International identity crises: Explaining Soviet and Russian strategic defense policies

How and why the Soviets and Russians responded to the United States' two most assertive strategic defense programs is a puzzle that offers promising insights into basic questions of international relations and comparative politics. This dissertation studies the elite politics of the Soviet Union and Russia from 1983 to 2003, and explains Soviet and Russian strategic defense policies and actions. It adapts social identity theory from social psychology and sociology to create a theory of elite international identity (EID). More specifically, Chapter One hypothesizes that groups of elites with recognized expertise in international identity form a self-definition of their nation by interacting among themselves and with elites from other nations, especially from their nations defining "other." The resulting EID determines how nations interact with their world---i.e., how they form policies and make decisions---and is subject to change through further intersubjective definition, particularly when the alternative is negative self-evaluation, confusion and uncertainty. Chapter Two establishes that in the early 1980s a group of Soviet elites consciously responded to the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) by reformulating the Soviet EID and then successfully lobbying for its adoption. Chapter Three delineates how the changing Soviet elite international identity determined Soviet responses m SDI from 1983 through 1986. Chapter Four considers five categories of existing, alternative explanations of Soviet and Russian strategic defense policies: military requirements, economic constraints, U.S. actions, bureaucratic politics, and ideas. Chapters Five and Six, and Seven and Eight, conduct these same analyses for 1987 through 1991; and 1999 through 2003, respectively. Chapter Nine summarizes the findings and investigates the causes of changes in elite international identities. It also offers broader lessons for political science. More specifically, it suggests that the identity-based model offers a useful method for applying social psychology to international relations: facilitating disciplined inductive case studies: bridging third-level systemic), second-level (group) and first-level (individual) analyses; and exploring how intersubjective interaction can change international structure.