
Georges Mamoulia, “Les crises turque et iranienne 1945-1947: L’apport des archives caucasiennes,” Cahiers du monde
russe 45, no. 1/2 (January-June 2004), p. 281.
106
29
could not do anything about what was going on there. But by January 1946 his attitude had hardened: “There
isn’t a doubt in my mind that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and the seizure of the Black Sea Straits to
the Mediterranean. Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the
making.”107 There were growing indications—troop movements, a propaganda campaign, and so on—that the
USSR might move against Turkey, and when in August the Soviets sent that country a note calling for a joint
defense of the Straits, the U.S. government felt it had to make some fundamental decisions. Truman and his
top advisors thought the only thing that could deter the Russians was the conviction that America was
“prepared, if necessary, to meet aggression with force of arms.”108 An American naval force was soon sent to
the eastern Mediterranean, and again the Soviets pulled back—in part because they had learned through
intelligence channels just how far the U.S. government was prepared to go.109
The Near Eastern crises of 1946, however, had a lasting effect, and in fact played a key role in
triggering the Cold War. The main lesson U.S. leaders drew from those crises was that Europe could not be
divided in a more or less friendly way: there had to be an effective counterweight to Soviet power in Europe;
opinion had to be mobilized at home and western Germany had to be drawn into the western bloc. But that
whole policy of “organizing” the western part of Germany economically, politically, and ultimately militarily,
and integrating it into the western world—and the policy of winning the Germans over by pointing to the
Soviets as the great enemies of German unity—was bound to be a source of deep concern in Moscow. So
when the western powers decided to move ahead with the establishment of a west German state, it was natural
that the USSR would react. If western Germany was being “organized” not just without them but against
them, that might lead to very serious problems in the long run. It would be best to nip them in the bud, by
getting the western powers to rethink their German policy and work out some sort of solution the Soviets
could live with. But how could they be made to do that? Berlin, a land island in the middle of the Soviet zone
Truman to Byrnes (unsent), January 5, 1946, in Monte Poen, ed., Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Letters Harry Truman
Never Mailed (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), p. 40.
107
Acheson to Byrnes, August 15, 1946, and Acheson-Inverchapel meeting, August 20, 1946, FRUS 1946, 7:840-842, 849850; and Mark, “War Scare of 1946,” pp. 383, 399-400.
108
Mark, “War Scare of 1946,” pp. 387, 401, 408; and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold
War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 93.
109
30
of Germany, half of which was garrisoned by the western powers—was the obvious lever. So when the
western governments reached a formal agreement at the beginning of June 1948 setting up a process that
would lead to the establishment of a west German state, the Soviets responded three weeks later by cutting off
surface communication between Berlin and western Germany.
The U.S. government announced that it would “not be coerced or intimidated in any way,” and “as a
further indication of our firmness” (as Secretary of State George Marshall told the National Security Council at
the time) sent 60 B-29 bombers to Britain.110 Its actual policy, however, was fairly moderate. It set up an airlift
to supply the western sectors of the city, but was very reluctant to take military action if the Soviets interfered
with it. Truman, for example, was not prepared even to shoot down barrage balloons, for fear of starting a war
for which America “did not have enough soldiers.”111 Nor were the Soviets, for their part, particularly
confrontational. They did even not take even non-military measures (like jamming radars) that could have
compromised the effectiveness of the airlift. Indeed, they continued to work with western representatives at
the Berlin Air Safety Center in managing air traffic around the city.112 Stalin’s goal, as he himself said, was not
to drive the western powers out of Berlin, but to reach a political understanding with them on the German
question. So he went out of his way to emphasize the common interests of the four victor powers in this area.
“After all,” he told the U.S. ambassador in Moscow on August 2, “we are still Allies.”113 And each side
understood that the other was not especially bellicose.114 To be sure, as long as the blockade lasted, there was a
Marshall press conference, quoted in Avi Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948-1949: A Study in Crisis
Decision-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 252; notes of July 16, 1948, NSC meeting, Declassified
Documents Reference System [DDRS], document CK3100454446. Contrary to what is sometimes said, these B-29’s were
not nuclear-capable bombers. See Ken Young, “U.S. ‘Atomic Capability’ and the British Forward Bases in the Early Cold
War,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (January 2007), pp. 124-125, and Avi Shlaim, “Britain, the Berlin Blockade
and the Cold War,” International Affairs 60, no. 1 (Winter 1983-84), p. 9.
110
Samuel Williamson and Steven Rearden, The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1953 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), p.
87.
111
Richard Kohn and Joseph Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W.
Johnson, David A. Burchinal and Jack J. Catton (Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1988), pp. 85-86, and Ann and John
Tusa, The Berlin Blockade (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), p. 274.
112
Walter Bedell Smith, My Three Years in Moscow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950), p. 244. See also Bedell Smith to
Marshall, August 3, 1948, FRUS 1948, 2:999-1006.
113
See Mikhail Narinsky, “Soviet Policy and the Berlin Blockade 1948,” unpublished paper presented at a 1994 conference
in Essen, p. 13: “No matter how sharp the international-political crisis around Berlin was, its participants believed that
none of the sides wished it to develop into an armed conflict.” Quoted in Elke Scherstjanoi, “Die Berlin-Blockade
114
31
certain sense that things might get out of hand and that an armed conflict was not entirely out of the question.
But, looking back, the risk of war, after the first few weeks especially, does not seem particularly great, and the
crisis limped along until an agreement was reached and the blockade was lifted in early 1949.115
What role did the audience costs mechanism play in these episodes? That question is easiest to answer
for the case of the Turkish crisis: it clearly did not play a significant role in this affair. U.S. leaders made a
point of playing down the importance of what the Soviets were doing with Turkey. As Eduard Mark pointed
out, in what is by far the best scholarly study of the crisis: “There were few public announcements, and
cautious efforts to mobilize public opinion had scarcely begun before the acute phase of the crisis suddenly
ended.”116 What was crucial in determining the way the crisis was resolved, according to Mark, was not what
was said in public, but rather what the Soviets were learning through secret channels—above all, the reports
they were getting about the U.S. attitude from their spy Donald Maclean, a British diplomat then based in
Washington. Maclean had been given the job of seeing “how far the West would go” in this area; he reported
that Truman would “never abandon Turkey,” and as a result “Stalin back-pedaled.” 117 Perhaps there was
more to it than that. After all, the British were told about Truman’s decision to go to war if necessary very
soon after it was made in mid-August, and it was only in late September that the Soviets “abruptly turned
conciliatory.” But even if other factors came into play, the key point to note is that the audience costs
mechanism was not a major factor here.
The Iran crisis, on the other hand, was played out in full public view, but that in itself does not mean
that audience costs were a major factor in this case. Perhaps the U.S. government “went public” mainly to
1948/49 im sowjetischen Kalkül,” Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft 46, no. 6 (1998), p. 500n. The Soviets, as the
Americans understood, were certainly not making any serious military preparations. See Victor Gobarev, “Soviet Military
Plans and Activities during the Berlin Crisis 1948-1949,” also presented at that 1994 conference, and also cited in
Scherstjanoi, “Berlin-Blockade,” p. 500; and, for U.S. assessments of Soviet policy at the time, John Barlow, “A Guiding
Hand? The CIA and Foreign Policymaking in the Early Cold War,” Ph. D. dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2009
(https://www.barlowlink.com/web_documents/A_Guiding_Hand.pdf), pp. 2, 164, 168, 170, and David Murphy, Sergei
Kondrashev and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997),
chap. 3, which also has some information on Soviet intelligence operations in the West at the time.
One scholar in fact writes that the July 22 decision to rule out an armed convoy and rely instead on diplomacy and the
airlift “marked the end of the crisis period.” Shlaim, Berlin Blockade, p. 269.
115
116
Mark, “War Scare of 1946,” pp. 386 (esp. n. 8) and 404.
117
Ibid., pp. 387, 401, 408.
32
mobilize support for its policy; perhaps it did so with an eye to scoring points at home by taking a tough line.
Allowing the crisis to play out in public, moreover, could put pressure on the Soviets in various ways—for
example, by making it clear to them that they would pay a price with American opinion, and with world
opinion more generally, if they did not back off. But the idea that the Soviets would pay a price with American
opinion if they continued is very different from the idea that the U.S. government would incur costs with the
same audience if it backed down. And there is no evidence that U.S. leaders had any interest in tying their own
hands for bargaining purposes, let alone that they sought to do so by exploiting the audience costs mechanism.
Did the Soviets, however, calculate that U.S. leaders had taken such a strong stand in public that they
could not back down without paying a big price at home, and was it this that led them to end the crisis? We
still do not have anything like the sort of evidence on Soviet policy-making in this affair that we have for the
American side, but it seems quite unlikely that the Soviet leadership was thinking in those terms. The more
sophisticated members of the Soviet establishment—people like Maxim Litvinov, for example—understood
how important public opinion was in America.118 But the Soviet leadership took a different view: public
opinion was not nearly as important as U.S. leaders claimed; their emphasis on public opinion as a factor the
U.S. government needed to, and the Soviets ought to, take into account was somewhat disingenuous, and
indeed was essentially an argument they liked to hide behind.
That was certainly the impression of U.S. officials who dealt directly with Soviet affairs at the time.
“Almost all of our people who have dealt with the Russians,” one State Department officer noted in early 1945,
believed that “the high Soviet officials who are responsible for the formulation of policy do not appreciate the
importance of public opinion in a democracy nor the importance of the press in the formation of public
opinion.”119 The U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, had made the same point a few months
earlier: he did not feel that the argument about public opinion carried “any particular weight with the Soviet
Government.”120
Vladimir Pechatnov, “The Big Three after World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post-war
Relations with the United States and Great Britain,” CWIHP Working Paper no. 13 (1995), p. 11.
118
119
Llewellyn Thompson to Dunn, February 3, 1945, FRUS 1945, 5:814.
120
Harriman to Secretary of State, August 21, 1944, FRUS 1944 4:1183.
33
The Soviets, in fact, seemed irritated when American officials made that argument. Harry Hopkins,
during his famous meeting with Stalin in May 1945, spoke at length about American public opinion; the way it
had shifted against the USSR in recent months, he said, was a great source of concern. But Stalin was
dismissive to the point of rudeness. In replying to Hopkins, he said, “he would not attempt to use Soviet
public opinion as a screen.” His anger had gotten the better of him, and he actually later apologized to
Hopkins, but it is clear that he felt the American attitude had changed and that the U.S. government was just
using these arguments about public opinion as a figleaf.121 Soviet officials in general did not believe that the
criticism of the USSR found in the American press was to be take at face value. “The primary goal of this antiSoviet campaign of American ‘public opinion,’” the Soviet ambassador in Washington wrote in 1946, “consists
of exerting political pressure on the Soviet Union and forcing it to make concessions.”122 The scare quotes are
quite revealing: the Soviet government felt it could see through what the Americans were doing; the
Americans’ argument that their hands were tied by their own domestic opinion was not taken at face value.
One has the sense, in fact, that in analyzing U.S. policy, the basic Soviet view was that the government’s policy
was crucial—that the press could be guided, that domestic political pressures in America could be finessed, that
“public opinion” was not a major independent factor the government had to contend with, but was rather
something that could be manipulated for instrumental purposes. It is thus not likely that Stalin thought that
the U.S. government’s public statements were of fundamental importance—that he calculated that the
Americans could not pull back in the Iran crisis because of the domestic political price the administration
would have to pay if it did so—and that this was the crucial factor that led him to give way in that affair.
The basic point here—that the audience costs mechanism was not a major factor in the Iran crisis—is
also supported by a comparison of this episode with the Turkish crisis of the same year. Those two Near
Eastern crises—so similar in many respects, but differing basically in that in one the administration “went
public” in a major way while in the other it did not—provide us with as close to a controlled experiment as we
Stalin-Hopkins meetings, May 26 and 27, 1945, FRUS: The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference) 1945,
1:26-28, 32 (for the quotation), 37 (for the apology).
121
Novikov to the Soviet leadership, September 27, 1946, on CWIHP website. That Soviet view, I should note, was by no
means totally absurd. Fraser Harbutt has argued that the U.S. government did, in fact, seek to manipulate U.S. opinion in
order to put pressure on the Soviets, and I personally find that argument persuasive. See n. 198 below.
122
34
ever get in international relations. And that simple comparison strongly suggests that audience costs were not a
major factor, and that other factors, common to the two crises, played the key role in determining the very
similar way in which those conflicts were resolved.
Do these points about the unimportance of audience costs also apply to the third case examined in this
section, the Berlin Blockade affair of 1948? The administration, one might think, might have been particularly
tempted to exploit the audience costs mechanism in this case. The presidential election was only a few months
away, and the public took a relatively tough line when the blockade was instituted: the price U.S. leaders would
have to pay for backing off from a firm stance would be unusually high. The administration, moreover, had a
domestic political interest in taking a hard line. In a document which, according to one historian, was to serve
as the “blueprint for Truman’s campaign in 1948,” Clark Clifford argued that (short of war) “the worse
matters” got and the more there was “a sense of crisis,” the better off Truman would be, because “in times of
crisis the American citizen tends to back up his President.”123 But still the administration’s rhetoric was fairly
mild during this affair, mainly because of its sense for American military weakness at the time.124 It was not
interested in taking advantage of the audience costs mechanism to make its threats credible, since the basic
tactic of threat-making was not particularly appealing at this point.
But the key question here has to do with Soviet calculations in 1948. Was it the case that prior to the
imposition of the blockade, the Soviets thought they could push the western powers out of Berlin, and pulled
back only after the U.S. government had taken a firm line in public, calculating that it would be hard for
American leaders to give way, given the price they would have to pay at home for doing so? It turns out that
there is some evidence to the effect that the Soviets understood, before the blockade, that many western
officials were thinking in terms of an eventual withdrawal from the city, and it might well have come as a
Clifford to Truman, November 19, 1947, quoted in Robert Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of
American History 59, no. 1 (June 1972), p. 93. Divine’s own comment about this becoming the “blueprint” for the
campaign is on the same page.
123
See Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), pp. 87, 90.
124
35
surprise to them that the western reaction was as firm as it was.125 But the American position in the crisis was
not rock solid—the U.S. government had not decided that if necessary it would go to war over the issue—and
the Soviets probably had a good sense for what U.S. policy was.126 Given what they knew, there was no reason,
for example, to think that the western powers would use force if they made the airlift impossible by jamming
the radars guiding the planes flying into the city. The fact that they did not go that route—that they did not
even experiment with such tactics—suggests that their real goal was not to push the western powers out of
Berlin, but rather to pull them back into negotiations on Germany as a whole.
But if that was the case, the sorts of statements the Americans made about how the United States
“would not be coerced” into abandoning Berlin would scarcely have led the Soviets to change their strategy. It
was in fact America’s reluctance to withdraw form Berlin under Soviet pressure that gave the Russians the
leverage they needed if they were to achieve their political goals. For that reason, if for no other, the audience
costs mechanism was not a major factor in 1948.
The Berlin and Cuban Crises (1958-1962)
As the Soviet Union developed its military power in the 1950s, many people in western Europe
wondered whether they could rely forever on the United States to protect them. Would America be willing to
go to war for the sake of her NATO allies once U.S. cities were vulnerable to Soviet attack? But if the
Europeans were to become less dependent on the United States, and perhaps ultimately able to defend
themselves, they needed to build nuclear forces of their own. There was no way western Europe could stand
up to a great nuclear power like the USSR armed only with conventional weapons.
This logic applied in particular to West Germany. The German chancellor in the 1950s, Konrad
Adenauer, certainly thought his country needed nuclear weapons.127 The American president at the time,
Dwight Eisenhower, sympathized with those European concerns, and unlike many of his subordinates did not
Scherstjanoi, in “Berlin-Blockade” (p. 499) summarizes some conclusions William Stivers reached in an unpublished
paper dealing with this issue presented at a conference in Berlin in 1998. See also Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 8182.
125
126
See Scherstjanoi, “Berlin-Blockade,” p. 500.
See Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 231-237. The discussion in this section is based largely on chapters seven and
eight in that book.
127
36
even object to the idea of a nuclear-armed Federal Republic.128 But a strong Germany—a Germany that would
not be dependent on America for her security and would therefore not be locked into a status quo policy—was
a real danger to the USSR. In the mid-1950s, the Soviets tried to head off this possibility by pushing plans for a
nuclear-free zone in central Europe. When those efforts failed, they felt they needed to use stronger tactics.
“What finally impelled” the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, “to resort to what today might be called shock
therapy,” Oleg Troyanovsky, his assistant for international affairs at the time, later wrote, “was information
from various sources that serious discussions were proceeding within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
and, in particular, between the United States and West Germany, regarding the possibility of the Bundeswehr’s
being granted access to atomic weapons in one form or another.”129
By provoking a Berlin crisis, the Soviets would force the western powers to take their concerns
seriously. So in November 1958, Khrushchev declared that he was going to sign a “peace treaty” with East
Germany and that when it was signed the rights of the western powers in Berlin would be terminated. He
would, however, give the western powers six months to negotiate a settlement that would make West Berlin a
“free city.” If they refused to go along with the plan and tried to maintain their position through military
means, the Soviet Union would “rise in defense” of its East German ally. The Soviets were thus threatening
war; the Eisenhower government was not going to capitulate to those demands; people thus felt there was a
certain risk of war. But Khrushchev was never prepared to risk a real military showdown with the West.130
When the U.S. attitude became clear to the Soviet leader in 1959, he in effect shelved the crisis. But when John
Kennedy took over as president in 1961, Khrushchev again threatened to sign a “peace treaty” with East
Germany that would end western rights in Berlin. If the western powers used force to maintain those rights,
he told Kennedy, that would be “regarded by the USSR as an act of open aggression against a peace loving
country, with all the consequences ensuing therefrom.”131 Again Khrushchev was in effect threatening war.
128
Ibid., chap. 5 and especially pp. 261-262.
Oleg Troyanovsky, “The Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott
Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 217, and Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp.
251-256.
129
130
Troyanovsky, “Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,” p. 237.
131
Kennedy-Khrushchev meetings, June 4, 1961, FRUS 1961-63, 14:87-98; the quotation is on pp. 90-91.
37
And again he was bluffing. As Anatoly Dobrynin, who was to serve for years as Soviet ambassador in
Washington, later wrote, “the possibility of a military confrontation” was “absolutely excluded from our
plans.”132
But the Americans were worried and felt they had to prepare for a showdown. Kennedy gave an
important televised speech to the nation on July 25, 1961, stressing America’s resolve and outlining various
steps that would be taken to strengthen the country’s military position. Now it was Khrushchev’s turn to be
alarmed. He had earlier ruled out the idea of sealing the border between the two parts of Berlin because he had
wanted to keep the Berlin issue alive. Now, however, he authorized the construction of the Berlin Wall. But as
the Americans saw it, that did not mean that the USSR was willing to live with things as they were—that is, that
it was prepared to accept a divided Berlin, with the western part of the city under the military protection of the
western powers. Instead, they saw the building of the wall as an aggressive act that might foreshadow further
aggressive acts; to avoid a confrontation they now pressed for negotiations, making it clear that they were
willing to make major concessions, relating above all to the status of the East German regime. In his July
speech, the president had said that America could not “negotiate with those who say ‘What’s mine is mine and
what’s yours is negotiable.’” But, given that the Soviet position on Berlin was as rigid as ever, that was exactly
what he was now proposing to do. The “audience” at home, however, did not seem to mind that shift in
policy; the administration was certainly not raked over the coals in the press for having moderated its
position.133
The American goal was to stabilize the status quo, not just in Berlin but in Europe as a whole. In the
U.S. plan, West Germany would remain non-nuclear. The Soviets would thus be getting the one thing they
Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962-1986) (New York:
Random House, 1995), p. 45.
132
Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 322-329. The phrase about “what’s mine is mine” (which had been proposed by
the famous broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, then head of the U.S. Information Agency) was in fact used a lot at
the time, but mainly by people who wanted to criticize the Soviets for their intransigence. People understood that
Kennedy had backed down from the attitude that phrase had come to stand for, but did not really hold it against him. A
Washington Post editorial of October 11, 1961, captured what seems to have been the prevailing view: “President Kennedy,
in his TV report to the Nation last July, warned that ‘We cannot negotiate with those who say “what’s mine is mine, what’s
yours is negotiable.’” That is, nonetheless, precisely what Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was saying in London
Tuesday. . . . If the President now stood on his July position, he would be justified; but the search for some balancing
adjustments and concessions in Berlin itself, or within the larger framework of a European settlement must go on, no
matter how difficult and discouraging.”
133
38
most wanted from the West. In exchange the USSR would have to accept the status quo in Berlin. But that
was something Khrushchev was not prepared to do. The fact that the Americans had gone so far so quickly
showed how determined they were to avoid war. Maybe that fear of war could be exploited to draw out further
concessions? So in late 1961 and through most of 1962 the Soviets were utterly intransigent in their talks with
the Americans. The U.S. attitude then hardened. It was coming to seem that a showdown over Berlin was just
a question of time. Khrushchev made it fairly clear that he would do nothing before the American mid-term
elections in November, but would then bring the crisis to a head. Kennedy by the late summer of 1962 had
thus come to accept a showdown as inevitable. Indeed, in his view, given the way the nuclear balance was
shifting, the sooner the West had it out with the Soviets the better.134
The climax of the crisis, as it turned out, came not in Berlin but in Cuba. It was discovered that the
Soviets were deploying missiles on the island, perhaps to improve their position for a showdown over Berlin.
The Americans reacted by insisting in a very public way that the Soviets remove their missiles from Cuba. To
give point to those demands, the island was blockaded and U.S. forces (and especially the Strategic Air
Command) were put on alert. For the Soviets, a real military confrontation was still totally out of the question.
With a U.S. invasion of Cuba imminent, and with the Soviets being told that the “time of reckoning had
arrived,” they agreed to settle the crisis on the terms the Americans proposed (which included a secret U.S.
promise to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey).135 That decision marked the end not just of the Cuban
missile crisis but also of the great Berlin crisis that had begun four years earlier.
What role did audience costs play in this story? For the Eisenhower period, it is hard to see how they
played any role at all. Under Eisenhower U.S. rhetoric was relatively restrained. American policy, as he saw it,
needed to be calm and steady, and he in fact would have liked to see some kind of negotiated settlement.136 He
thus preferred quiet measures (which he knew Soviet intelligence would pick up) to overt threats—in large part
Ibid., pp. 325-351, and, for the point about the nuclear balance, pp. 351 and 353. On the point about postponing the
crisis until after the elections, see also Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York: Norton,
2006), pp. 458, 462.
134
The quotation is from Troyanovsky’s account, quoted in William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New
York: Norton, 2003), p. 575.
135
See Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 194-195, 211-214, and
Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 256-263.
136
39
because he thought they would be less alarming to the public.137 Insofar as the management of public opinion
was concerned, it was not Eisenhower’s goal to take such a tough line that fear of a hostile public reaction
would prevent him from subsequently pursuing a more moderate policy. He was instead worried that taking
too tough a line in public would scare people and thus actually prevent him from pursuing a sufficiently firm
policy. In his view, people in the government “would like to think that public opinion pushes us into war,” but
unless it was handled the right way, he was not so sure that the public “would even follow us into war.”138 His
aim, in other words, was not to limit his own freedom of action (by generating audience costs through tough
public statements) but rather to maintain it (by pursuing a sober policy and cautiously guiding opinion at
home).
For the Kennedy period, however, things were not that simple, and a case can be mae that the
audience costs mechanism did play a certain role at that time. First of all, it is quite clear that some major
presidential statements and speeches—the July 1961 speech on Berlin, the October 22, 1962, speech during the
missile crisis, and some key public warnings issued in September 1962 about a possible deployment of missiles
in Cuba—were important parts of the story.139 Weren’t the Soviets bound to calculate that the U.S. president,
subject to strong right-wing pressure as it was, could not back down after having taken a very strong stand in
those statements without paying a prohibitive price at home? After all, didn’t the Americans themselves
In April 1953, in a discussion of tactics for ending the Korean War, Eisenhower “stated his belief that it was possible to
handle the matter in such a way as, on the one hand, to impress the enemy with our determination, without, on the other
hand, unduly alarming our allies or our own people. The matter, said the President, should be handled in such a way that a
foreign G-2 [Army intelligence], piecing together the bits of information on the transfer [of atomic weapons], would come
to the conclusion that he had pierced the screen of the intentions of the United States.” Discussion at the 141 st Meeting
of the National Security Council, April 28, 1953, DDRS/ CK3100241247, p. 12. During the Berlin crisis, U.S.
commanders in Europe took “certain military actions pointed largely toward Berlin,” “visible to Soviet intelligence,” but
not such as to “cause public alarm.” JCS to USNMR, Febuary 21, 1959, quoted in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, p.
212. This was in line with a policy Secretary of State Dulles laid out in a meeting with the president and other high
officials on January 29, 1959; see FRUS 1958-62 8:301. See also Dulles-Merchant meeting, February 27, 1959, quoted in
Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 281-282 n. 152. A British diplomat called for the same sort of thing in 1961, urging that
the West “select measures which would give Khrushchev pause without too greatly frightening our own side and the rest
of the world; in other words, that steps which he learns about through his secret sources are probably of more value than
those which attract public attention.” Caccia to Foreign Office, June 18, 1961, in Documents on British Policy Overseas, series
III, vol. 6, doc. 228.
137
Eisenhower meeting with Dulles and other top officials, January 29, 1959, FRUS 1958-60, 8:303. Emphasis in original
text.
138
On the September warnings, see Jeremy Pressman, “September Statements, October Missiles, November Elections:
Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy Making, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Security Studies 10, no. 3 (Spring 2001), pp. 80-81.
139
40
analyze the situation in that way? Kennedy certainly knew in late 1961 that his room for maneuver was narrow.
“There are limits,” he said, “to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period.”140 He had
actually issued the September warnings to protect himself against attacks from the right, and those statements,
as Jeremy Pressman points out, “constrained his range of action once the [missile] crisis began”—in part,
because of the domestic political price he would have to pay if he did not do what he had said he would do.141
And indeed during the crisis the U.S. government, having made those statements, had to insist on a withdrawal
of the missiles: as McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national security advisor, put it, “we’re very hard-locked
on to” that policy.142 Kennedy himself also felt that after those warnings had been issued, if America now did
nothing, “I would think that our risks increase.”143 He was probably thinking mainly of what a failure to act
would do to America’s international reputation, but he certainly realized he would pay a price at home if he
now softened his line. He knew, for example, that “the domestic political heat following his television
appearance would be terrific.”144 And he made a point of keeping his agreement to withdraw the Jupiter
missiles from Turkey secret, in part, for domestic political reasons. There was, in particular, to be no written
document formalizing the understanding. His brother Robert Kennedy, even though he was essentially just a
messenger here, told Ambassador Dobrynin that he could not “risk getting involved” with such a document,
since it might surface in the future and “cause irreparable damage to my political career.”145 And on November
7 the president himself seemed to acknowledge that domestic political concerns had played a significant role
during the crisis. “With this election now over” (the mid-term elections had been held the previous day), the
government, he said, could now play it “very straight”—the implication being that it had not been able, for
domestic political reasons, to play it very straight before.146
Kennedy, in a conversation with John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted in Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 379. See also Robert Kennedy’s comments, quoted in Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 555.
140
141
Pressman, “September Statements,” p. 82, 92-97.
Meeting of Kennedy with his main advisors, October 16, 1962, quoted in Sheldon Stern, Averting “The Final Failure”:
John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 80.
142
143
Ibid., p. 82.
144
Notes of NSC meeting, October 20, 1962, FRUS 1961-63, 11:135.
145
Dobrynin to the USSR Foreign Ministry, October 30, 1962, on CWIHP website.
146
Tape of November 7, 1962, meeting, quoted in Stern, Averting, p. 405. Emphasis in original text.
41
So isn’t it plausible that the Soviets understood the situation—that is, that they realized how limited
Kennedy’s freedom of action actually was, both in 1961 and 1962? Certainly Soviet officials like Ambassador
Dobrynin understood that it would be hard for Kennedy to withdraw from Berlin: a withdrawal, he reported
to Moscow, would be seen as a sign of weakness, not just internationally but domestically as well.147 And
indeed some of Kennedy’s top advisors—Theodore Sorensen, for example—made it very clear to him in mid1962 that the president’s hands were tied, especially since elections would soon be held, and the ambassador
fully accepted that argument. Dobrynin, Sorensen wrote, noted “his agreement and understanding when I
stressed on two different occasions (both relating to the fall elections, which seemed to be his principal topic of
interest) that the President could not possibly lay himself open to Republican charges of appeasement in his
response to any buildup in Berlin pressures between now and November 6 [election day].”148 And Khrushchev
himself often took the line that Kennedy was too weak to resist pressure from more bellicose elements within
the United States—too weak, perhaps, to pull back from the brink of war for fear that “he will be called a
coward” at home.149 Didn’t this show he understood the pressures Kennedy had to deal with—pressures that
might prevent him from pulling back once he had committed himself in public to a particular policy? Didn’t
the fact that Khrushchev made such a point of putting off the Berlin showdown until after the U.S. elections
show that he recognized the role domestic politics played in America, and how it limited Kennedy’s freedom of
action, especially when elections were imminent (as they were in October 1962)?
But none of this actually proves that a desire to exploit the audience costs mechanism was a key factor
on the American side or that Soviet awareness of the importance of audience costs played an important role in
determining how the Berlin and Cuban crises ran their course. As Pressman points out with regard to the
147
Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 64.
148
Sorensen-Dobrynin meeting, August 23, 1962, quoted in Pressman, “September Statements,” pp. 94-95.
Khrushchev at meeting with Warsaw Pact leaders, August 3-5, 1961, quoted in Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The
Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 140. Zubok
published extracts from the notes of that meeting in the CWIHP Bulletin, issue 3 (Fall 1993)
(http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACF1BD.pdf), pp. 59-61; see esp. p. 60. The Soviet leader took the same
line at a Presidium meeting on January 8, 1962. See Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, p. 413, and Jonathan
Haslam, Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp.
188-189. See also Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), p. 499.
149
42
September 1962 warnings, “the impact of domestic politics was more unintended than premeditated.”150 The
president would run the risk of incurring audience costs no matter what course of action he chose; one cannot
therefore infer from the mere fact that a particular policy choice would generate audience costs that the
government, for tactical purposes, had decided to take advantage of the audience costs mechanism.151 A
decision to “go public” might have nothing to do with audience costs. The decision, for example, to give a
major speech to the nation during the missile crisis (which was one of a handful of examples Fearon cited in his
main article on audience costs) could have been made for all sorts of reasons.152 It was understood from the
start that the American insistence that the missiles be withdrawn would in all probability lead to a major crisis,
and Kennedy might have just felt he needed to explain what he was doing and why to head off criticism both at
home and abroad and to mobilize support for his policy. So his aim might have been to strengthen his
position, not to limit his own freedom of action by generating audience costs. If his goal in “going public” had
been to burn his bridges in order to gain a bargaining advantage, then one would expect to find some evidence
of that in the documents, which are particularly rich in this case. And yet that evidence is just not there, nor
does one find any evidence of this sort in the documents relating to the Berlin crisis in 1961. U.S. officials
certainly realized that taking action in public would tie their hands for domestic political reasons, but they
tended to view that as a problem—as a source of weakness in the American position—and not as something
that would strengthen their position in dealing with the Soviets. The “element of irreversibility that many
military measures have in a democratic society,” the president was told by one of his advisors, was a major
factor limiting America’s ability to “use its military power flexibly and effectively”: “Having once stepped up
the degree of military activity in any situation, we find it difficult indeed in internal political terms to step it
down.” Kennedy himself clearly disliked the idea of actions that would tie his hands. At one point he
requested that information about Soviet bombers being delivered to Cuba “be withheld at least until after [the]
150
Pressman, “September Statements,” p. 86.
For Kennedy’s awareness of this problem, see Richard Ned Lebow, “Domestic Politics and the Cuban Missile Crisis:
The Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations Reevaluated,” Diplomatic History 14, no. 4 (October 1990), p. 479, and
Stern, Averting, p. 150.
151
Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences,” p. 582. Ted Sorensen, who drafted the speech, talks about why the speech
was drafted the way it was and some of the audiences it was aimed at in his memoir Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 298-300.
152
43
elections,” since if it came out before then, “a new and more violent Cuban issue would be injected into the
campaign and this would seriously affect his independence of action.”153
But the validity of the audience costs theory in these cases really depends on the sorts of calculations
the Soviets made, and there are a number of problems with the argument that they understood that Kennedy’s
ability to retreat was limited for domestic political reasons, and that that understanding played a key role in
shaping their policy in these crises. First of all, Khrushchev’s argument that Kennedy was too weak to stand
up to right-wing pressures at home is scarcely to be taken at face value. If the Soviet leader had really believed
his own rhetoric, he would certainly have pursued a more cautious policy during this period. The proof, he
argued, that Kennedy was weak was that he was unable to settle the crisis on Soviet terms—that he lacked “the
authority and prestige to settle [the Berlin/Germany] issue correctly.”154 But it is hard to believe that
Khrushchev really felt that Kennedy’s refusal to give way to Soviet threats was proof of weakness; if he did,
one could scarcely argue that he was being rational. In any event, with the crisis building up in the late summer
of 1962, the Soviet leader took a very different line. When told that Robert Kennedy had informed a Soviet
contact (Bolshakov) that it was very hard for the president to pursue a conciliatory policy toward the USSR for
domestic political reasons, Khrushchev was incredulous: “Told of Robert Kennedy’s fear for his brother’s
position,” William Taubman writes, “Khrushchev retorted, ‘They can’t mean it. Is he the President, or isn’t he?
If he is a strong President, he has no one to fear. He has full powers of government, and his brother is the
Attorney General in the bargain.”155
To be sure, the more sophisticated Soviet officials, like Dobrynin and Troyanovsky, understood how
the American system worked, and how domestic political factors influenced what the U.S. president could do.
Even the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, warned that the deployment of missiles in Cuba, as Jonathan
Haslam points out, “could cause a political explosion in Washington—of this he was ‘absolutely certain, and
Deputy national security advisor Carl Kaysen to Kennedy, September 22, 1961, Berlin – General – 9/17/61-9/22/61,
National Security Files, box 83, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. In this memo, Kaysen was commenting on the Berlin
crisis game that Thomas Schelling had conducted earlier that month. For the Kennedy comment: McCone memorandum,
October 11, 1962, quoted in Pressman, “September Statements,” pp. 98-99.
153
154
Quoted in Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, pp. 188-189.
155
Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 555-556.
44
this had to be taken into account.’” But Khrushchev was not particularly interested in what they had to say.
The American political situation was not taken into account in any serious way.156
This point has a direct bearing on the audience costs theory. That theory stresses the importance of
new information about resolve that is revealed when statesmen “go public” in the course of a crisis. But in the
Cuban case the relevant body of information had been available all along. The problem was that it had been
ignored. In the case of the Berlin crisis in 1961, one cannot go quite that far. Kennedy’s July speech obviously
played a major role, but the tough line he took was but one element in a larger picture. The military measures
that were taken, what the Soviets were learning through intelligence channels, and what was being said in
private—all this fed into an assessment of how far the Americans were willing to go, and the same sort of thing
was true during the Cuban missile crisis as well.157 From Khrushchev’s point of view, it was important that
every scrap of information be taken into account: “You’ve got to take note of everything,” he told Bolshakov
in September 1962, “—the tone, gestures, conversations. We in Moscow need to know everything, especially
at a time like this.”158 So all sorts of things had to be factored into the equation, but calculations about
audience costs did not rank very high in that list.
So what conclusion is to be drawn from the discussion in this whole section of the great power crises
won by democratic states? The basic finding is quite simple. There is little evidence that the audience costs
mechanism played a “crucial” role in any of them. Indeed, it is hard to identify any case in which that
mechanism played much of a role at all. There are all kinds of ways in which new information is generated in
See Zubok, Failed Empire, p. 143; Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 541-542; Troyanovsky, “Making of Soviet Foreign Policy,”
pp. 235-236; Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 64, 79; and Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, pp. 201-202.
156
On the role of intelligence, see (for 1961) Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, pp. 373-374, and (for 1962)
Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, p. 209. By breaking the American codes, the Soviets were able to get “direct access to secret
U.S. communications during the missile crisis,” and it was that information, Haslam writes, that convinced Khrushchev
“just how serious the situation had become.” Dobrynin, however, thinks that it was his report of a conversation of Robert
Kennedy at the peak of the crisis to the effect that time was running out that “turned the tide in Moscow.” He also
alludes to alarming intelligence reports that were coming in about how military action was imminent, leading to a “frantic
search for a solution” in Moscow. Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp. 88-89; see also Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 564. The
Americans, it seems, understood in 1961 that while public threats could be dismissed as mere posturing, what was learned
through intelligence channels would in all likelihood be taken more seriously. They knew that at least one Soviet agent had
penetrated NATO and they allowed him to continue reporting on NATO’s war plans, calculating that this would have a
major impact on Soviet policy. “For reasons which I cannot specify,” then-U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk later wrote,
“we assumed that the Soviet Union would become fully informed of these [contingency plans] and would take such
possibilities into full account.” See Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, p. 295 n.39.
157
158
Quoted in Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 556.
45
the course of a crisis, and that new information, for the reasons Fearon outlined, plays a fundamental role in
determining how that crisis runs its course. But audience costs were not a major factor in any of the crises
examined here.
WHEN DEMOCRACIES LOSE
The audience costs mechanism was thus much weaker in practice than many scholars have assumed,
but how is that finding to be explained? Why did audience costs not play a major role in any of the great power
crises in which a democracy prevailed? By looking at the crises in which democratic powers were defeated—
the Fashoda crisis (focusing now on the French side), the Rhineland crisis of 1936, and the Czech crisis of
1938—we can perhaps get some clues as to why this was so. Studying those cases (as Schultz noted) might not
tell us much about how large audience costs are in general, but it might give us some sense for the sorts of
things that determine how much of a price would actually be paid if a country suffered a diplomatic defeat, and
why that price in many cases might not be nearly as great as some theorists seem to think.
The Fashoda case is of particular interest in this context because one might have expected the French
government’s political weakness to give it something of a bargaining advantage—or at least to cancel out the
bargaining advantage the domestic political situation had given the British government. It was not just that the
current French ministry might fall if it gave way during the crisis. The whole republican system was in danger
because of the Dreyfus affair, which was also going on at that time. Would the British really want to bring
down the government and perhaps even trigger a military coup in France by taking too hard a line? And with
the stakes so high at home, did the French government have much room for maneuver? It seemed to the
British ambassador in Paris that Delcassé’s back was to the wall and that for domestic political reasons he
simply could not withdraw from Fashoda. But Salisbury was unmoved. The British took naval measures that
suggested that war was imminent, and the French, despite their domestic political situation, felt they had no
choice but to give way.159
Roger Brown, in Fashoda Reconsidered, stresses the link between the domestic and international crisis. See especially pp.
99-100 for an extract from a letter Ambassador Monson sent Salisbury on October 1 talking about the “utter
impossibility” (for domestic political reasons) of the French government backing down. Monson’s report is also referred
to in Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy, p. 193. That report was an exact counterpart for France of Ambassador
159
46
The republic survived, but what happened to the French leaders responsible for the policy that had led
to this dramatic diplomatic defeat? The historian Gabriel Hanotaux had served as foreign minister almost
without interruption from 1894 to June 1898, and the Fashoda affair put an end to his political career.160 But
Hanotaux had scarcely been the driving force behind the policy. He had in fact at times opposed a forward
policy in the Upper Nile, but with no political base of his own could easily be overruled.161 Delcassé, on the
other hand, had played a key role, as under-secretary for colonies in 1893, in launching the policy that led to the
Marchand mission; his “grand design,” his biographer Christopher Andrew wrote, was “to challenge the
English presence in Egypt by a Fashoda expedition.”162 In early 1898 he still championed that policy: “It is
not I who am to blame,” he declared, if “the French flag has yet to be carried to the banks of the Nile.”163 To
be sure, he took a more moderate line after he became foreign minister in June 1898. But he was not forced to
resign when the policy he had for years been so closely associated with collapsed in November. People, in fact,
had to plead with him to stay in office, and he remained foreign minister until 1905.164
It is no wonder that people like Delcassé were not held accountable for the Fashoda débâcle. The
policy that had led to Fashoda had very broad support in parliament, even from the Socialists; in one key vote
held at the end of 1896, only a handful of deputies were opposed.165 But if the political class as a whole was to
blame, it was scarcely going to punish itself for what had happened. There was no way that the parliament as a
whole would be held liable, and so no audience costs would be incurred by those who were really responsible
for the policy.
Courcel’s report from London about the British government being unable to back down (again, for domestic political
reasons) which Schultz had referred to; see p. 17 above. For the fear of a coup, see Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, pp. 105106 and 110, and Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, pp. 374-375.
160
See Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “Hanotaux,” p. 93, and Michel, Mission Marchand, p. 224.
161
See Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered, p. 53.
Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy 18981905 (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 41, 90.
162
163
Ibid., p. 91, and Guillen, L’Expansion, pp. 412, 418.
164
See Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 353.
165
See Michel, Mission Marchand, pp. 57-58, Guillen, L’Expansion, p. 462, and Sanderson, Upper Nile, p. 391.
47
In the crises of the 1930s, somewhat different mechanisms came into play. The western governments
during that period had to deal with certain commitments they had made but did not wish to honor. On March
6, 1936, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. The French prime minister announced on the radio the next day
that his government was not prepared to allow “Strasbourg to be exposed to German cannon fire.”166 The
French foreign minister had warned the previous month that France would not permit the Rhineland to be
remilitarized.167 The British, for their part, had agreed (in the 1925 Locarno treaty) to guarantee the
demilitarized status of the Rhineland, and Foreign Secretary Eden had told Parliament at the end of March that
he was “not prepared to be the first British Foreign Secretary to go back on a British signature.”168 Yet for
France a unilateral use of force was utterly out of the question for military, financial and domestic political
reasons. The assumption was that to take action France would have to mobilize, but a frightened public was
not prepared to risk war. Elections were imminent, and the voters, it seemed, would react to strong measures
by voting for the anti-militarist left-wing parties. “A general mobilization six months before elections,” the
foreign minister later noted, “was insane.” The “audience,” in other words, would punish the government for
following through with its threats, not for backing down from them—although it is only fair to point out that
that punishment might have been less severe than it otherwise would have been because commitments had
been made.169
France could not act without Britain, but for the British the remilitarization of the Rhineland was not a
fighting issue. Despite Eden’s statement to Parliament, the British were not willing to honor their Locarno
pledge, and the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, was irritated by the fact that the French seemed to want to
Quoted in Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy, 1932-1939 (New York:
Enigma Books, 2004), p. 130. This is a translation of Duroselle’s La Décadence, 1932-1939, which was originally published
in 1979.
166
See Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, “Les milieux gouvernementaux français en face du problème allemand en 1936,” in JeanBaptiste Duroselle, Itinéraires: Idées, hommes et nations d’Occident (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991), p. 315.
167
Quoted in R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1993), p. 65.
168
The basic source on French policy in this affair is Stephen Schuker’s extraordinary article “France and the
Remilitarization of the Rhineland, 1936,” French Historical Studies 14, no. 3 (Spring 1986); see especially pp. 316 and 322 for
the point about mobilization being necessary, and pp. 316-317 and 329 for the role of domestic political considerations.
See also the discussion in Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, chapter 5, especially pp. 128-131 (for the points about
public attitudes and the elections).
169
48
force Britain to choose between risking war and reneging on her commitments.170 But since practically no one
in Britain thought that force should be used in 1936, the government paid no real domestic political price for
failing to live up to its Locarno pledge.
In the Czech crisis of 1938, the story is less clear-cut. The French had an alliance with Czechoslovakia
and in early September their foreign minister announced that his government would “remain committed to the
pacts it has entered into.”171 The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, publicly warned in March of that
year that if war broke out, “other countries, besides those which were parties to the original dispute, would
almost immediately be involved”—and this was “especially true,” he noted, “in the case of two countries like
Britain and France.”172 The problem developed into a crisis in September. To head off what seemed to be an
imminent German attack on Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet Hitler and came back with
a plan to turn over to Germany those parts of Czechoslovakia in which most of the inhabitants were ethnically
German. The French went along with the plan and the Czechs were made to accept it. Chamberlain then
returned to Germany, thinking that a settlement was at hand. But Hitler now insisted on more extreme terms:
he demanded that specific areas on a map he displayed be turned over to Germany almost immediately. That
was too much for most of Chamberlain’s Cabinet colleagues, although Chamberlain himself was willing to
accept that arrangement; the French, although deeply divided, were also prepared to face war over the issue.173
An armed conflict seemed imminent, but then both sides drew back. A conference was held at Munich. Hitler
made some minor concessions and war was avoided—not just a major European war, but also the localized
war with Czechoslovakia which Hitler had very much wanted.
We now think of the Munich agreement as a disaster for the western powers, but at the time Hitler felt
that he himself had been defeated—cheated out of the war he had craved.174 Did he back down to the extent
he had because the western governments had been able to generate audience costs? Certainly Chamberlain
170
See Parker, Chamberlain, p. 64.
171
Quoted in Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, p. 280.
172
Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain, p. 139.
See Parker, Chamberlain, pp. 167-173; Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, pp. 287-291; and Anthony Adamthwaite,
France and the Coming of the Second World War, 1936-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), pp. 217-218.
173
174
See Richard Overy, “Germany and the Munich Crisis: A Mutilated Victory?” Diplomacy and Statecraft 10, no. 2/ 3 (1999).
49
himself tried to make it clear to Hitler that he was under considerable pressure at home and that if the Führer
wanted to keep such a conciliatory prime minister in power, he needed to be more accommodating.175 It was
not that Chamberlain had sought to generate audience costs by taking a strong stand in public. He in fact very
much disliked public threats and was quite upset when the Foreign Office issued a strong public warning to
Germany at the peak of the crisis.176 But even though he tried to damp down the political pressure for a firm
line, he still in effect sought to exploit the political situation as a way of getting Hitler to see reason. It does not
seem, however, that that tactic had much of an effect. The domestic political situation in Britain is not cited in
the historical sources as a key factor that led Hitler to pull back at the last minute.177 But even if the political
situation within Britain and France was taken into account, it would not have been because public statements
had locked those countries into a position from which they could not draw back. It would have been because
of substantive changes, not tactical “bridge-burning” moves: political opinion within the Cabinet, within
Parliament, and within the country at large had shifted, and as a result the British government was now less
inclined to give way.
Chamberlain, however, was still strong enough in late 1938 to get his colleagues to accept the Munich
agreement, but the détente with Germany he had hoped for never materialized, and relations between Germany
and the western powers rapidly deteriorated. By the beginning of 1939, even Lord Halifax, the foreign
secretary, had concluded that a peaceful accommodation with Hitler was not in the cards: “the present state of
tension,” he told the Cabinet on February 2, “could not last indefinitely and must result either in war or in the
See Parker, Chamberlain, pp. 167, 174, 186-187. In a series of meetings with a contact at the German embassy,
Chamberlain’s press advisor George Steward explained some of the problems the prime minister had to face at home with
the goal of getting Hitler to soften his line. See Richard Cockett, Twilight of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement and the
Manipulation of the Press (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), pp. 85-86, and John Ferris, “Intelligence and
Diplomatic Signaling during Crises: The British Experiences of 1877-78, 1922 and 1938,” Intelligence and National Security
21, no. 5 (October 2006), p. 688. Note especially Steward’s warning to the Germans (at the time of the the prime
minister’s second trip to Germany) that Chamberlain “might not be able to hold out in the face of ‘a revolt of public
opinion which is brewing.’” Quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, “The British Government and the Media, 1937-1938,”
Journal of Contemporary History 18, no. 2 (April 1983), p. 292.
175
176
See Parker, Chamberlain, pp. 157, 174-175, and Cockett, Twilight of Truth, p. 82.
Historians instead talk about the defection of Italy, opposition within Germany, new evidence of the German people’s
lack of enthusiasm for war, and especially the general deterrent posture of the western powers. See , for example, Gerhard
Weinberg, “Munich after 50 Years,” Foreign Affairs 67, no. 1 (Fall 1988), pp. 171-172, and Overy, “Germany and the
Munich Crisis,” pp. 205-210.
177
50
destruction of the Nazi regime.”178 As far as the broader public was concerned, however, the key change took
place the following month when the Germans seized what was left of what was now called “Czecho-Slovakia.”
Germany was now taking over territories not inhabited mainly by Germans and the appeasement policy was
thoroughly discredited. Opinion had been transformed, Winston Churchill thought, in the course of a single
week. He likened it to “the kindling of a fire which rose steadily, hour by hour, to an intense furnace heat of
inward conviction.”179
The Munich agreement had called upon the powers to guarantee the rump Czechoslovak state. A
British minister, on Chamberlain’s authority, had announced in October 1938 that the government felt “under
a moral obligation to Czechoslovakia to treat the guarantee as being now in force.”180 But now that the
Germans had moved into Prague, no one thought that that guarantee should be honored. The government
claimed it did not apply to the case at hand, since Czecho-Slovakia had not been invaded. The Czechs had
given in to German threats, but, as Chamberlain told the Cabinet, “our guarantee was not a guarantee against
the exercise of moral pressure.”181 The government did not pay a major political price for its failure to honor
its commitment in this case, although some people were annoyed by the hypocritical excuse Chamberlain had
given.182 Its behavior in this episode was just a brushstroke in a larger picture: the public had turned against
the Chamberlain policy as a whole, and his political position at home was not nearly as strong as it had been.
But Chamberlain was not forced to resign. How was he able to avoid paying the obvious price for the
failure of his policy? The answer is quite simple. He never really changed his mind about the need for
appeasement, but he pretended to pursue a tougher policy in order to remain prime minister. Chamberlain
survived, R.A.C. Parker writes, “only by appearing to carry out the policies advocated by Churchill, especially in
the acceleration of rearmament.” After the Germans moved into Prague, Parker notes, he “was reduced to
Cabinet Conclusions, February 2, 1939, Cab 23/97, The National Archives, Kew
(http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/large/cab-23-97.pdf).
178
179
Quoted in Franklin Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 242.
180
See Sidney Aster, 1939: The Making of the Second World War (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), p. 24.
181
Ibid., p. 29.
182
See Gannon, British Press, pp. 256-257.
51
pursuing his policies by stealth. When, on 2 September, that became known, he came close to being turned
out.”183 But even then, with the failure of his policy manifest, he managed to remain in office.
The French prime minister, Edouard Daladier, had also signed the Munich agreement, and he also
remained in power until war broke out in September 1939, and indeed beyond. His political position, in fact,
became stronger after Munich.184 This is not too surprising, since the sort of policy Daladier pursued had
broad public support. The simple fact that the French government was backing off from public threats could
scarcely be held against it, given the profound wish of the country to avoid war. The Chamber of Deputies
backed the Munich agreement by an overwhelming majority, although many deputies voted with a heavy
heart.185 The Socialist leader Léon Blum’s attitude was perhaps typical: a “profound joy” that war had been
avoided was mixed with a “profound sadness” that Czechoslovakia had been sacrificed.186 It was clear,
moreover, that Daladier had scarcely been a free agent; given the circumstances, he could hardly be blamed for
pursuing the policy he did.
So in these cases when democracies were defeated, the domestic political bill that leaders had to pay
was not very high. To avoid misunderstanding, let me again stress the point that this does not mean that as a
general rule audience costs would not be incurred if a government backs down in a crisis. There are many
cases—the Cuban missile crisis, most obviously—where they would have been substantial (although that fact
does not in itself mean that they played a major role in those episodes). The findings presented in this section
relate to the audience costs argument in a rather different way. There is a certain tendency in the literature to
treat audience costs as a kind of surtax: certain costs might be incurred for giving way in a crisis simply because
of the intrinsic importance of the interests being sacrificed, but beyond that an additional price would be paid
because people feel that making threats and then backing down is worse than simply not contesting the issue in
183
R.A.C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 263; see also pp. 216, 223.
See Yvon Lacaze, L’opinion publique française et la crise de Munich (Berne: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 609, and Adamthwaite,
France, p. 315.
184
185
See Lacaze, Crise de Munich, p. 526.
186
Ibid., p. 523. See also Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat, pp. 291-299.
52
the first place.187 If that “surtax” varies at all, it is mainly because regime type differs: the effect is assumed to
be much greater for democracies than for other sorts of regimes.188 What the cases discussed here suggest,
however, is that the basic attitude of the “audience”—how hawkish or dovish it is—is a very important source
of variation, as in fact a number of scholars have noted. Leaders might not be punished for backing down
when the public believes that choice is correct. In those cases, there might be no “surtax” at all; indeed, the
government might be punished politically if it did not give way.
On the other hand, regime type is less important than many scholars assume in determining how large
the audience costs are. The Tsarist regime had to take audience costs into account during the Eastern Crisis in
the 1870s, and this sort of factor also had a certain impact on German policy in the period from Agadir to
World War I.189 It played a role in shaping Khrushchev’s policy in 1958, and indeed his “audience”—the rest
of the Soviet leadership—made him pay the price for his failures when it removed him from power in 1964.190
“Fearon,” Alastair Smith writes, “assumes that leaders pay a fixed cost in terms of domestic support if they fail to
follow through on their policy pledges.” Smith, “International Crises and Domestic Politics,” p. 625. Philip Potter and
Matthew Baum, in “Democratic Peace, Domestic Political Audiences, and Political Communication,” Political
Communication 27, no. 4 (2010), argue quite effectively that the issue of how much of an additional price would actually be
paid is a good deal more complex than the audience costs theorists would have it. The point that audience costs can be
understood as a kind of “surtax” also calls to mind Schelling’s distinction between threats and warnings. In a warning, an
actor points out what he is going to do in certain circumstances in any case; a threat, on the other hand, constrains the
actor’s subsequent choices and might lead him to do “what he would manifestly prefer not to do if the contingency
occurred.” In a threat, in other words, the act of communication increases the level of commitment beyond what it would
otherwise be, and thus provides a way to convey “true information credibly.” It provides evidence in itself that one would
actually do what one has said one would do. See Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, pp. 123-124, esp. n. 5. I am grateful to
Robert Jervis for bringing this point to my attention.
187
Some scholars simply assume that the strength of the audience costs mechanism is a direct function of how democratic
a state is. Christopher Gelpi and Michael Griesdorf, for example, do a statistical analysis based on that assumption and
conclude that “democratic political structures are important because of their ability to generate audience costs.” But that
conclusion does not follow—indeed, cannot follow—from an analysis based on that premise. See their article, “Winners
or Losers? Democracies in International Crises, 1918-94,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (September 2001), pp.
633 and 638. Joe Eyerman and Robert Hart make a similar assumption in their article “An Empirical Test of the Audience
Cost Proposition: Democracy Speaks Louder than Words,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 40, no. 4 (December 1996), p. 603.
188
On Russia, see Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, esp. p. 195. On Germany, see Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German
Antagonism, pp. 366-367, 447-448, and Mommsen, Imperial Germany, pp. 176-177, 195-197, and 285 n. 28.
189
According to Troyanovsky, it was information about West Germany getting access to nuclear weapons that led
Khrushchev to provoke the Berlin Crisis in 1958. “If this were to happen,” he wrote, “and there were no meaningful
response from the Kremlin, Khrushchev’s prestige would tumble dramatically.” Troyanovsky, “Making of Soviet Foreign
Policy,” p. 217. With regard to 1964, some scholars used to argue that foreign policy issues had relatively little to do with
Khrushchev’s fall from power that year. See, most notably, William Tompson, “The Fall of Nikita Khrushchev,” Soviet
Studies 43, no. 6 (1991), pp. 1109-1110. But it is quite clear from evidence that has become available since 1991 that
foreign policy was of central importance. See especially Paul Du Quenoy, “The Role of Foreign Affairs in the Fall of
Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964,” International History Review 25, no. 2 (June 2003), and also Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp.
79, 93.
190
53
The idea, Jessica Weeks writes in a recent article, that because of their greater ability to exploit the audience
costs mechanism “democracies have an advantage over autocracies in signaling their intentions” is “now
axiomatic.” She takes issue with that assumption and the historical evidence supports her basic conclusion.
That “axiom,” it turns out, is more problematic than many people think.191
THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM
In an article written more than half a century ago, Thomas Schelling discussed the advantages of
basing the study of strategy on the assumption that behavior was rational. It was not that of “all possible
approaches,” he said, this was the one that stayed “closest to the truth.” The real advantage was that it gave a
“grip on the subject that is peculiarly conducive to the development of theory.” But whether the theory that
takes shape gives us any real “insight into actual behavior” was a matter for judgment: the results reached, he
said, might “prove to be either a good approximation of reality or a caricature.”192 The implication was that
purely abstract theorizing is just a beginning—that one has to look at the empirical evidence to see whether a
particular theory actually helps us understand how things work.
That, in fact, was what I tried to do in this article. My goal was to see whether the theory Fearon had
laid out in 1994, and which is still taken quite seriously by many scholars, holds up in the light of the historical
evidence. And the basic conclusion reached here was that the audience costs mechanism is not nearly as
important as he and many other scholars have assumed. That mechanism is supposed to play a crucial role in
determining how crises, especially those involving democracies, run their course. But it is hard to point to a
single great power crisis in which a democracy prevailed in which audience costs generated by public threats
were an important factor. And yet those are the cases where one would presumably have the best chance of
seeing the audience costs mechanism at work.
But why exactly does the audience cost mechanism count for so little in determining outcomes? The
key historical finding here—that that mechanism does not play much of a role in determining how crises are
Jessica Weeks, “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization 62 (Winter
2008), p. 35. See also Jonathan Brown and Antony Marcum, “Avoiding Audience Costs: Domestic Political
Accountability and Concessions in Crisis Diplomacy,” Security Studies 20, no. 2 (April-June 2011).
191
192
Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, p. 4.
54
resolved—suggests that there must be something wrong with the Fearon theory. Perhaps some of the
assumptions on which it was based were mistaken, or maybe it simply failed to take certain important factors
into account. If so, maybe the historical analysis here can tell us something about which particular
assumptions were problematic, and which particular factors were not taken into account—that is, about why
exactly the theory had gotten it wrong.
The idea that the Fearon theory is not perfect is by no means new. Over the years even scholars
working within the rational choice tradition have pointed to a number of problems with that theory and have
tried to remedy those problems by developing it in various ways. And very recently a handful of scholars have
(as I have) reached the conclusion that the empirical evidence supporting audience costs theory is not
particularly strong; and a couple of them have tried to explain why the audience costs mechanism seems to
play so slight a role in determining how crises run their course, in the process questioning some basic
assumptions that lie at the heart of the theory.193 In this section, I want to tackle that fundamental issue myself.
In doing so, I will certainly be making points which other scholars have made before; a new article by Snyder
and Borghard is of particular interest in this context.194 My aim here, however, is not to lay out a purely
original argument, but rather to try to pull things together and deal with the question in as systematic a way as I
can.
Why then does the audience costs mechanism play such a slight role in determining the way crises run
their course? In part, it is because direct threat-making (as some theorists have in fact pointed out) is often not
a particularly attractive strategy.195 Too explicit a threat may backfire, by engaging the adversary’s prestige (and
provoking the adversary’s own domestic audience) in too direct a way; even a successful threat of this sort,
resulting in a public humiliation of the adversary, might have unpleasant long-term consequences. It often
makes sense, therefore, to muddy the waters a bit and avoid direct threats; this is particularly true when
See especially Jack Snyder and Erica Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political
Science Review 105, no. 3 (August 2011), and Alexander Downes and Todd Sechser, “The Illusion of Democratic
Credibility,” http://irworkshop.sites.yale.edu/sites/default/files/Sechser_IRW.pdf (downloaded September 30, 2011).
193
194
Snyder and Borghard, “The Cost of Empty Threats.”
See, for example, Shuhei Kurizaki, “Efficient Secrecy: Public versus Private Threats in Crisis Diplomacy,” American
Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (August 2007), p. 554.
195
55
political leaders want to avoid alarming their own publics, or third parties, or when they want to acquire a
reputation for responsible, statesmanlike behavior, which might be of some value both at home and abroad.
Hence threats are often couched in general language, and it is relatively easy to back off from such threats
without paying much of a political price at home. Thus it might have been “the policy of the United States,” as
President Truman proclaimed in his famous “Truman Doctrine” speech of March 1947, “to support free
peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures,” but the
administration paid no real domestic political price when it did not lift a finger to prevent the subjugation of
Czechoslovakia a year later. The “threat” was very general; it was not meant to be taken, and was not
understood as, a blueprint for action.
But even when a state does commit itself in a relatively unambiguous way to a particular policy,
backing off from such a policy might not have major political consequences at home, especially if the
“audience” wants to avoid war and prefers a relatively moderate policy. If, on the other hand, the “audience” is
hawkish, the government might still be able to moderate its position without paying a big political price at
home. It can resort to scapegoating; it can talk tough to cover up its retreat; it can conceal (from the public)
the more moderate aspects of its policy and misleadingly present itself as having taken a harder line than it
actually had.196
This, of course, does not mean that there is no way leaders can ever tie their hands by generating
audience costs. There are certainly times when audience costs can be generated—when a government can take
such a tough line that it could not pull back without paying a major political price at home. The point here is
simply that leaders in practice are often reluctant to go that route. The reason is that “bridge-burning,” as I
have noted a number of times already, is just not a very attractive tactic.197 Statesmen, generally speaking, do
I gave a number of examples of this in the text, but Kennedy’s decision to conceal the fact that he had agreed to
withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey during the Missile Crisis is also worth mentioning here. The president and his
associates, as is well known, went out of their way to portray Kennedy as having taken a much tougher line on this issue
than was actually the case, and even branded Adlai Stevenson as an appeaser for having supported the idea of a trade
involving the Jupiters—an idea the president himself had championed. See Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali,
“One Hell of a Gamble”: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 321, and Philip Nash, The
Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997), pp. 157-160.
196
197
See esp. p. 43 above.
56
not like to limit their freedom of action. This is not to say that tactics of that sort are never considered. One in
fact does come across examples of “bridge-burning” from time to time.198 And the decision to pursue that sort
of policy, when it actually is made, does convey information, as the basic Fearon theory says it should: risktaking is a form of costly signaling; a less resolute state would be less likely to run risks; and indeed the more of
a disincentive there is to surrender control and thereby accept a certain risk of escalation, the more information
is conveyed when a government actually chooses to do so. The problem, however, is that such tactics do not
seem to play much of a role in international political life.199 Governments, of course, often try to guide and
sometimes even whip up domestic political opinion, but normally this is with a view to maintaining their own
freedom of action by mobilizing support for their policies, and not to limiting it by generating audience costs.
Given all this, it is by no means obvious, from an adversary’s point of view, that the degree to which a
government has “gone public” should be taken as the key measure of its seriousness in a crisis—that this is a
key indicator that would allow the adversary to judge whether or not that government is bluffing. And indeed
one has the impression that other factors—other sources of information generated during a crisis—play a
much more important role. What is really crucial is the overall picture that takes shape in your mind about how
far your adversary is prepared to go in the conflict. In forming that picture all sorts of things get taken into
account: what the other power’s leaders are saying, not just in public but in private as well—among
themselves, to your representatives, and to third parties; what you learn about public attitudes and the attitudes
of the government’s political opponents, most obviously through the press; and what your adversary is actually
Public opinion can sometimes be manipulated in a way that would at least appear to limit a government’s options, a
situation which could then be exploited for foreign policy purposes. Kiderlen, for example, explained to the leader of the
Pan-German League how nationalist agitation at home could be useful in diplomatic terms: “I could then say, ‘yes, of
course I’m conciliatory, but public opinion must be taken into account.” Quoted in Wernecke, Wille zur Weltgeltung, p. 29.
A similar tactic was used by the German chancellor in 1967 to get concessions in the negotiations on a nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Günter Diehl, then head of the Press and Information Office in the West German government, later
explained the thinking to Matthias Küntzel. “For tactical reasons,” he said, “a certain amount of resistance was welcomed
by the chancellor.” His goal was to “argue to the outside, vis-à-vis the nuclear powers: ‘You should be accommodating
towards us because otherwise the NPT will not find a broad majority.’” Matthias Küntzel, Bonn and the Bomb: German
Politics and the Nuclear Option (London: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 94. Note also Fraser Harbutt’s argument about President
Roosevelt’s policy at and immediately after the Yalta Conference in 1945. See Fraser Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and
America at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 310-330, esp. p. 316; and Fraser Harbutt, The
Iron Curtain: Churchill, America and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 86-92.
198
Empirical work done in the 1970s in fact showed that statesmen are less interested in abandoning control—that they
leaned “more toward caution and prudence”—than leading deterrence theorists seemed to think. See Robert Jervis,
“Deterrence Theory Revisited,” World Politics 31, no. 2 (January 1979), p. 303.
199
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doing, especially in the military sphere. You learn what you can through diplomatic channels and intelligence
channels; you try to assess the political situation that your adversary’s government has to deal with, in part to
get some sense for how much freedom of action its leaders have. You try to figure out how strong an interest
the rival power has in what is at stake; you try to think about what you yourself would do if the situation were
reversed.200 So all sorts of indicators are generated as a crisis runs its course, each a brushstroke in a larger
picture, each important only in the context of all the others.
Many of these indicators can be understood in costly signaling terms. As a crisis deepens and the risk
of war seems to increase, even a simple willingness to stay the course can be a costly signal; it is not something
that a country that is not prepared to run a serious risk of war would do. Escalatory actions—indeed anything
that seems to bring the two sides closer to war—are even more significant, and this is true whether there is a
risk of preemptive or accidental war or not. The basic problem is that the more deeply you commit yourself,
the harder it is to pull back—and not just for domestic political reasons. Even adding in a concern for one’s
international reputation (as some scholars do) would not exhaust the range of possibilities. Humiliation might
be undesirable in its own right; a country might end up paying a price in terms of how it feels about itself.
And it does seem clear empirically that the sheer momentum of a mounting crisis can constrain the behavior of
even the most powerful dictators and cause them to do things they might not have planned on doing at the
start of a crisis. It is quite clear, for example, that German policy in 1939 is to be understood in these terms.201
Military measures, in particular, can be revealing because they are an important part of that general
picture. In 1962, military actions—like the blockade of Cuba, the preparations at that time for an invasion of
This is point is not new. Schelling noted years ago that strategic analysis was “vicarious problem-solving. We figure
out what a person might do by putting ourselves into his position, adopting for the purpose as much as we know about his
preferences, and deciding what he ought to do or what we would do if we were he.” Thomas Schelling, Choice and
Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 205.
200
See Raymond Sontag’s remarkable article, “The Last Months of Peace, 1939,” Foreign Affairs 35, no. 3 (April 1957), esp.
pp. 507, 524. In the Czech crisis the previous year, as Richard Evans points out, “it was in the end Hitler who backed
down.” That “retreat,” as Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw notes, “was tantamount to a loss of face.” Kershaw cites in
this context a comment made at the time by the Abwehr general Helmuth Groscurth: “One can’t grasp this change.
Führer has given in, and unexpectedly.” If Hitler had pulled back again in 1939, the blow to his prestige might have been
unbearable. As Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary in the German Foreign Office in 1939, later noted—“with some
insight,” in Kershaw’s view—Hitler was by now “the prisoner of his own actions. The wagon had begun in the spring to
roll towards the abyss. In the last days of August, Hitler ‘could hardly have turned the carriage around without being
thrown off himself.’” Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 673, and Ian
Kershaw, Hitler, 1939-45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 119, 228.
201
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the island, and the fact that the Strategic Air Command was put on a high level of alert—were important
because the Soviets understood them in the context of what they were learning in all kinds of ways about how
seriously the Americans took the issue and how far they were prepared to go. Those specific actions, to be
sure, had certain direct effects. It was assumed, for example, that there was a certain risk that the Soviets would
respond to the U.S. blockade of Cuba by imposing a counter-blockade around Berlin, and that the Americans
would then be faced with the problem of how far they were willing to go in a confrontation over the city.
Their willingness to face that Berlin problem (when they decided to blockade Cuba) could thus be taken as a
measure of a more general willingness to risk war. But the key thing here is that when you saw all those
military preparations, it was hard to think that the Americans were bluffing—and that would have been true
whether the United States was a democracy or not. Those measures in themselves (and not just because they
were, to a certain extent, being publicly observed) suggested that the U.S. government was quite serious in this
crisis.
And what a government is saying in private can play a key role in this context. One does not have to
abandon the costly signaling idea to accept that point.202 Mere talk, of course, is not necessarily to be taken at
face value. Deception is obviously not unheard of in international politics. But, as many scholars have noted,
it often has a price tag. An ability to make one’s true intentions understood, and one’s explanations believed,
can be of enormous value; there is a real cost to debasing a currency which is almost indispensable in the dayto-day conduct of foreign policy. When interests overlap—and states generally have a strong common interest
in avoiding war and thus in understanding each other—meaningful communication is possible even when the
costs are relatively low.203 Honest signaling, to be sure, cannot be taken for granted. Statesmen might at times
See Robert Trager, “Diplomatic Calculus in Anarchy: How Communication Matters,” American Political Science Review
104, no. 2 (May 2010), esp. p. 349 n.12.
202
A number of theorists, in both economics and evolutionary biology, have argued that “cheap talk” can make a
difference in bargaining—that the more completely interests overlap, the more likely it is that direct communication can
play an important role. In economics, the key paper was Vincent Crawford and Joel Sobel, “Strategic Information
Transmission,” Econometrica 50, no. 6 (November 1982) (see esp. p. 1450), but note also Joseph Farrell and Matthew
Rubin, “Cheap Talk,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, no. 3 (Summer 1996), esp. p. 107. In evolutionary biology, the
argument about the effectiveness of low-cost signaling in cooperative relationships was laid out in an important article by
John Krebs and Richard Dawkins: “Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation,” in J.R. Krebs and N.B. Davies,
Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, 2nd edition (Sunderland: Sinauer Associates, 1984), esp. p. 391. See also Searcy
and Nowicki, Evolution of Animal Communication, chapter 2. That basic argument is supported by some quite extraordinary
203
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want to mislead their opponents. But if they go too far, they risk destroying something—the ability to
communicate honestly—which they might very much want to hold on to.204
But beyond that, sometimes new information can be generated during a crisis which can be credible
even if no cost is involved. Years ago Robert Jervis distinguished between what he called signals and indices.
Signals were issued, and known to be issued, “mainly to influence the receiver’s image of the sender” and were
thus inherently suspect, whereas indices were “believed to be inextricably linked to the actor’s capabilities or
intentions” and so were thought to be (although not necessarily actually were) “beyond the ability of the actor
to control for the purpose of projecting a misleading image.”205 “Private messages the perceiver overhears or
intercepts,” including documents obtained through espionage, could be indices; mere talk—the “internal
dialogue” within another state—could also function as an index if the listener feels that the government has no
control over what is being revealed.206 These are strong indicators of intent; they can yield new information
that can influence the way a crisis runs its course; yet the costly signaling perspective does not allow for the
role played by indicators of this sort.
Take, for example, the case of Britain in 1939. Certain key indicators of British resolve—the great
increase in armaments spending, for example—can obviously be understood in costly signaling terms. Britain’s
experimental findings, to the effect that “face-to-face communication” produces “substantial increases in cooperation,”
well beyond what standard rationalist theories might lead one to expect. See Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the
Evolution of Social Norms,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 140-141, and also Farrell and
Rabin, “Cheap Talk,” p. 104n. Scholars, in fact, are sometimes quite surprised to see how important “cheap talk” can be.
See, for example, Jervis, Logic of Images, pp. 96-97.
See Jervis, Logic of Images, pp. 18 n. 2, 70-83 (esp. 78-79) and p. xvii in the preface to the 1989 edition of this book.
Honest signaling, as is often noted, can be viewed as a form of cooperation, and much analysis of the problem of
deception is based directly on the general arguments one finds in the literature about how cooperation is possible among
self-interested actors involved in continuing relationships with each other. The basic idea is that individuals will cooperate
because otherwise their partners will stop cooperating with them; a cooperative system can be based on that principle of
reciprocity, and that system can be sustained in a variety of ways. See especially Robert Axelrod and William Hamilton,
“The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science 211 (new series), no. 4489 (March 27, 1981); and also Robert Axelrod, The
Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Note also Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal
Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (March 1971), esp. pp. 47-54 (on the sort of psychological system that
evolves to support cooperation and deter cheating; in the case of signaling, “cheating” refers to deception and
“cooperation” refers to honest signaling). The idea that deception can be costly when it is discovered, and that this is one
of the things that makes honest signaling possible, has also come to play a key role in the biological literature. See, for
example, Bergstrom, “Dealing with Deception in Biology,” pp. 27-30, and James Hurford, The Origins of Meaning (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 289-290.
204
205
Jervis, Logic of Images, pp. 18-19, 26.
206
Ibid., pp. 18-19, 35.
60
firm diplomatic stance, and especially the guarantee of Poland—and also the fact that that stance did not
weaken even as the crisis escalated—can also be understood in that way, because of the mounting price the
British government would pay, in both domestic and international terms, if it backed down. But perhaps the
most important indicator had to do with way people at all levels—in the Cabinet, in Parliament, in the press,
and in the country as a whole—had come to feel about the problem. It was of fundamental importance that
their willingness to accept a showdown with Germany did not crumble as the threat of war loomed larger. The
credibility of that indicator had little to do with any costs that had been incurred, or would be if the British
attitude softened. It was something that could be observed directly, just by talking with people and listening to
what they had to say. It was a powerful indicator simply because it could not be faked. And the fact that the
British were holding firm would, in a sense, be new information since the Nazis’ initial assumption had been
that Britain would back down in the crisis—that “in the war of nerves, Nazi nerves would prove stronger.”207
Yet as the costly signaling idea took hold, the whole idea of an index in that sense essentially fell between the
cracks.208
Given all this, it is not hard to understand why the audience costs mechanism is not nearly as
important in determining how crises get resolved as many theorists seem to assume. But perhaps the basic
conclusion to be drawn here is methodological in nature. The bottom line here is not that theorizing is devoid
of value. This is obviously not the case, and Fearon’s contributions to the field, in particular, have been quite
extraordinary. The basic problem is simply one of balance. It is very easy, when you are grappling with a
problem on a purely abstract level, to get carried away with a particular idea, and to lose sight of all the reasons
the particular effect you are focusing on might not count for as much in the real world as you might think—
and this is true, whether you are working in the rational choice or in some other tradition. The way to control
Goebbels remark, paraphrased in Raymond Sontag, A Broken World, 1919-1939 (New York: Harper,1971), p. 341; see
also p. 363.
207
Spence borrowed the term “index” from Jervis, but used it in a rather different way. For him, indices were
“observable, unalterable” attributes, like the sex of a job applicant, as opposed to signals, which were manipulable. See
Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” pp. 357, 369, 374. It was thus natural for people like Fearon who adopted Spence’s basic
approach to not view indices as playing a role in crisis situations; if they were fixed and unchanging, they should already
have been taken into account before the crisis started and could not provide new information. In other words, given that
basic approach, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that a non-cost-incurring index could provide new information in a
crisis and thus play a key role in shaping outcomes.
208
61
for that kind of problem is to analyze the theoretical issue you are concerned with in the light of the empirical,
and especially the historical, evidence. Indeed, it is only by doing that kind of analysis that you can reach a
judgment about the value a particular theory has. It is the only way to see whether a theory is just an interesting
intellectual construct or whether it gives you any real insight into how things actually work.