A Study On The Reasons Of Alliance Collapse

In the study of international politics,alliance is not only an important concept and a common policy choice to the country,but also a continuous process.Usually the alliance consists of three main parts: alliance establishment?alliance maintenance and alliance collapse.In the existing research,most researchers pay more attention to the alliance establishment and alliance maintenance,which makes plentiful of research results.However,the study of alliance collapse is so rare and there is not a complete research framework about it,which makes us can not grasp the alliance concept comprehensively and it is harmful to select policy for country in the international system.The paper attempt to analyze the causes to alliance collapse from the view of levels analysis: domestic politics,alliance structure and international system.The most key factors are the government replacement and the political preference and personality traits for leaders in the domestic political level;In the alliance structure level,the power gap and the difference of strategic objective are significant factors;for the international system level,the power transition and system change make a profound impact to alliance collapse.In a short,the three levels lead to the alliance collapse by increasing costs and reducing benefits.The paper is divided into four chapters plus conclusion.The first chapter introduces the concept of alliance mainly,and makes a definition to the alliance.What is more,analyze the reasons to the alliance collapse,for which find the suitable definition to the alliance collapse,which can shape a good theoretical foundation for the further study.The second chapter try to explore the important influence from the domestic politics: the government replacement and the personality traits and political preference of the leaders.This is the influence path of the domestic politics: these factors increase the cost and decrease the benefits of the alliance,which cause the alliance collpase finally.In the last section,the writer analyze some cases for proving the accuracy of conclusion.The third chapter studies the reasons of alliance collapse from the structure of alliance.In the first section,we elaborate two factors: the power gap and the difference of strategic objective.The next section explore a specific influence path from the structure alliance level.The writer pay attention to the relation between the power gap and the difference of strategic objective and the costs and benefits of the alliance collapse.The last section,the writer select some cases to illustrate the power gap and the difference of strategic objective making work to the alliance collapse further.The forth chapter studies the causes of alliance collapse from international system level.In the international system level,the power transition and the evolution of international system can affect the alliancecollapse,because the two factors can result the rising of costs and declining of benefits,and these changes can make an imbalance of cost and interest,which cause the alliance collapse the last section,the writer analyze the case of the UK-Japan alliance and the U.S.-South Korea alliance for explaining the importance of the power transition and the evolution of system.The conclusion makes a summary to the whole study: the three levels can make work to the alliance collapse by increasing cost and decreasing benefits.