Wedge strategy, balancing, and the deviant case of Spain, 1940-41

Security Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-38

  Crawford, Timothy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 40949086441     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410801894126     Document Type: Article

References (300)

1. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), bk. III, chap. xi., 245.
2. "... they here are hacked asunder." Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), canto XXVIII, 475.
3. I have not found a book or article in the field of international relations that makes wedge strategy in general a central concern. However, a recent dissertation insightfully addresses it. See Yasuhiro Izumikawa, "United We Stand, Divided They Fall: Use of Coercion and Rewards as Alliance Balancing Strategy" (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2002). Three notable works dealing with wedge strategy in specific historical contexts are Gregory Mitrovitch, Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000);
4. John Lewis Gaddis, "Dividing Adversaries: The United States and International Communism, 1945-1958," in The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chap. 6;
5. and David Mayers, Cracking the Monolith: U.S. Policy against the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949-1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
6. At the apex of the relevant literature stands George Liska, Nations in Alliance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 42-60, which gives sustained analysis of reasons for "dealignment" and "realignment," including outside pressures.
7. Next are Ivo D. Duchacheck, Conflict and Cooperation Among Nations (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1960), 372-77, which identifies "division of rival power and coalition" as a "balancing device";
8. and Glenn Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 337-38, which devotes two pages to the subject of "divide and rule."
9. See Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Third Edition (New York: Knopf, 1961), 178-79 for his chapter on "different methods of the balance of power" which gives one paragraph to the subject of "divide and rule."
10. See also, Frederick H. Hartmann, The Conservation of Enemies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), 147;
11. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), 118;
12. A. F. K. Organski, World Politics, Second Edition (New York: Knopf, 1968), 278
13. George Modelski, A Theory of Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1962), 132;
14. Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: Norton, 1997), 108 n. 46;
15. and Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 171.
16. For recent illuminating treatments, see Daniel H. Nexon and Thomas Wright, "What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate," American Political Science Review 101, no. 2 (May 2007): 261-63;
17. and Patrick M. Morgan, International Security: Problems and Solutions (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2006), 64.
18. The offensive approach is also discussed in William C. Wohlforth, et. al., "Testing Balance-of-Power Theory in World History," European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 2 (2007): 157;
19. Robert Powell, "War as a Commitment Problem," International Organization 60, no. 1 (January 2006): 196;
20. Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, "Toward a Dynamic Theory of International Politics: Insights from Comparing Ancient China and Early Modern Europe," International Organization 58, no. 1 (January 2004): 18;
21. Timothy W. Crawford, Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 27-28;
22. Stephen M. Walt, "Keeping the World 'Off-Balance': Self-Restraint and U.S. Foreign Policy," in America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power, ed. G. John Ikenberry (Cornell University Press, 2002), 140
23. John Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), 153-54;
24. and Martin Wight, Power Politics (Leicester University Press, 1978), 159.
25. Even Robert Art's capacious definition has this bias: Balancing behavior is "designed to create a better range of outcomes for a state vis-à-vis another state or coalition of states by adding to the power assets at its disposal."
26. See Robert Art, "Correspondence: Striking the Balance," International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/06): 183.
27. For a similar definition, see Susan B. Martin, "From Balance of Power to Balancing Behavior: The Long and Winding Road," in Perspectives on Structural Realism, ed. Andrew K. Hanami (Palgrave- Macmillan, 2003), 70.
28. Organski, World Politics, 279.
29. On the theoretical value of studying deviant cases, see Andrew Bennett and Colin Elman, "Case Study Methods in the International Relations Subfield," Comparative Political Studies 40, no. 2 (February 2007):176-78;
30. Andrew Bennett and Colin Elman, "Qualitative Research: Recent Developments in Case Study Methods," Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006), 462;
31. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005), 114-15, 215-16;
32. Henry E. Brady and David Collier, ed., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 285;
33. Jack S. Levy, "Qualitative Methods in International Relations,v in Evaluating Methodology in International Studies, eds., Frank P. Harvey and Michael Brecher, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 137, 142;
34. Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 22-23, 86;
35. Ronald Rogowski, "The Role of Theory and Anomaly in Social Science Inference," American Political Science Review 89, no. 2 (June 1995), 467-70;
36. and Arend Lijphart, "Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method," American Political Science Review 65, no. 3 (September 1971): 692.
37. The emphasis on expectations follows from the definition of alignment in Snyder, Alliance Politics, 6.
38. Indeed, misjudgments of how actual alliances will form are a prime contributor to the disagreements over relative power that are an important cause of war: See Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1988);
39. James D. Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," International Organization 49, no. 3 (July 1995), 379-414.
40. On abandonment in alliance politics, see Snyder, Alliance Politics.
41. Pre-alignment wedge strategies can be subdivided into two types, neutrality-reinforcing and preclusive alliance making. These distinctions are developed in Timothy W. Crawford, "Wedge Strategies and Power Balancing" (paper, American Political Science Association annual meeting, 30 August-2 September 2007).
42. For a fuller exposition of these categories, see Crawford, "Wedge Strategies and Power Balancing."
43. Sigmund Neumann, The Future in Perspective (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1946), 275. Neumann wrote "Franco's dictatorial godfathers, [were] confident that their youngest brother-in-arms would march with them into battle when the 'the day' arrived. Strangely enough he did not, not even in the heyday of the 'New Order' when the picking seemed good and another Axis front might have been a fatal blow to the Allied cause.v
44. Ian Colvin, "The Hendaye Tapestry: Hitler and Spain," The National and English Review (June 1950), 21. A more recent historical study of the case begins, "It is without doubt astonishing that Francoist Spain did not become drawn into the Second World War - or, to be more precise, that it did not make a fully fledged military commitment to the Axis."
45. Christian Leitz, Sympathy for the Devil: Neutral Europe and Nazi Germany in World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 114. After the war, when Spain had compelling reasons to seek accommodation with the liberal democratic victors, the Franco regime's official history (and apologists in the West) argued that its wartime policy had always been to stay out. Madrid's well documented diplomatic efforts to create the conditions for an advantageous entry were, so the argument went, really a clever shell game, designed to throw off Nazi pressures for belligerency, allowing Spain to hide and profitably ride-out the war as a neutral. There is scant contemporary evidence to support this interpretation and an avalanche of contemporary Spanish and non-Spanish documentary evidence to support the opposite thesis. So we can rule out the argument that there is no real puzzle because Spain never had any intention to enter the war.
46. See Elena Hernandez-Sandoica and Enrique Moradiellos, "Spain and the Second World War, 1939-1945" in European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents during the Second World War, ed. Neville Wylie (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242;
47. Leitz, Sympathy for the Devil, 114 n. 2;
48. David Winegate Pike, "Franco and the Axis Stigma," Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 3 (January 1982): 369-480;
49. Paul Preston, "Franco and Hitler: The Myth of Hendaye 1940," Contemporary European History 1, no. 1 (March 1992): 1-16;
50. and Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: Unwyn-Hyman, 1990), 56.
51. On the utility of selecting cases of "intrinsic importance," see Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, 86-87.
52. On the role of counterfactuals in causal analysis see Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
53. James W. Davis, Terms of Inquiry: On the Theory and Practice of Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 168-75;
54. and Richard Ned Lebow, "What's So Different about a Counterfactual?" World Politics 52, no. 4 (July 2000): 550-85.
55. The virtues of examining counterfactuals "embedded" in the "actual experience of historical actors" are stressed by Paul Schroeder, "Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War," in Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe, ed. David Wetzel, Robert Jervis, and Jack Levy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 158-60.
56. Tetlock and Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments, 23-25;
57. Lebow, "What's So Different about a Counterfactual?" 565-66.
58. On necessary condition, counterfactual, and conjunctural causal arguments in case studies see Jack Levy and Gary Goertz, eds., Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals (New York: Routledge, 2007);
59. Gary Goertz, "The Substantive Importance of Necessary Conditions," in Necessary Conditions: Theory, Methodology, Applications, eds., Gary Goertz and Harvey Starr, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 67-73;
60. and Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Quantitative and Qualitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
61. We can treat Spain's economic crisis as a given: To postulate the alternative in 1940 would also require us to imagine away the preceding civil war that caused the economic crisis and whose outcome placed Spain in the Fascist camp ideologically. Such reasoning fails the minimal-rewrite standard and also invalidates the coherence of the hypothetical. Hitler's alliance bids could have been different - that is, more generous and forthcoming - and if they had been, the argument implies that Spain would have gone to war, and thus, Britain's wedge strategy would have failed.
62. On critical junctures and path dependency in causal analysis, see Davis, Terms of Inquiry, 168-70;
63. and Bennett and Elman, "Qualitative Methods," 463-65.
64. Even after the war Hoare would identify himself, unapologetically, as a subscriber to the "school of the carrot": Quoted in Christian Leitz, Economic Relations between Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain, 1936-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 139.
65. As foreign minister in 1935, Hoare coauthored with his French counterpart an agreement which wrote-off Mussolini's conquests in the Italo-Ethiopian war. The British public was outraged, and Hoare was sacked soon after. See Henderson B. Braddick, "The Hoare-Laval Plan: A Study in International Politics," Review of Politics 24, no. 3 (July 1962), 342-64. The positive reaction of Spain's foreign minister to Hoare's appointment as ambassador is suggestive: Hoare, he said, was "one who had consistently and courageously taken the right lines both over [Italy's conquest of] Abyssinia and towards Spain." British Documents on Foreign Affairs; Series F, Europe; Part III, 1940-1945; vol. 13, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland, January 1940-December 1941 (University Press of America, 1998), [hereafter BDFA], 83.
66. Denis Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy of Survival: British Policy and Franco's Spain, 1940-41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28.
67. See Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, chap. 3.
68. Herbert Feis, The Spanish Story: Franco and the Nations at War (New York: Norton, 1948), 28-29
69. Gibraltar was captured by British and Dutch forces in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession. Spain ceded sovereignty to the British in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.
70. For overviews of this period, see Glyn A. Stone, Spain, Portugal and the Great Powers, 1931-1941 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);
71. Dante Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 1936-1941 (Columbia University Press, 1962);
72. William H. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940-1941(New York: Harper and Row, 1953), 60-64;
73. Katharine Duff, "Spain between the Allies and the Axis," in The War and the Neutrals, vol. 7 of Survey of International Affairs, 1939-1946, eds., Arnold Toynbee and Veronica M. Toynbee (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 256-85;
74. Feis, Spanish Story; and Annette Baker Fox, The Power of Small States: Diplomacy in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), chap. 6.
75. I have not included "pure" balance-of-power theory in this inventory because it has notoriously limited predictive utility. On this point, see John Vasquez, "The Realist Paradigm and Degenerative vs. Progressive Research Programs," in Realism and the Balancing of Power: A New Debate, eds., John A. Vasquez and Colin Elman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 31;
76. Inis Claude, Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), 89;
77. and Steve Yetiv, "The Travails of Balance of Power Theory: The United States in the Middle East," Security Studies 15, no. 1 (January-March 2006): 70-105.
78. The clearest prediction that I can derive from pure balance-of-power theory for this case - during the period in question - would be a Spanish alliance with Britain (and later the USSR) against Germany. By June 1940, Germany was by far the most powerful country in Western Europe. A pure balance-of-power theory would expect German power - in itself - to so threaten Spain that Spain would form a strong alliance with Britain (the off-shore balancer) and the USSR (consistent with the checkerboard pattern).
79. On the theoretical utility of studying deviant outcomes in easy cases, see Levy, "Qualitative Methods in International Relations," 143;
80. and Bennett and Elman, "Case Study Methods in the International Relations Subfield," 189 n. 6.
81. On the inferential leverage of causal process tracing and analysis, see George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, 127-49;
82. and David Collier, Henry E. Brady, and Jason Seawright, "Sources of Leverage in Causal Inference: Toward an Alternative View of Methodology," in Rethinking Social Inquiry, 229-66;
83. and Davis, Terms of Inquiry, 175-81.
84. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 210-11.
85. An important recent article on this pattern and its surprising tendency not to hold is Zeev Maoz, Lesley G. Terris, Ranan D. Kuperman, and Ilan Talmud, "What is the Enemy of My Enemy? Causes and Consequences of Imbalanced International Relations, 1816-2001," Journal of Politics 69, no. 1 (February 2007): 100-15.
86. As Franco's military chief of staff put it to Hitler on 16 June 1940, Spain "had always been fully and entirely in sympathy with Germany ... because Germany was fighting against the same enemies who had opposed Spain in the Civil War." Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945 (Washington DC: GPO, 1956), series D, vol. IX, doc. 456, 585 [hereafter DGFP, D, IX].
87. Or, as Franco put it to Hitler in October 1940, "Spain has in every moment felt herself at one with the Axis. In the Civil War the soldiers of the three countries had fought together and a profound unity has arisen among them." The Spanish Government and the Axis (Washington DC: U.S. Department of State, 1948), doc. 8.
88. Suner said to Ribbentrop on 17 September 1940, "in Spain they had a high regard for the Italians as true friends." DGFP, D, XI, doc. 66, 86. For an overview of impact of German and Italian aid on the outcome of the civil war,
89. see Robert H. Whealy, "German and Italian Military Assistance gave the Nationalist a Decided Advantage," in History in Dispute, Vol. 18, The Spanish Civil War, ed. Kenneth W. Estes and Daniel Kowalsky (Thomson Gale, 2005), 171-75.
90. See Stephen Walt, Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987);
91. and "Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power," International Security 9, no. 4 (Spring 1985), 3-43.
92. A British citizen in Spain with "unique knowledge of Spanish life," reported that in November 1939 most Spaniards "seemed profoundly impressed by the power of Germany, and there was a feeling of satisfaction and security arising from Spain's close relations with Axis powers." BDFA, 176.
93. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 2.
94. As Suner would put it in January 1941, "England and the United States wish the end of a nationalist regime in Spain, a regime which was established in opposition to them." DGFP, D, XI, 1189.
95. Because Walt's theory does not specify how the four threat components (capability, malign intentions, proximity, and offensive advantage) aggregate, it would be possible (but tortuous) to argue that Spain's viewing the democracies as greater threats is not an anomaly for balance-of-threat theory because democratic government was perceived by fascist Spain as a proxy for malign intentions, and that component of the threat formula took priority over the three other components, even though high values were obtained on each of them. This version of the balance-of-threat argument, which privileges ideological identity as a driver of threat perception, is equivalent to the "Ideological Affinity" argument which is discussed and dismissed below. For a thorough exposition of the manifold permutations and ambiguities of balance-of-threat theory, see Colin Elman, "Explanatory Typologies and Property Space in Qualitative Studies of International Politics," International Organization 59, no. 2 (April 2005): 293-326, esp. 302-5.
96. Walt, Origins of Alliances, 28-32; and Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 163.
97. Randall L. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances: Triplarity and Hitler's Strategy for World Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 21-22.
98. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances, 22.
99. Said Suner to Ribbentrop in January 1941, "the Spanish government has not forgotten the humiliation which Spain has had to suffer for centuries at the hands of England, France, and the United States." DGFP, D, XI, 1189.
100. Smyth, Diplomacy of Survival, 86. In June 1940, a Franco-inspired article in the Falangist press, entitled "Gibraltar, Honor and Duty of Spaniards," said Gibraltar, "rises like shadow between England and Spain" and is "the first of our great problems ... Gibraltar is part of Spain and no one can retain it without being guilty of despoliation." BDFA, 83-84.
101. In August 1940, Spanish Foreign Minister Beigbeder explained to a German envoy Gibraltar's importance in these terms: "without [it] our independence will always be precarious." Documentos Inéditos para la Historia del Generalísimo Franco [hereafter DIHGF], ed. Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (Aldecoa: Madrid 1992), vol. II-1, 286. Quotes from this source are based on the author's translations.
102. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 4.
103. DGFP, D, IX, docs. 456, 586.
104. Preston, Politics of Revenge, 55
105. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances, 24.
106. Ibid., 144.
107. DGFP, D, X, 274.
108. DGFP, D, XI, docs. 353, 598, 602.
109. As Hitler put it to Suner in November 1940, "in no circumstances would Germany's friends emerge from this war dissatisfied and the enemies satisfied." DGFP, D, XI, 604. Earlier, on 17 September 1940, Ribbentrop met with Suner to talk terms for Spain's entry into the war and stated that "Germany would take Morocco away from France in her peace treaty with that country and give it to Spain, with the exception of the bases of Mogador and Agadir and their hinterland as well as certain economic reservations, to be determined by friendly agreement." DGFP, D, XI, 100. On 26 September 1940, Ribbentrop offered Suner a pact that would explicitly "contain the assurance that in the peace treaty Morocco would be transferred to Spain with certain German reservations." DGFP, D, XI, 169. In other words, Hitler did not turn down Franco's request for the expansion of Spanish holdings; indeed, he offered to expand Spanish holdings in Morocco, but not to the full extent of Franco's request. But given that Franco's demands were a bargaining position, there is no reason to assume that Franco's maximal demands reflected the minimum acceptable payoff.
110. Mark L. Haas, "Ideology and Alliances: British and French External Balancing Decisions in the 1930s," Security Studies 12, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 35.
111. A related argument positing "common identity" as a driver of alliance is Michael Barletta and Harold Trikunas, "Regime Type and Regional Security in Latin America: Toward a 'Balance of Identity' Theory." In Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, eds., T.V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michael P. Fortman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), chap. 12.
112. Hass, "Ideology and Alliances," 35.
113. See David Winegate Pike, "Franco and the Axis Stigma," Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 3 (July 1982): 371.
114. BDFA, 142.
115. Earlier, in June 1940, Hoare described Suner as seeming "to glory in the French defeat as the final blow to a democratic system that he believes to be rotten," BDFA, 93. Smyth describes Suner as "fervently anti-democratic,"
116. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 33.
117. DGFP, D, XI, doc. 63, 90.
118. Preston, Politics of Revenge, 53.
119. The leading works here are Randall Schweller, Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton University Press, 2006),
120. and Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton University Press, 1998).
121. For a good overview of this school, see Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, "State Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource- Extractive State," Security Studies 15, no. 3 (July-September 2006): 464-95.
122. The official documents are brimming with observations along these lines. For example, in April 1940, the British military attaché in Madrid recorded that "acute economic distress exists throughout the country and ... supplies of petrol, wheat and other war essentials are extremely meager and quite inadequate for military operations of any scope or duration."
123. BDFA, 77. Hoare wrote to Halifax, 12 July 1940, "food outlook for the winter seems ominous."
124. BDFA, 99. See also, BDFA, docs. 8, 37, 73, 113, 114, 129;
125. DGFP, D, X, doc. 355; and DGFP, D, XI, docs. 335, 497, and 677.
126. For a starkly pessimistic internal report to Franco and his associates in September 1940, see DIHGF, vol. II-1, doc. 88.
127. As Preston notes, "After her exhausting enterprises in Abyssinia, in Spain and in Albania, Italy was barely in better shape than Spain for a military escapade." Preston, Politics of Revenge, 55. That Italy was grossly unprepared for war is a standard theme. A leading historical account characterizes Italy's "poor man's war economyv thus: "Italian industry and the Italy economy were inadequate. The country was still predominantly agricultural. [There were] shortages of materials, foreign exchange, the absence of alternate sources for the seaborne raw materials which the West would cut off, and the weakness of the country's industrial and scientific base ... Shortages dominated the rearmament program ... [When Italy faced] war in September 1939, supplies of industrial raw materials, including coal, were short or entirely lacking ... [No central authority existed to impose] an end to administrative confusion, jurisdictional conflict, and dispersal of effort."
128. Macgregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 30-32. An authoritative economic history agrees: "not only was the Italian economy not in a position to withstand a long war without access to suppliers across the seas but to attempt to do so was sheer folly... Not only were Italy's economic war potential and its industrial preparation hopelessly inadequate for the tasks at hand, but its military preparation was no better .... its gold and foreign exchange holdings were such as to dictate a policy of peace."
129. Shepard B. Clough, The Economic History of Modern Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 261, 273.
130. For a recent discussion of "Italian un-preparedness" see Reynolds M. Salerno, Vital Crossroads: Mediterranean Origins of the SecondWorldWar, 1935-1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 131-36, 181-82.
131. Suner said to Ribbentrop in September 1940 that "from the standpoint of internal order in Spain and because of the consolidation of the national Revolution, an action in the field of foreign policy was necessary." DGFP, D, XI, 63, 86. At other times he declared to Hitler that "for reasons of domestic strengthening and of external security, Spain was raising ... territorial demands," and "his belief in the historical dogma that a domestic revolution needs some enterprise in foreign policy in order to consolidate domestic conditions." DGFP, D, XI, 96-97, 602.
132. Contra Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 349, who argues that "in the Second World War, the decisions of such countries as Italy, Spain, or Turkey, or even France, to join or not to join one or the other side were mere episodes, welcomed or feared, to be sure, by the belligerents, but in no way even remotely capable of transforming victory into defeat or vice versa."
133. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 460.
134. "History and Imagination," in History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H. R. Trevor Roper, eds., Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London: Duckworth & Co., 1981), 360, 362.
135. Colvin, "The Hendaye Tapestry," 21.
136. This, it is also worth noting, does not sound like a military elite confident in the Navy's ability to deter Spain. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 122-23.
137. Donald S. Detwiler, "Spain and the Axis During World War II," Review of Politics 33, no. 1 (January 1971): 53.
138. This interpretation appears, for example, in Fox, The Power of Small States, chap. 6. For the literature rebutting this view, see note 16 herein.
139. "It was not reasonable to suppose, or even to hope," recalled Trevor Roper, "that General Franco, who after all had been placed in power by our enemies, would resist the temptation to which Mussolini had so easily yielded, and would refuse to rush to the aid of the apparent victor [in 1940]." History and Imagination, eds., Lloyd-Jones, et. al., 360. As the British Naval attache in Madrid in 1940 saw it, the possibility that Spain would remain non-belligerent was "rather remote"; Hoare too felt that there was "but an outside chance" that the policy of inducing Spain to remain non-belligerent would succeed. Churchill's chancellor of the exchequer did not even want to release funds for such a "lost cause."
140. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 28, 30. Observes Smyth: "the political position which the British attempted to uphold in Spain in the summer of 1940, was slight in comparison with that which their enemies had managed to establish." Ibid., 36. For a contemporary synopsis of the "strength of German power"
141. in Spain, see Hoare's memo to Halifax of 11 July 1940, in BDFA, 77.
142. For examples: Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 90-91; Pike, "Franco and the Axis Stigma," 379; and Goda, "Franco's Bid for Empire," 181.
143. See Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 34. On 9 August 1940, Halifax wrote to Hoare that the government concurred with the view that if "it should prove impossible to prevent Spain from entering the war against us, it is to our advantage that her entry into the war should be delayed as long as possible."
144. BDFA, 87.
145. As part of the policy to cultivate friends of Britain in Madrid, Churchill authorized an extensive campaign of personal bribery among leading figures in the Nationalist government and military. This was economic statecraft of the most elementary and unvarnished kind. See Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 35;
146. and David Stafford, "Roosevelt, Churchill and Anglo-American Intelligence: The Strange Case of Juan March," Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 36-48.
147. Hernandez-Sandoica and Moradiellos, "Spain and the Second World War, 1939-1945," 247.
148. Smyth comments: "the tenor of British blockade and economic policy in general remained predominantly conciliatory rather than coercive through the period 1940-1."
149. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 64.
150. BDFA, 95.
151. For Hoare's similar summation of the policy logic to Halifax, see BDFA, 105.
152. BDFA, 109
153. Henry Pelling, Britain and the Second World War (London: Collins, 1970), 91-92.
154. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 60.
155. Dalton quoted in Leitz, Economic Relations, 139.
156. See also, Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 59-60, 157;
157. and Pelling, Britain and the Second World War, 92.
158. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 47.
159. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 49-50.
160. BDFA, 141.
161. Paraphrase in Norman J. W. Goda, "Franco's Bid for Empire: Spain, Germany, and the Western Mediterranean in World War II," in Spain and the Mediterranean Since 1989, ed. Raanan Rein (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 179,
162. also see n. 79.
163. Interestingly, in late September, Suner informed Ribbentrop - perhaps to goad him into being more generous - that Hoare had "intimated" to the Spanish Foreign Minister "that England would be prepared to see to it that after the war French Morocco would be ceded to Spain." DGFP, D, XI, 167.
164. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 44.
165. Hoare to Franco, 22 June 1940, BDFA, 98.
166. We should not exaggerate the deterrence effect of the Naval threat to bombard the Spanish coastline because, to put it simply, Her Majesty's Navy had its hands full with other pressing missions, like stopping a cross-channel invasion, protecting Atlantic sea-lanes, and upholding imperial positions in Asia.
167. See Churchill quoted in Feis, Spanish Story, 61.
168. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 59.
169. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 218;
170. and Detwiler, "Spain and the Axis," 42.
171. The oil embargo lasted from 27 July to 7 September 1940. Leonard Caruana and Hugh Rockman, "An Elephant in the Garden: The Allies, Spain, and Oil in World War II," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12228 (May 2006): 10-21. The authors emphasize the "painful lesson" of this embargo as the reason why Franco decided not to enter the war in December 1940. Ibid., 21. It should be emphasized, however, that the choke threat was largely implicit and only really flexed twice: "Britain's economic policy toward Spain," notes the leading work on the subject, "only became really severe when there were serious doubts about the continuance of Spanish neutrality, and a political decision that firmness might be needed, at least temporarily, to consolidate such neutrality."
172. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 61. Indeed, it was not squeezed but quite the reverse in December 1940 and January 1941, when Franco made the crucial decision not to enter the war: Britain permitted Spain to import a monthly average of about 50 thousand metric tons of oil. This was down from the 67 thousand metric tons imported in 1935 (the last year of peace before the civil war), but the peak of wartime levels.
173. Caruana and Rockman, "An Elephant in the Garden," 38, 40.
174. On this point also see Christian Leitz, "More Carrot than Stick: British Economic Warfare and Spain," Twentieth Century British History 8 (1998).
175. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 61;
176. Feis, Spanish Story, 50. That month, as part of Britain's effort to assure Franco that it wanted to do business with his regime, not overthrow it, BBC announced that Whitehall had no intention of restoring Juan Negrin, the former President of the Council of Ministers of the Spanish Republic then exiled in Britain, to power during or after the war. Ibid., 57.
177. BDFA, 131.
178. Detwiler, "Spain and the Axis," 52.
179. Similarly, Preston, argues that it is "only from mid-November 1940 that it is ... possible to speak accurately of Franco 'holding off' Hitler's demands [for an alliance]." Preston, "Franco and Hitler," 16.
180. Preston writes, "most danger of Spanish belligerence had passed in late 1940."
181. Preston, Politics of Revenge, 52.
182. On this point also see Leitz, Sympathy for the Devil, 114.
183. Germany expended 500 million RM in the civil war, and Italy expended 700 million RM. Detwiler, "Spain and the Axis," 57, n. 6.
184. In the latter, Spain agreed vto avoid anything in the political, military, and economic fields that might be disadvantageous" to Germany, or advantageous to Germany's enemies, if war came. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 206.
185. Preston, Politics of Revenge, 52.
186. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 209.
187. DGFP, D, IX, doc. 129, 191.
188. On 14 June 1940, a Spanish foreign ministry official wrote to the Foreign Minister (Beigbeder) that the non-belligerency declaration is "in fact, a preparatory stage for entry in the conflict." Quoted in Hernandez-Sandoica and Moradiellos, "Spain and the Second World War," 251.
189. Preston's comment on this juncture: "With France on her knees and Britain with her back to the wall, Franco felt all the temptations of a cowardly and rapacious vulture."
190. Preston, Politics of Revenge, 59.
191. DGFP, D, IX, 488. Simultaneously, Madrid sought, to no avail, British help in extracting from collapsing France, Spanish-claimed territory in Morocco. BDFA, 92
192. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 48.
193. On these points, see Charles B. Burdick, Germany's Military Strategy and Spain in World War II (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968), chap. 1;
194. and Norman J. W. Goda, "Germany's Conception of Spain's Strategic Importance, 1940-1941," in Spain in an International Context, 1936-1959, eds. Christian Leitz and David Joseph Dunthorn (New York: Berghan Books, 1999), chap. 7.
195. Burdick, Germany's Military Strategy, 25-26.
196. Detwiller, 41;
197. also see Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 41
198. Burdick, Germany's Military Strategy, 30.
199. DGFP, D, X, 274.
200. Stohrer replied to Ribbentrop's 2 August instructions stating that both the Spanish Foreign Minister (Beigbeder) and Interior Minister (Suner) had recently "repeatedly pointed out to me [the] Spanish offer ... to enter the war on the side of Germany and Italy."
201. DGFP, D, X, 313. Later in August, Stohrer reported back that in an interview Beigbeder had "spontaneously reverted to an earlier Spanish offer to enter the war on our side under certain conditions. I had the distinct impression that the Foreign Minister considers Spain's participation in the war as practically certain."
202. DGFP, D, X, 369.
203. Franco wrote Mussolini about the possibility of Spain entering the war "once the difficulties of provisioning have been removed" and requesting Italian help in "preparing [Spain] to take her place in the struggle against the common enemies."
204. DGFP, D, X, 346. Franco worried that Germany was moving too slowly and urged it to "accelerate" preparations for the Gibraltar operation "because of [Spain's] fuel and food difficulties which were growing more severe each day."
205. Burdick, German Military Strategy, 41. On 5 August 1940, Beigbeder indicated to Stohrer that "Spain, due to its shortage of gasoline, can wage war without [German] help for 1 and 1/2 months at the most. As concerns the grain for bread ... Spain has sufficient supplies, until about March of next year." DGFP, D, X, 313.
206. On 16 August 1940, the German charge d'affairs in Madrid gave Berlin a detailed report on Spain's large requirements for gasoline and wheat. DGFP, D, X, 335. These estimates would subsequently prove too optimistic.
207. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 223; and Burdick, German Military Strategy and Spain, 42.
208. Burdick, German Military Strategy, 43.
209. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 63. Says Feis about the importance of this agreement: "the opposite course, a refusal to permit Spain to secure oil, might quite possibly have caused the Spanish government to come to terms with Germany ... Oil was a universal particle in the stream of Spanish life ... Britain was effective ... in making it known that it was the guardian of this particle.
210. Feis, Spanish Story, 52.
211. DGFP, D, XI, doc. 63 at 89, and doc 67 at 99.
212. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 4.
213. Suner claimed later that if Hitler had agreed to guarantee Spain's territorial claims in North Africa, Spain would have entered war at this time. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 87.
214. DGFP, D, XI, 89. Franz Halder recorded in his diary at this time (14 September 1940) that Hitler's approach was to promise to meet all of Spain's requests in exchange for its war effort, "regardless of whether they could be kept or not."
215. Burdick, German Military Strategy, 43, n. 17;
216. and Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 93.
217. According to Leitz, the only concrete German action on this score was a contract to provide 20,000 tons of wheat and 10,000 tons of rye by March 1944. Of this, only 397 tons had reached Spain by February 1941. Leitz, Economic Relations, 127, n. 5.
218. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 4. The next day, Suner met with Ribbentrop, repeating that Spain was "now willing to join the fight in spite of [economic] difficulties in proportion to the support that could be given her in augmenting her inadequate supplies," but Spain wanted in return to get "all of French Morocco in her hands." DGFP, D, XI, 83, 85.
219. Hitler promised "to provide economic help to the greatest extent possible for Germany herself" but that assistance could "only be of an emergency or temporary nature." DGFP, D, XI, 106-107.
220. DGFP, D, XI, 106-107.
221. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 5.
222. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 93.
223. DGFP, D, XI, 200.
224. Hitler expressed willingness to forego bases in French Morocco if Spain would cede a Canary island to German control. Hitler's major concern was defending the Continent from the emerging Atlantic alliance. DGFP, D, XI, 250. On this point see Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 134-35.
225. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 227.
226. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 7.
227. See Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 8.;
228. Colvin, "Hendaye Tapestry";
229. and Preston, "Franco and Hitler."
230. Preston writes that Franco "was adamant in a way he had not been before about the need for adequate economic and military preparation. The scale of assistance required by Spain meant that [in Franco's words] 'it is necessary to enshrine the future in a protocol."'
231. Preston, "Franco and Hitler," 6.
232. Leitz observes, "the supply of war material to Spain appeared to be one of the least problematic issues during the crucial period of discussions between German and Spanish officials in September and October 1940. Problems developed over Spain's main requests for such essential goods as wheat, oil cotton, fertilizers and coal."
233. Leitz, Economic Relations, 132.
234. Detwiler, "Spain and the Axis," 43. Hitler floated a formula by which French concessions to Spain would be offset by transfers of conquered British colonies.
235. DGFP, D, XI, 377-79.
236. BDFA, 147.
237. Quoted in Preston, "Franco and Hitler," 13.
238. Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion, vol. I (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), 165, 171. "The Italian offensive bogged down almost from the beginning, and the establishment of a front in Greece opened the way for British military intervention in the southern Balkans, where they would be within bombing range of the Rumanian oil fields." Ibid., 171.
239. Franco letter quoted in Goda, "Franco's Bid for Empire," 181. Franco's 30 October 1940 letter was not found in the German archives after the war, and no record of it was ever released by Madrid. The only version of the letter appears in Suner's second volume of memoirs, published in 1977. The actual letter did lead Halder to record this in his diary: "Franco has promised that he would seriously carry out the agreements which he has made orally - i.e., enter the war on our side." DGFP, D, XI, doc. 273, 452.
240. Also see Burdick, Germany's Military Strategy, 63; Preston, Politics of Revenge, 69.
241. BDFA, 156. On 5 November, Hoare reported to Halifax that the Franco regime was "not prepared to be turned out by the people because supplies have run out but will, if necessary, seek to remain in power by force of German arms [and] joining the continental bloc." BDFA, 158.
242. DGFP, D, XI, 478-79.
243. DGFP, D, XI, doc. 352.
244. DGFP, D, XI, 600.
245. Ibid., 605-606.
246. DGFP, D, XI, 623.
247. Preston, Politics of Revenge, 69.
248. BDFA, 165.
249. Burdick, German Military Strategy, 66;
250. DGFP, D, XI, doc. 414.
251. Ibid., doc. 420. This communication also conveyed Franco's serious worries concerning Spain's economic bind.
252. Burdick, German Military Strategy, 98.
253. BDFA, 168; Leitz, Economic Relations, 141 n. 61.
254. BDFA, 170.
255. Burdick, German Military Strategy, 99.
256. BDFA, 173-74; and Leitz, Economic Relations, 142.
257. Those conditions focused chiefly on giving Britain full credit for the aid in the Spanish press.
258. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 11.
259. DGFP, D, XI, 816.
260. DGFP, D, XI, 824 n. 2. Stohrer wrote "the scarcity of foodstuffs, has really become quite disastrous in recent weeks." Ibid., 825.
261. DGFP, D, XI, 817; Burdick, German Military Strategy, 104.
262. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 137-38, 169, 174;
263. and Stone, Spain, 158.
264. DGFP, D, XI, 667, 695.
265. Ibid., 1157, 1184.
266. Ibid., 707.
267. Spanish Government and the Axis, doc. 12.
268. Burdick, German Military Strategy, 119.
269. Leitz, Economic Relations, 136;
270. DGFP, D, XII, doc. 28, 51-53.
271. Ibid., 138.
272. Why, after Franco balked, did not Hitler just invade Spain and take Gibraltar out? A decisive answer is beyond the reach of this study, but Norman Rich provides a compelling response: "In refusing to yield to [his] demands [Franco] presented Hitler with the alternative of leaving Spain under the leadership of a benevolent neutral or of conquering a hostile nation. ... [Franco] confronted Hitler with the image of a Ferdinand VII and Joseph Bonaparte, and forced the Fuhrer to consider the winning of Gibraltar against the background of another Peninsular War... [Hitler] also had numerous other reasons for staying his hand in Spain. In the first place, he recognized the correctness of the Caudillo's warning that Spain at war would be a permanent and severed drain on the German economy... the end of Spanish neutrality would also mean the need to defend Spanish territory with German troops. Like Italy, Spain would become a military as well as economic burden.
273. Rich, Hitler'sWar Aims, vol. I, 75-76. Burden's intensive study of the question stresses Hitler's growing fixation with a knock-out "eastern solution" (that is, Barbarrosa) and his determination to prioritize it over a move against Spain, as well as the increasing additional demands of military operations in Yugoslavia and Greece.
274. See Burdick, Germany's Military Strategy, 97-130, esp. 115-16, 122, 124.
275. On this question, also see Leitz, Sympathy for the Devil, 126-27.
276. Preston argues that "the decisive obstacle to precipitate warlike action was the rapid deterioration of Spain's economic position, which would bring with it an ever greater vulnerability to Anglo-American pressures and blandishments."
277. Preston, "Franco and Hitler," 4. However, this view fails to appreciate that had Britain tried to isolate Spain, Spain's vulnerability to Nazi pressures and blandishments would have increased significantly, and then, the rapid deterioration of Spain's economy would have pushed Spain into the war. Maurice Peterson, the British ambassador to Spain Hoare replaced, had maintained during his mission that "Spain was so prostrate that Britain could never provoke its active enmity."
278. Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, 32. Fortunately, Peterson was out of the picture after France fell and Franco was seeking to enter the war profitably.
279. Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig, "Italy," The Origins of World War I, eds., Hamilton and Herwig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 364-67.
280. See Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, 352-54. William H. McNeil, America, Britain, and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941-1946, vol. 5 of Survey of International Affairs, 1939-1946, ed. Arnold Toynbee (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 71.
281. Schweller, Unanswered Threats, 10. To be fair, in a previous work Schweller argued that engagement "which relies on the promise of rewards rather than threat of punishment to influence the target's behavior" (a "common form" of which is "appeasement") "should not be viewed as an alternative to balancing but rather as a complement to it."
282. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances, 65, 74, 75. My point, developed below, is that appeasement is not merely a "complement" to balancing but actually a form of balancing in certain circumstances.
283. Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, "Progressive Research on Degenerate Alliances," in eds., John A. Vasquez and Colin Elman, Realism and the Balancing of Power: A New Debate, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 70.
284. Jack S. Levy, "Balances and Balancing, Concepts, Propositions, and Research Design, " in eds., Vasquez and Elman, Realism and the Balancing of Power, 136.
285. See also Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy, "The Preventive War that Never Happened: Britain, France, and the Rise of Germany in the 1930s," Security Studies 16, no. 1 (January-March 2007): 32-67, esp. 66.
286. John A. Vasquez, "The New Debate on Balancing Power," in eds., Vasquez and Elman, Realism and the Balancing of Power, 91.
287. This is clear from the empirical example they all refer to - Britain's late-1930s policy of trying to appease Germany while arming against it. See also, Stephen Walt, "Alliances, Threats, and U.S. Grand Strategy: A Reply to Kaufman and Labs," Security Studies 1, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 454. If one accepts that appeasement toward one element of a threatening coalition can defuse the combination and reduce the overall level of threat, then Vasquez's claim is simply wrong.
288. See Stephen R. Rock, Appeasement in International Politics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 12.
289. The connection between behavior that rewards a potential aggressor and a larger balancing strategy is even stronger if the offered reward is "compensation" or "side payments" which offset the target's "aggrieved position ... rather than compromise" on the central issue at stake between the appeaser and the appeased. This distinction between concessions and compensation is explored in James W. Davis, Threats and Promises: The Pursuit of International Influence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 20-21.
290. Rock, Appeasement, 35.
291. On appeasement as a way to reduce exposure to multiple disconnected threats, by conciliating on one front in order to consolidate strength on others, also see Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 165;
292. and Daniel Treisman, "Rational Appeasement," International Organization 58, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 345-73.
293. Quoted in Salerno, Vital Crossroads, 36.
294. On the Anglo-Italian Easter Accords of April 1938, see ibid., 49-51.
295. On their failure to separate Italy from Germany, see ibid., 59-62.
296. See also Schweller, Deadly Imbalances, 75.
297. Wight, Power Politics, 160.
298. Neutrality is described as one form of "hiding from threats" in Paul Schroeder, "Historical Reality vs. Neo-Realist Theory," International Security 19, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 108-48.
299. Michael I. Handel, Weak States in the International System (London: Frank Cass, 1990), 43-47.
300. This basic theme is developed in Timothy W. Crawford, Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 1.