Politics of survival, nationalism, and war for territory

This study is a collection of four interrelated essays that deal with the following question: how can we explain the fact that while territorial wars in the first 150 years of the Wespthalian state system were frequent but limited in intensity, territorial conflict among states in the past century has become an infrequent but intense enterprise? The first essay outlines the main argument: the shifting trends in interstate territorial conflict is a function of the increasing political value of territory, which in turn follows from the rise of nationalism as the dominant political doctrine in the modern state-system over the course of the 19th century. Before the age of nationalism, leaders' attitude towards territory was driven primarily by resource considerations, which then made it both easy and expedient for leaders not only to initiate wars but also to limit their intensity once they broke out, leading to the frequent but limited wars of the 1648--1789 period. The rise of nationalism throughout the course of the 19th century, a process that was triggered by the French Revolution, increased the political value of territory and thereby amplified leaders' sensitivity towards the territorial integrity of the states they ruled. That leaders were compelled to care about state territory for its own sake consequently made it much more difficult for leaders to risk territorial wars and to limit the intensity of wars once they erupted, leading to an increase in the intensity of the wars that erupted, but an overall decline in the frequency of wars.;The second essay applies the insights introduced in the first to the bargaining models of war and deals with the following question: how does the perceived indivisibility of territory affect the patterns of war between states? The conventional wisdom suggests that indivisibility increases the likelihood of conflict between states. I challenge this conventional wisdom and argue that indivisibility of an issue, while making intrawar bargaining an extremely costly enterprise for the relevant parties, paradoxically creates incentives for the actors to prevent the pre-war bargaining processes from falling apart, thereby limiting the likelihood of conflict in the first place. I maintain that the rise of nationalism rendered territory more of an indivisible item for states and then utilize quantitative and qualitative evidence on the patterns of territorial war in the European state system since 1648 in order to substantiate my argument.;The third essay addresses the transformational period that was triggered by the French revolution and led to the rise of nationalism as a potent force in world politics. In particular, this essay deals with the following question: how can we explain the paradoxical trends in military conflict during the 1789--1870 period, where a sudden and unprecedented explosion in the frequency and intensity of war in the European state system during 1789--1815 was immediately followed by an equally unusual peaceful episode during 1815--1870? The essay maintains that these trends follow from the immediate and mid-term consequences of the French revolution for the political survival calculi of the European leaders: the war-proneness of 1789--1815 followed from the ideological threats that the Revolutionary French elites and the monarchs of the Old Regime mutually posed towards each other and the peacefulness of the subsequent episode was a result of the shared ideological threats that monarchs of Europe faced in their domestic politics.;The fourth essay combines the insights offered in the first three essays to construct a conceptual analysis of the so-called "survival assumption," the assumption that "states' primary goal is survival." A structured conceptual analysis of the treatment of the survival assumption in international relations theory reveals that the assumption suffers from significant conceptual problems and ambiguity. The relevant problems can be traced to two sources: underspecification of the core concepts and lack of attention to microfoundations. In order to address these problems, I propose a novel interpretation of the assumption that is built on leaders and their concern for staying in power as well as leaders' sensitivities towards territory and ideological threats they face domestically or internationally. This interpretation has a number of implications not only for neorealism, but also for the relationship between states and territory as well as for the concept of security dilemma.