The Foreign Imposition of Domestic Institutions

The Foreign Imposition ofDomestic InstitutionsJohn M. Owen, IV

International relations research has paid little attention to why states often spendprecious resources building and maintaining domestic institutions in other states. Iidentify 198 cases of forcible domestic institutional promotion, the most costly formof such interventions, between 1555 and 2000. I note several patterns in the data:these interventions come in three historical clusters; they are carried out by states ofseveral regime types; states engage in the practice repeatedly; target states tend tobe undergoing internal instability; states tend to promote their own institutions; andtargets tend to be of strategic importance. The most intensive periods of promotioncoincide with high transnational ideological tension and high international insecu-rity. I argue that these two conditions interact: forcible promotion is most likelywhen great powers (1) need to expand their power; and (2) find that, by imposingon smaller states those institutions most likely to keep their ideological confreres inpower, they can bring those states under their influence. Although in periods of highinsecurity domestic variables alone may account for institutional impositions, suchimpositions may nonetheless extend the promoting states’ influence and therebyalter the balance of international power.

Some assert that, if institutions did not affect international relations, then stateswould not devote valuable resources to their creation and preservation.1 Amonginternational relations scholars this assertion carries some weight. Its primaryopponents, structural realists, agree that wasteful, irrational behavior by states is

I thank the University of Virginia’s Sesquicentennial Fellowship and the Center of InternationalStudies at Princeton University for generous support, participants in the CIS Visiting Fellows’ Seminarat Princeton, and participants in Paul Stephan’s and John Setear’s seminar on international relations atthe University of Virginia Law School for comments on the data and arguments. I am grateful to JorgeBenitez, Rachel Brewster, Mark Haas, Howard Hechler, Gideon Rose, Kenneth Schultz, RandallSchweller, Paul Stephan, Mira Sucharov, Topher Turner, David Welch, Mark Zacher, three anonymousreferees, and especially Jeffrey Legro and the editors of IO for comments on previous drafts of thisarticle. For research assistance, I thank Rachel Vanderhill and Eric Cox. Any errors are the author’s soleresponsibility.

1. See, for example, the exchange between Keohane and Martin 1995; and Mearsheimer 1995.

International Organization 56, 2, Spring 2002, pp. 375–409© 2002 by The IO Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

selected out by the international system. If building and maintaining institutionswere wasteful, then states would be socialized into stopping the practice, especiallyin a competitive security environment.2

The institutions at issue are usually international, but the same reasoning may beapplied to states’ promotions of domestic institutions within other states. Domesticinstitutional promotion is arguably as common as, and sometimes more costly than,the construction of international institutions; it certainly has a longer pedigree. Sincethe dawn of the modern states system in sixteenth-century Europe, states have usedbribery, coercion, and brute force to modify and maintain other states’ internalregimes. The Counter-Reformation (1550–1648) was partly constituted by theefforts of Catholic and Protestant princes to forcibly overturn the established(institutional) religion in one another’s states. The French Revolution and reactionto it (1789–1849) and the ideological struggles of the twentieth century (1917–91)involved more clusters of forcible domestic regime promotion. In calmer timesgovernments have offered material inducements to foreign states to alter or keeptheir institutions; they have also used various covert means to the same ends. Sincethe end of the Cold War the United States and its allies have used economicincentives to promote liberal institutions in Russia and China, and force to imposethem in Haiti and the Balkans.

In spite of its historical, theoretical, and policy importance, we have littleliterature on the causes and consequences of the promotion of domestic institutions.Historians and political scientists have examined U.S. efforts to promote democ-racy, but none has subsumed such efforts under this more general phenomenon. Thisarticle focuses on forcible promotions, or what I call impositions, for two reasons.First, uses of force to promote domestic institutions are particularly puzzlingbecause our theories on the use of force tend to be least concerned with states’domestic institutions. Second, using forcible interventions reduces selection biasbecause such interventions are the easiest to identify. In this article I identify 198cases of forcible institutional promotion, the most costly variety, since 1555. Thedata show the following: The great majority of cases have occurred in one of threehistorical clusters (1600–50, 1790–1850, and 1917–today). Legitimist (absolute)monarchies, constitutional monarchies, republics, dictatorships, and communiststates have all often promoted institutions. Most promoting states are great powers.Most promoters engage in the practice repeatedly. Almost half of the target statesborder the promoting states; another quarter are close neighbors of the promoters. Asignificant number of targets are undergoing civil unrest. States usually promotetheir own institutions. Finally, the incidence of forcible promotion rises withtransnational ideological strife, and especially sharply when such strife coincideswith high international insecurity. Of the 198 cases, 141 take place in such periods.

Taken together, these findings suggest that variables stressed by competingtheories of international relations—ideas and institutions on the one hand, power on

2. See Waltz 1979, 128; and Walt 1996, 3.

376 International Organization

the other—are all necessary to an explanation of the phenomenon. I argue that themajority of foreign impositions of domestic institutions are explained by aninteraction of ideology and power. Transnational ideological struggles cause ideo-logues across states to favor close relations with great powers ruled by their chosenideology. A country that needs to increase its power—such as one involved in a hotor cold war—may pull lesser states into its sphere of influence by promoting in thosestates the institutions called for by the ideology; such institutions make it morelikely that the ideologues supporting them will rule. Thus domestic institutionalimposition can alter the balance of international power. It may also exacerbate thesecurity dilemma and provoke counter-promotion by rival states.

This argument may not explain all cases of forcible institutional promotion. Somehistorical periods feature moderate amounts of promotion yet low systemic insecu-rity or ideological tension. Domestic-political factors alone, including moral normsand fear of ideological subversion, may account for many cases. Even then, statesmay alter the balance of power, wittingly or not, by imposing domestic institutions.U.S. policymakers promoting democracy abroad today need to be mindful that, inhelping people in the Balkans and elsewhere, they are also extending U.S. power,which as always incurs costs as well as benefits.

The Puzzle of Domestic Institutional Promotion

Institutional promotion has been little studied as a general phenomenon. In separatestudies, Werner3 and Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson4 have identified conditionsunder which a war victor is likely to overthrow the government of a vanquishedstate. Both studies advance our understanding of institutional promotion, and someof their findings are corroborated here. But both begin only in 1816, use data setsthat include a higher threshold of violence than that included here, and omit most ofthe variables examined in this article. A number of scholars have analyzed thecauses of one particular set of institutional promotions, namely, U.S. efforts topromote liberal democracy in other countries.5 None of the scholars treat U.S.democracy promotion as an instance of a broader empirical phenomenon, and so theexplanations they offer are hampered by selection bias.

Domestic institutional promotion is any effort by state A to create, preserve, oralter the political institutions (as distinguished from the ruler or government) withinstate B. Although imperial states often promote their institutions in regions theyannex or directly rule, I study only those states that retain juridical sovereignty. Whyan imperial state imposes institutions upon areas it directly rules—that is, non-sovereign territories—is an interesting question in its own right. But institutionalpromotion in (otherwise) sovereign states is particularly interesting because it is a

3. Werner 1996.4. Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1996.5. See Smith 1994; Robinson 1996; and Cox, Ikenberry, and Inoguchi 2000.

Imposition of Domestic Institutions 377

matter for mainstream systemic international relations (IR) theory. Yet systemic IRtheories cannot explain it, inasmuch as they abstract from states’ domestic proper-ties. For all of their disputes with structural realists, many liberal neo and construc-tivist theorists agree that IR theory should be systemic, inasmuch as theories thatinclude domestic variables such as internal institutions are reductionist. For struc-tural realists, the only domestic property that belongs in IR theory is material power,which is reformulated as a distributional variable. Neoliberal institutionalists in-clude international institutions as systemic variables, but these institutions evidentlysucceed or fail at fostering cooperation regardless of the domestic properties of theirmembers’ states.6 Constructivists reject the rationalist assumption of exogenouspreferences assumed by neorealists and neoliberals. But many constructivists doaccept the starting assumption that states are unitary inasmuch as they are “con-structed” by international rather than domestic norms.7

Systemic theorists do not assert that domestic institutional type is never conse-quential. Structural realists acknowledge that domestic factors may help causeindividual events, such as wars.8 Because neoliberals’ primary concern is the effectsof information on bargaining, they have explored the notion that states withtransparent institutions (namely, democracies) are more cooperative since they areless able to disguise their true capabilities and intentions.9 Systemic constructivistsacknowledge a potential causal role for domestic norms.10 Theory aside, most IRscholars would probably acknowledge that domestic institutions do matter. But toexplain how, they must go beyond the current range of mainstream systemictheories.

IR theory before Waltz had its inadequacies, but it was better equipped tointegrate domestic and international politics. Even realists joined these levels ofanalysis. For Thucydides, Athens’ democratic institutions gave it a vigor thatoligarchic Sparta lacked. For Machiavelli, republics were the states best suited toimperialism. For Rousseau, constitutional states were the most secure.11 Morerecently, realists of the 1950s and 1960s incorporated ideological differences amongstates into their theories.12 Today, evidence is mounting that domestic properties, inparticular political institutions, do affect international relations in generalizableways. To name two prominent examples, liberal democracies seldom fight warsagainst one another,13 and states with similar domestic regimes tend to be allies.14

6. See Keohane 1984; Axelrod 1984; and Oye 1986. Notable recent liberal attempts to theorize aboutdomestic-international links include Putnam 1988; Milner 1997; and Moravcsik 1997.

7. See Finnemore 1996; and Wendt 1999. Among the exceptions are Reus-Smit 1999 and several ofthe contributors to Katzenstein et al. 1996.

8. Waltz 1989.9. Keohane 1984, 258–59. Fearon 1994; Schultz 1998 and 1999; and Martin 2000 have developed

this insight.10. Wendt 1994, 385–86.11. Doyle 1997, 75–80, 103–105, 145–50.12. See Aron 1966; Hoffmann 1965; and Kissinger 1964.13. See Rummel 1983; Doyle 1986; Russett 1993; and Owen 1997.14. See Siverson and Emmons 1991; Werner and Lemke 1997; and Haas 2000.


Domestic Institutional Promotion as a Regularity

If domestic institutions do have generalizable effects on states’ external behavior, itis no surprise that states spend costly resources trying to alter one another’sinstitutions. Such policies were common, Thucydides tells us, in Greece in the fifthcentury B.C. During the Corcyræan civil war, Athens intervened on behalf of thecommoners, Sparta on behalf of the oligarchs.15 In medieval Italy, the Guelfspromoted republican institutions, the Ghibellines autocratic ones-often in oneanother’s cities.16 Institutional promotion has also been common in the modern statesystem. Means of promotion include rhetoric, subversion, economic inducementssuch as aid or sanctions, and the threat and direct use of force.

Tables 1 through 3 present a compilation of the universe of cases since 1555 inwhich one state forcibly intervened in another to alter or preserve its internalpolitical institutions. I present only forcible institutional promotions for two reasons.First, notwithstanding the general consensus that liberal democracies rarely attackone another, the dominant school of thought in security studies continues to berealism. In recent decades, realism has elided any meaningful role for states’domestic institutions and hence cannot suggest an explanation for the foreignimposition of domestic institutions. Second, use of force is the easiest interventionto identify. States used other means to promote institutions throughout this period.For example, Louis XIV paid subsidies to England’s Charles II and James II inreturn for a secret Anglo-French alliance and the establishment of absolute monar-chy and Catholicism in England. A century later, the British used subversion to tryto overturn the French republic.17 Identifying the universe of non-forcible promo-tions, particularly of covert action, would be impossible; it would also be difficultto characterize the biases in such a sample. (The set of cases presented here wouldbe biased if we were seeking all possible conditions under which one state’sinstitutions were of interest to another.)

I have compiled as many cases as possible from what is generally known as themodern states system. I thus exclude the ancient Chinese, classical Greek, medievalItalian, and pre-Columbian American systems.

Criteria for Case Selection

Full criteria and justifications for case selection are given in the appendix. Aninternal political institution is any norm, or predominant rule, governing the relationof rulers to ruled within a given state’s borders, that is, governing the administrationof the state’s domestic coercive power. I do not include interventions to replace one

15. Thucydides 1982, 193–202.16. Strictly speaking, Guelfs and Ghibellines were identified according to whether they backed the

papacy (Guelf) or empire (Ghibellines) in the great struggle for political authority in Western medievalChristendom. But Guelfs tended to favor republicanism and Ghibellines autocracy. Weart 1998, 40–41.

17. Duffy 1983.


ruler or government with another under the same institutions. Uses of force must bedirect, and are thus limited to invasions, sieges, military occupations, naval attacksor blockades, and aerial bombardments by the assets of the intervening state. Thepromoting state may impose new institutions upon a conquered territory, or maysimply intervene for one side in a civil conflict with the intent of promoting one setof institutions over another. The promoting state may or may not succeed. Cases inwhich multiple states intervene on the same side are counted once; when two ormore states intervene on opposite sides, the cases are counted separately.

Target states must be sovereign after the intervention. Sovereignty means acombination and modification of what Krasner calls Westphalian sovereignty, or“exclusion of external actors from authority structures,” and international-legalsovereignty, or “mutual recognition.”18 Impositions of institutions by a state withinits own borders, its own formal empire, or areas it directly ruled are excluded.

A majority of cases in Table 1 come from the Thirty Years’ War. The absolutenumbers are high in part because the number of political units was high: the HolyRoman Empire comprised approximately 1,000 semi-autonomous estates at thistime, including secular and ecclesiastical principalities, duchies, free cities, andother territories. Each time an army attempted to cross a hostile border, with theintent of altering or preserving some subset of the target’s institutions, counts as aseparate case. Almost all invasions, excluding those of the Turks, were so intended.Even the French armies, who fought against Catholic states on behalf of a Catholiccountry, intended to overturn regimes that persecuted Protestants in favor of regimesthat tolerated all varieties of Christians.

The inclusion of intra-imperial uses of force during this period requires somejustification. Even if, as Voltaire said, the Holy Roman Empire was no empire(never mind its being holy or Roman), the sovereignty of its estates was somethingless than most states enjoy today. Certainly the emperors considered the Catholic-Protestant contests to be roughly equivalent to a modern civil war. But fewcontemporaries considered, and no scholars of the period today consider, the empireafter the thirteenth century to be a single sovereign state analogous to Spain orFrance.19 In the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555, particularism took furtherroot as the emperor gave up the right to enforce Catholicism as the official religionthroughout the empire; under the formula cuius regio, eius religio, Lutheran rulerscould establish Lutheranism in their estates.

In Table 1, therefore, imperial estates that were not directly under Habsburg ruleare treated as sovereign. Lands under direct Habsburg rule, including the Austrias,Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Royal Hungary (all labeled “Habsburg lands”) arenot treated as sovereign.20 Only invasions of these Habsburg lands by powers otherthan the Empire are included.

18. Krasner 1999.19. See Krasner 1999, 79; and Asch 1997, 18–24.20. Kann 1974, 1–24.


TABLE 1. Forcible institutional promotion 1555–1700

Case PromoterGreat

Power?Close

neighbor?aPromoter’sinstitutions? Target

Targetunrest?a Year(s)

Counter-promotion?

1 France X X Scotland X 1559–602 England X X Scotland X 1559–60 X3 England X X France X 1562–634 France, X X Low Countries X 1572

England, X XScotland, XNassau X X

5 Spain, X X Ireland X 1578–80Papal States X (England)

6 H.R.E. X X X Aachen X 15817 Spain, X X X Cologne X 1583–89

Bavaria X8 Palatinate, X X Cologne X 1583–89 X

Dutch Rep. X9 England X X France X 1585

10 Spain X X X France X 1589–9811 England X X X Netherlands X 1585–161112 England X X X France X 1590–9113 H.R.E. X X Aachen 159814 Poland X X Sweden 1600–2915 H.R.E. X X X Transylvania 1604–160616 H.R.E., X X X Donauworth X 1606–10

Bavaria X X17 Passau/Strassburg X Cleves-Julich 1609–1018 Nassau, X Cleves-Julich 1609–10 X

England, X XFrance X

19 Protestant Union X X Strassburg 160920 Catholic League X X Strassburg 1610 X21 H.R.E. X X X Transylvania 1611–1322 U.P. X France X 161623 Spain, X X Habsburg lands X 1618–22

Bavaria X X24 Protestant Union X X Habsburg lands X 1618–22 X25 Transylvania X X Habsburg lands X 1619 X26 Poland X X X Habsburg lands X 1619 X27 Transylvania X X Habsburg lands X 1620 X28 Spain X X X Palatinate 162029 U.P., X Palatinate 1620 X

England X X30 Catholic League X X Palatinate 1620–25 X31 Spain, X X X Palatinate 1621 X

Catholic League X X32 Spain, X X Valtellina X 1620–26

H.R.E., X XGenoa X

33 Grey Leagues, X X Valtellina X 1621 XBern, Zurich XVenice

34 Baden X X Palatinate 1622 X35 Spain X X X Julich 162236 Transylvania X X Habsburg lands 162337 Spain X X X United Provinces 1624–2938 Denmark X Lower Saxony 1625–2939 England X X Palatinate 1625 X

(continued)


Between 1555 and 1700, states forcibly promoted institutions mainly having to dowith the relation of government to adherents of various branches of the Christianreligion. At stake was usually which confession—Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist—would be established, and what rights were to be retained by dissenters. In a typicalcase, an army would attack a country or city with the object of altering or preservingits official religion. The religious question arose from the Protestant Reformation,which in addition to challenging Catholic doctrines posed a threat to the unity ofmost states in Central and Western Europe. The Reformation quickly spread from

TABLE 1. continued

Case PromoterGreat

Power?Close



Counter-promotion?

40 France X X Valtellina 1624–25 X41 Transylvania X X Habsburg lands 162642 Bavaria X X Habsburg lands 1626 X43 Spain, U.P. X X X France X 162744 England X X X France X 1627–29 X45 France X X X England 1627–2946 Catholic League X Denmark 1627–2847 England, X X Denmark 1627–28 X

U.P. X48 Catholic League X X Mecklenburg 162749 Catholic League X X Pomerania 162750 Catholic League X Holstein 162751 Denmark X X Mecklenburg 162852 H.R.E., X X Magdeburg 1629–31

Catholic League X X53 H.R.E. X X Halberstadt 162954 H.R.E. X X Augsburg 162955 H.R.E. X X Bremen 162956 Sweden X X Magdeburg 1630 X57 Catholic League X X Saxony 163058 Sweden X X Frankfurt 163159 Sweden X X Mainz 163160 Saxony X X Habsburg lands 163161 Sweden X X Bavaria 163362 H.R.E., X X Wurttemberg 1634–38

Bavaria X X63 France X X Valtellina 1635 X64 Sweden X X Habsburg lands 1639–4565 Transylvania X X Habsburg lands 1644–4566 H.R.E. X X X Transylvania 1644–4567 France X X Netherlands 1672–78

Sources: Asch, 1997; Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2000; Holborn, 1959; Kohn, 1999;Leurdijk, 1986; Luard, 1986; Maland, 1980; Parker, 1997; and Pennington, 1989.

a During the Thirty Years’ War, central Europe experienced general civil discord; cases only counthere if violence clearly triggered promotion.

Habsburg lands denotes areas directly ruled by the Habsburgs.The Catholic League and Protestant Union each comprised various German princes.H.R.E. refers to the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor.U.P. refers to the United Provinces of the Netherlands.


Germany in all directions, in the process fragmenting into various branches—Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, Anabaptist, and others—whose members disagreedover central doctrinal questions. Many princes converted to Protestantism and madetheir new confession their state’s official religion, usually disallowing worship byCatholics (and other varieties of Protestant). In an age when princes bore someresponsibility for the souls of their subjects, most considered it obligatory toestablish one confession as true.

At various points in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, popes called for aCounter-Reformation, which often involved the use of force by Catholic princes toeradicate Protestantism within their own and other states. The Peace of Augsburg in1555, which recognized the right of Catholic and Lutheran princes to determine thereligion of their states, was an early attempt to freeze such forcible promotionswithin the empire while the Church reunited. But Augsburg failed beginning in 1581when the emperor intervened in Aachen to preserve the Catholic establishment.Meanwhile, outside the empire, a few years earlier England and France had bothintervened in Scotland over the official religion of that state. England, France, Spain,and the emperor intervened in various other cities and states in northwestern Europetoward the end of the sixteenth century, including in the French civil war.21

The seventeenth century saw the rate of such interventions accelerate, as Prot-estant insurrections erupted in various imperial lands and Catholic and Protestantpowers intervened. Typical were the interventions in Cleves and Julich, free citiesin northwestern Germany that had officially declared for Protestantism. In 1609 thebishop of Passau and Strassburg seized the towns and re-imposed Catholicism; thefollowing year England, France, Nassau, and the United Provinces marched at least12,000 troops into Cleves and Julich to re-establish Protestantism.22

In 1618 a Protestant revolt in Bohemia drew a reaction not only from the emperor(who directly ruled Bohemia and thus was not engaging in foreign intervention) butalso from Spain and Bavaria on the Catholic side and the Protestant League(German) and Transylvania on the Protestant side. In the ensuing Thirty Years’ War,various regions of the empire were ravaged by military interventions intended toalter or preserve established religion. These actions were not motivated solely byreligious zeal—Catholic France, for example, could hardly be called zealous for theProtestantism of its allies—but rulers did intend to promote Catholicism, Protes-tantism, or toleration in targets, and did so upon victory.23 Most strikingly, in 1629the Emperor Ferdinand II issued the Edict of Restitution declaring that all conqueredlands in the empire would be forcibly returned to the Catholic fold.

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended this savage wave of forcible institutionalpromotion. Embers of the Counter-Reformation remained, flaming up on occasionssuch as Louis XIV’s war against the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the1670s, in which the French king intended to restore Catholicism to the republic he

21. For a discussion of this history, see Philpott 2001.22. Maland 1980, 41–42.23. Asch 1997, 62–97.


so hated.24 Louis promoted official Catholicism by other means in other places—forexample, by subsidies to Charles II and James II of England—but forcible attemptsto affect foreign states’ internal political institutions fell off sharply for more thana century.

Table 2, covering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shows that the rate ofinstitutional promotion remained flat until the French Revolution of 1789. In theWar of Spanish Succession (1702–13), a secondary issue was Louis XIV’s declaringfor the Catholic son of James II as heir to the English throne, and so his attacks onEngland qualify as a case.25 So does Prussia’s invasion of Silesia (Austria) in 1740,since Frederick the Great announced that he would liberate Silesian Protestants(then disabled under Austrian law).26 France and others intervened in Geneva in1782 to restore the constitution after a domestic revolt;27 more significantly, Prussiacarried out a similar action in the United Provinces in 1787,28 and another in Liegein 1790.29 In 1792 Russia invaded Poland to overturn the latter’s liberal constitution,ratified the previous year.30

The War of the First Coalition against the French Republic had as one stated goalthe restoration of the Bourbon monarchy; in turn, the French made clear theirintention to export republicanism to their enemies.31 In the latter half of the 1790s,France imposed republican institutions on the various monarchies and oligarchies ofItaly and northwestern Europe it conquered.32 These many promotions, and the evengreater number by Napoleon Bonaparte in the following decade, make up the bulkof forcible promotions in this period.

Details varied, but in general Napoleon forced states in Germany, Italy, andelsewhere to adopt his legal code, abolish feudalism, and rationalize and centralizeadministration. He also replaced with Bonapartist monarchies the republics thatFrance had established in the 1790s.33 The coalition that defeated France in1814–15 restored the Bourbon monarchy, albeit this time as a constitutional regime;the victors allowed the liberated countries to establish their own institutions with theexception of Switzerland, whose constitution was included in the Final Act of theCongress of Vienna.34

24. Pennington 1989, 508–509.25. Black 1999, 327–30.26. Ibid., 324.27. Ibid., 512.28. Schroeder 1994, 41.29. Ibid., 62.30. Ibid., 83–85.31. This goal was controversial in Britain, but it remained official policy from 1793 until 1815. Cf.

Duffy 1983, 11.32. For details see Schroeder 1994; and Blanning 1996.33. For details see Esdaile 1995, 72–90; Broers 1996b, 61–69; and Schroeder 1994, 377–82.34. Schroeder 1994, 571–72.


TABLE 2. Forcible institutional promotion, 1701–1900

Case PromoterGreat

Power?Close

neighbor?Promoter’sinstitutions? Target

Targetunrest? Year(s)

Counter-promotion?

1 France X X X England X 1702–132 Prussia X X X Austria 1740–483 Russia X X Poland X 1768–724 France X Poland X 1768–72 X

Turkey X5 France, X X Geneva X 1782

Sardinia,Bern X

6 Prussia X X Netherlands X 17877 Prussia X Liege X 17908 Russia X X X Poland X 1792–939 Austria, X X France X 1792–97

Prussia, X XGreat Britain X X X

10 France X X Austria 1792–9711 France X X Prussia 1792–9712 France X X X Britain 1793–9713 France X X X Netherlands 179514 France X X Lombardy, etc. 179715 France X X X Genoa 179716 France X X Rome 179817 France X X X Switzerland 179818 France X X Naples 179819 Great Britain X X X France 1798–1802

Austria, X XPrussia, X XPortugal, X XTurkey X X

20 Great Britian X X Naples 179921 France X X Tuscany 180022 France X X Cisalpine Rep. 180323 France X X X Helvetic Rep. 180324 France X X X Italian Rep. 180425 France X X X NW Germany 180426 France X X Wurzburg 180527 France X X Tyrol 180528 France X X X Batavian Rep. 180629 France X X X Neuchatel 180630 France X X X Wurttemberg 180631 France X X X Baden 180632 France X X Bavaria 180633 France X X Frankfurt 180634 France X X X Nassau 180635 France X X Hesse-Cassel, 1807

X Brunswick et al.36 France X X Poland 180737 France X X X Spain 180838 Britain X X Sicily 181139 Austria, X France 1814–15

Prussia, XRussia, XGreat Britain X X X

40 Great Britain X Switzerland 1815 X41 Austria X X Naples X 182142 Austria X X X Piedmont X 1821

(continued)


In the three decades following the Vienna settlement, the legitimist (or “abso-lute,” as distinguished from constitutional) monarchies35 of Austria, Prussia, andRussia sometimes invaded small states in Italy and Germany to suppress constitu-tional or republican revolutions. The three even established such interventions asnormative in the 1820 Troppau Conference, when they stated that the “GreatAlliance” reserved the right to use arms to restore European regimes overthrown byrevolution.36 When governed by legitimists, France carried out similar interven-tions, as in Spain in 1823.37 Even Britain, which loudly disavowed any right to

35. A legitimist monarch was formally unconstrained by a constitution, ruling, as in Louis XIV’smotto, by “Dieu et mon droit,” or “God and my right.” A constitutional monarch admitted to beingconstrained to govern according to law.

36. Artz 1934, 149–52.37. Schroeder 1994, 623–28.

TABLE 2. continued

Case PromoterGreat

Power?Close

neighbor?Promoter’sinstitutions? Target

Targetunrest? Year(s)

Counter-promotion?

43 France X X X Spain X 182344 Great Britain X X Portugal X 182645 Spain X X Portugal 182646 Great Britain, X X Greece X 1827–32

France, X XRussia X

47 Russia X X Turkey 1828–29(Romania)

48 Austria X X X Modena X 183149 Austria X X X Parma X 183150 Austria X X X Papal States X 1831–3251 Great Britain, X X Spain X 1833–39

France X X X52 Great Britain, X Portugal X 1834

Spain X X X53 Great Britain, X X Portugal X 1846–47

Spain X X54 France, X X Papal States X 1849

Austria, X X XTwo Sicilies, X XSpain X

55 Prussia X X X Saxony X 184956 Austria X X Tuscany X 184957 Prussia X X Bavaria X 184958 Prussia X X Baden X 184959 Russia X X X Transylvania X 184960 Austria X X Sardinia X 185961 France X X Mexico 1862–6762 United States X X X Cuba X 1899–1901

Sources: Black, 1999; Esdaile, 1995; Holsti, 1991; Kohn, 1999; Krasner, 1999; Leurdijk, 1986; Lu-ard, 1986; Schroeder, 1994.


intervene in another state’s internal affairs, used its military to maintain or changedomestic institutions in Portugal, Greece, and Spain during this period.38 Followingthe multilateral suppression of the revolutions of 1848–49, forcible institutionalpromotion mostly ceased until the close of the nineteenth century, apart fromNapoleon III’s ill-fated imposition of monarchy in Mexico between 1861 and 1867.

Table 3 lists forcible institutional promotions in the twentieth century. The list ofpromoters is more diverse than in the other tables. The United States attempted toimpose institutions in Mexico and the Dominican Republic early in the century (notincluded are U.S. depositions and restorations of specific leaders in Latin Americanstates that left institutions untouched). The communist coup in Russia in 1917 ledto a number of attempts at forcible regime promotion: the Allies in the Great Wartried to overturn the Bolshevik regime; France and Romania intervened to the sameend in Hungary in 1919; and the Soviets tried to force revolution in Finland, Poland,and Iran. In the 1930s Germany, Italy, and Portugal forcibly intervened in Spain onbehalf of the Nationalists; the Soviets intervened on behalf of the Republicans.

During World War II, Germany imposed various fascist institutions in thosestates it conquered; included here are those targets allowed to retain their interna-tional legal sovereignty. In Croatia (Yugoslavia) the Germans helped establish anauthoritarian state that persecuted Jews and Serbs.39 Denmark retained its monar-chy, but the Germans forced the government to censor the press and outlawcommunism.40 The Allies liberated these states to defeat Germany, but in theprocess they supplanted the institutions imposed by the Nazis. The Soviet Unionused various means in states it occupied to impose Marxist-Leninist institutions.41

The Western Allies used force to overturn Nazi-imposed institutions in France, theLow Countries, and Scandinavia, and (under U.S. leadership) to impose liberaldemocracy in West Germany, Italy, and Japan.

During the Cold War the Soviets used force to promote particular institutions intargets in northeast Asia, central Europe, the Middle East, and central Asia. Sovietallies China (in the Korean War), North Vietnam (in Indochina), and Cuba (inAngola) carried out similar interventions. The United States forcibly promotedinstitutions in northeast and southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.Assorted minor powers forcibly promoted institutions in the Middle East and Africa.Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has led its North Atlantic TreatyOrganization (NATO) allies in interventions in the Balkans to force institutional-ization of human rights.

38. See Ibid., 710–21; Krasner 1999, 157–63; Leurdijk 1986, 239–40; and Encyclopaedia BritannicaOnline 2000.

39. Lemkin 1944, 252–60.40. Ibid., 157–64.41. The stories have been told many times; one useful early source is McNeil 1952. It should be noted

that the Soviets did not directly impose communist institutions on Czechoslovakia or Hungary (the RedArmy withdrew from the former in 1945); still, they did liberate these and all countries in central Europewith the intention of eliminating the institutions established by the Germans during the war.


TABLE 3. Forcible institutional promotion, 1901–today

Case PromoterGreat

Power?Close



Counter-promotion?

1 Great Britain, X X Albania X 1912–13Russia, XGermany, X XFrance, XAustria-Hungary, X X XItaly X X

2 United States X X X Mexico X 19143 United States X X X Haiti X 1915–194 United States X X X Dom. Rep. X 1916–245 U.S.S.R. X X Finland X 19186 Germany X X X Finland X 19187 Great Britain, X X U.S.S.R. X 1918–22

United States, X XFrance, X XJapan, X XItaly X

8 France, X X X Hungary X 1919Romania X

9 U.S.S.R. X X Poland 1920–2110 U.S.S.R X X Iran X 1920–2111 Germany, X X Spain X 1936–39

Italy X12 U.S.S.R. Spain X 1936–39 X13 Germany X X X Slovakia 1939–4514 Germany X X X France 1940–4515 Germany X X X Denmark 1940–43*16 Germany X X X Croatia 1941–4517 Great Britain X X Greece X 1944–45 X18 United States, X X France 1944–45 X

Great Britain, X XCanada X

19 United States X X Italy 1944–4720 U.S.S.R. X X X Bulgaria X 1944–4821 Great Britain, X X X W. Germany 1944–49

United States, X XFrance X X X

22 U.S.S.R. X X X Poland 1944–4823 U.S.S.R. X X X Romania 1944–4824 U.S.S.R. X X Albania 1944–4625 U.S.S.R. X X X E. Germany 1945–4926 U.S.S.R. X X X Yugoslavia X 1945 X27 U.S.S.R. X X X Czechoslo. 194528 U.S.S.R. X X X Hungary 1945–4729 United States X X Japan 1945–5230 U.S.S.R. X X X Iran X 1945–4631 U.S.S.R. X X Austria 194532 Western Allies X X X Denmark 1945 X33 Western Allies X X X Belgium 194534 Western Allies X X X Netherlands 194535 Western Allies X X X Norway 194536 Western Allies X X X Luxembourg 194537 Syria X X Lebanon X 194938 United States et al. X South Korea 1950–5339 China, X X South Korea 1950–53 X

U.S.S.R. X X X South Korea 1950–53

(continued)


TABLE 3. continued

Case PromoterGreat

Power?Close



Counter-promotion?

40 U.S.S.R. X X X E. Germany X 195341 U.S.S.R. X X X Hungary X 195642 United States X Lebanon X 195843 Egypt X X North Yemen X 1962–6744 N. Vietnam X X Laos X 1964–7345 United States, Laos X 1964–74 X

Thailand X46 France X Gabon X 196447 United States, X S. Vietnam X 1965–73

S. Korea, XThailand, X XPhilippines, X XAustralia,New Zealand

48 United States X X Dom. Rep. X 1965–6649 U.S.S.R., X X X Czechoslo. X 1968

Poland, X XHungary, X XBulgaria, X XE. Germany X X

50 South Yemen X X Oman X 1968–7551 Great Britain, X Oman X 1968–75 X

Iran,Jordan

52 France X Chad X 1969–7153 N. Vietnam X Cambodia X 1970–7354 United States, X Cambodia X 1970–73 X

S. Vietnam X55 Cuba X Angola X 1975–9156 South Africa X Angola X 1975–88 X57 Syria X Lebanon X 1976–58 Tanzania X X Uganda 197959 U.S.S.R. X X X Afghanistan X 1979–8960 Iraq X X Iran 1980–9061 Iran X X Iraq 1980–9062 Israel Lebanon X 1982–8563 United States X X X Grenada X 198364 United States X X Panama X 198965 United States et al. X Somalia X 1993–9466 United States X X X Haiti X 199467 United States, X X Bosnia-Herz. X 1995–

Great Britain, XFrance X

68 Nigeria X Sierra Leone X 199769 United States, X X Yugoslavia X 1999–

Great Britain, X (Kosovo)France, XCanada et al.

Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2000; Holsti, 1991; Kohn, 1999; Krasner, 1999;Lemkin, 1944; Leurdijk, 1986; and Luard, 1986.


Patterns in the Data

Three Clusters of Institutional Promotion

It is clear that the frequency of forcible institutional promotion fluctuates widelyover time. Part of the variation coincides with changes in the numbers of states.Decolonization following World War II increased the units in the internationalsystem, and we would expect institutional promotions to increase accordingly. Yetmuch of the variation holds even when the number of states is held constant.Although the number of states did not change in 1648, the number of promotionsbetween 1600 and 1649 was far greater than that between 1650 and 1699.Furthermore, when Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 he reducedthe number of states in the system (namely, in Europe and the New World) toapproximately 40, and yet the incidence of promotion remained high. Promotionsdecreased markedly after 1849, and yet the number of states did not shrink untilItalian and German unification in the 1860s and 1870s.

Measured in raw numbers, the great majority of cases take place in one of threehistorical clusters. The first cluster occurs between roughly 1580 and 1650; thesecond, between 1790 and 1850; the third, between 1910 and the present. Duringother periods, forcible institutional promotion was rare. Figure 1 presents theseclusters by grouping interventions according to decade. Promotions that straddledtwo or more clusters are included in each decade in which they continued. The thirdcluster, still under way albeit at reduced intensity, is longer than the previous two.

FIGURE 1. Foreign Impositions of Domestic Institutions, 1550–1999


A number of cases, particularly in the first and third clusters of cases (roughly the1620s and 1940s), are counter-impositions, namely, cases in which one stateintervened in a target to counteract a previous attempted or completed promotion bya third state. Most of these interventions likely would not have occurred without theinitial promotion. (The precise number cannot be demonstrated, inasmuch as whenthe target was undergoing a civil war the second foreign promoter may haveintervened in any case.) Although counter-impositions are theoretically significant,demonstrating that counter-promoters care about others states’ domestic institutions,they inflate the number of impositions. Counter-impositions are indicated in the lastcolumn in the tables. (Note that, under the coding rules, interventions intended tocounter a state’s efforts to annex a target, such as the U.S.-led intervention in SouthVietnam, are not counted as counter-interventions.) Figure 2 does not includecounter-impositions.

Not Only Democracies

The tables show clearly that it is not only liberal democracies that promote their owninstitutions in other states. In the twentieth century, communist, fascist, andtheocratic-Islamic states each engaged in the practice. In the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, monarchies, republics, and dictatorships (namely, NapoleonicFrance) promoted institutions by force. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,monarchies (here including all principalities) were the most powerful political units,and they imposed institutions freely.

FIGURE 2. Foreign Impositions of Domestic Institutions 1555–1999 (excludingcounter-impositions)


Repeat Offenders

Even so, the set of states that uses force to promote institutions is no random sample.The same states tend to engage in the practice time and again in a given period.Table 1 shows that six states (Spain, the Empire, France, England, Sweden, andTransylvania) were responsible for 43 of the 66 promotions. One or more of threestates (France, Austria, and Prussia) initiated or were included in 51 of the 60promotions (Table 2); as already noted, France alone accounts for 33 cases. Table3 shows that the United States, the Soviet Union, or Germany promoted in 49 of 67cases.

Great-Power Promoters

Not only is a disproportionate amount of promoting done by a few states, mostpromoting states are great powers. Those that are not tend to be regional powers.From 1555 through 1648, Spain was Europe’s leading military power; it forciblypromoted institutions ten times. The Holy Roman Emperor, the other Habsburgpower, did so in nine cases. France, which regained its status at or near the top ofEurope after its civil wars ended in 1598, forcibly promoted institutions six times.42

England, a minor power until the late 1580s, at which time it joined the greatpowers, did so in eleven cases.43

Table 2 (1701–1900) shows that France was promoter in 34 of the 62 cases. Inmost years prior to 1815, France was Europe’s leading power; between 1799 and1814, when 17 of its promotions took place, it bade fair to conquer Europe. Most ofthe remaining promotions in this period were carried out by Prussia, Russia, Austria,and Britain, the other four great powers. Occasionally a minor Iberian or Italian statewould participate in a forcible promotion as an accomplice to a great power.

In the period covered by Table 3 (1901–today), great powers also participated ina majority of the 71 impositions. The United States has been a great powerthroughout the period and imposed institutions in 25 cases. The Soviet Union, agreat power from 1917 until its disintegration in 1991, imposed institutions in 20cases. Germany, a great power until 1945, imposed institutions in six cases (plus thetwo Balkan cases in the 1990s). Great Britain and France, great powers until the1940s and arguably to the present day, each imposed institutions in twelve cases. Incontrast to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, minor states such asNorth Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, and Syria imposed institutions by themselves(although with Soviet support in the case of the first three).

In all three periods, then, the most powerful states were responsible for the greatmajority of forcible institutional promotion. A related point is that imposing states

42. France’s promotions during this period may be undercounted. I only included interventions inwhich the evidence of intent to modify or preserve the target’s institutions was clear. In many Frenchmilitary actions in Africa the evidence of intent was inconclusive.

43. Here great power status is based on statistics on military manpower in Kennedy 1987, 56.


tend to be much stronger militarily than target states.44 This is especially true duringthe second and third waves of institutional imposition. France was the predominantintervenor between 1790 and 1815, a period when it was Europe’s most powerfulstate. During the Concert of Europe period, when the five powers were roughlyequal, each invariably promoted institutions only in much weaker states. In thetwentieth century, almost all imposers targeted weaker states.

Measuring power differentials during the first period is difficult, although in manycases, such as when the emperor, Spain, France, or the confessional leaguesintervened in a small German state, it is beyond doubt that imposer was morepowerful than target. In a few cases it is probable that the target had more aggregatepower than the imposer did, for example, when in 1562–63 England’s Elizabeth Isent troops to aid the Huguenots in the French civil war. What made France weakat this time was that same civil war. That point leads to the next general finding:namely, that targets are usually experiencing civil unrest.

Target Instability

In at least 22 cases shown in Table 1, intervention was preceded by an uprising,revolution, civil war, or coup d’etat in the target.45 England and France intervenedin Scotland in 1559 after the heavily Calvinistic lower Scots nobility declared aProtestant kingdom.46 Spain and England intervened in the French and Dutch civilwars. In Donauworth, a free town near Bavaria, the emperor and Bavaria invadedafter Catholics began rioting against the Protestant town council.47 During theThirty Years’ War, targets were almost always internally divided between Catholicsand Protestants, often violently so. Table 2 shows that 27 cases were preceded bycivil unrest in the targets. Strikingly, between 1815 and 1849, all 20 impositionswere carried out following rebellions in the target states.

Table 3 shows that 41 of the targets were experiencing civil strife. Early in thetwentieth century, targets in Latin America and Europe were all torn by domesticwars or insurrections. During the Cold War, following an insurrection in EastGermany, the Soviets invaded. In most southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, African,and Latin American cases, targets were undergoing civil wars (often exacerbated byoutside financial and logistical support).

By no means did all forcible institutional promotions follow civil unrest orreforms in the target. Republican and Napoleonic France usually invaded states withno violent internal conflict. Nazi Germany’s forcible promotions were similar, aswere most of those of the Soviet Union and United States in the 1940s. The Soviets

44. Werner 1996 finds that regime imposition increases with the power differential between victor andvanquished.

45. Civil unrest may be underreported in Table 1. In general, all of central Europe was in politicalferment between 1618 and 1648, but only when the evidence was clear did I record a target as undergoingpolitical unrest immediately before an intervention.

46. Sutherland 1984, 74–80.47. Maland 1980, 15.


invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia after reformers peacefully began alteringinstitutions. Even in a majority of these cases, however, target states had a cohort ofelites who desired the institutions that the intervenor was imposing.

When Security Is Scarce

The incidence of institutional imposition rises steeply during periods of hegemonicstruggle, either hot or cold wars. Figure 1 shows that three spikes come in the ThirtyYears’ War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the World War IIand early Cold War (the last is not a spike in Figure 2, which excludes counter-impositions); in each of these, forcible institutional promotion exceeded ten casesper decade. The middle and late Cold War featured five or more cases per decade.Periods of relative international security, such as 1815–1914, feature moderate orlow amounts of institutional imposition.

The correlation with high systemic insecurity is far from perfect. Most notably,the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when Louis XIV’s bid formastery of Europe was opposed by a coalition of states, featured very littleinstitutional imposition. Furthermore, the Concert of Europe period (1815–49) andpost-Cold War period (1991–today) feature moderate amounts of imposition eventhough states were relatively secure.

In Times of Ideological Ferment

The three clusters of institutional imposition that I have identified correspondroughly with periods of history generally thought to be ideologically charged.Portions of the states system were afflicted with transnational ideological struggles,or contests that (1) concerned domestic societal order and (2) spanned two or morestates. The first cluster corresponds to the Counter-Reformation (early sixteenththrough mid-seventeenth century), when Western and Central Europe were con-sumed with the question of which form of Christianity was true and ought to beestablished by rulers. After the Peace of Westphalia, Catholic-Protestant strugglescontinued, but the link between religion and politics was attenuated. The secondcluster corresponds to the French Revolution and reactions to it (1789–1849), inwhich constitutionalism and republicanism erupted to challenge absolute monarchyand lingering feudalism. Across states in Europe and the New World, societies werepreoccupied with whether legitimism, republicanism, or the “third way” of consti-tutional monarchy was the best regime. The failure of the European revolutions of1848–49 brought on a period of ideological calm, as revolution was supplanted bygradual reform in most Western countries.

The third cluster corresponds roughly to the ideological contests of the twentiethcentury. These were initiated by the Bolshevik coup d’etat in Russia in 1917, whichgenerated anti-communism in the liberal democracies and later fascism in Italy,Germany, other parts of Europe, and Japan. After fascism’s defeat in 1945, the ColdWar continued the struggle between communism and liberal democracy, which


ended in the victory of the latter in the 1980s. As Francis Fukuyama has famouslydeclared, liberal democracy at present faces no system-wide competitor, and thus welabel this period one of low ideological tension.48 Yet, ideological strugglescontinue on a regional scale, as actors in many regions resist, often violently, liberalsecularism and market capitalism.

In Their Own Backyards

In Table 1, we see that 32 out of 67 promotions were in states either bordering thepromoter or across a narrow body of water from it; in Table 2, 27 out of 60; in Table3, 28 out of 60. Sweden promoted Protestantism in German lands across the BalticSea (see Table 1). England or Great Britain imposed institutions on France (Tables1-3) and the Low Countries (Tables 1 and 3). The United States forcibly promotedinstitutions on Caribbean islands four times (see Table 3). Many more promotionswere carried out in states in the promoter’s general region.

Distant impositions are relatively rare. They include Spain and the Papal States inIreland in 1600–01; England and Spain in the Palatinate in 1620 and 1621; andSweden’s promotions in southern Germany in the 1630s (all shown in Table 1).Table 2 shows distant promotions by France and Turkey in Poland 1768–72; Prussiain the Low Countries in the late 1780s; Austria, Prussia, and Russia in France, andvice versa, through most of the 1790-1814 period; Britain in Naples in 1799; Francein Poland in 1807; Britain in Sicily in 1811; Britain in Portugal in 1826, 1834, and1846–47; and France in Mexico 1862–67. Distant promotions shown in Table 3include the Allies in Russia 1918–22; France in Hungary in 1919; Germany and theSoviet Union in Spain in 1936–39; Britain in Greece in 1944–45; the various U.S.promotions of liberal democracy in Europe and Japan after the World War II; U.S.promotion of anticommunist authoritarianism in South Korea, South Vietnam, Laos,and Cambodia in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; France in Gabon in 1964; Britain inOman in 1968–75; Cuba in Angola from 1975 to 1991; and the United States andothers in Somalia 1993–94, Bosnia-Herzegovina 1995–present, and Yugoslavia(Kosovo) 1999–present.

Strategic Targets

Across time, many targets stand out as having geopolitical consequence. Somecoincide with vital military, naval, or trading routes. Valtellina, a valley of the AddaRiver in Lombardy (now Italy) that was a target several times during the ThirtyYears’ War, was of consequence to Spain, France, and the emperor because itprovided an east-west passage through the Alps. Britain and France intervened inSpain in the Concert of Europe period, as did Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Unionin the late 1930s; that target’s significance to Mediterranean traffic is obvious.

48. Fukuyama 1992.


Targets also hold strategic importance because of their natural resources. A numberof twentieth-century impositions were carried out in the oil-rich Middle East. Oneshould note too that the strategic importance variable has an endogeneity problem:aside from its physical characteristics, state B may acquire strategic importance forstate A when A’s rival state C treats B as if it already has such importance.49 Thusthe aggregate data may not capture the strategic importance of many targets. Ofcourse, the strong association, identified above, between the propinquity of twostates and the probability that one will promote institutions in the other, may also beattributed to strategic interest.

In Their Own Image

In most cases, intervening states promote their own institutions.50 In the first cluster,Catholic states generally sought to establish Catholicism, Protestant states Protes-tantism. France was officially Catholic but tolerated Protestants under the Edict ofNantes (in effect from 1598 to 1685); in Valtellina it promoted toleration.51 In theseventeenth century, absolute monarchies occasionally promoted their institutionsagainst oligarchy and republicanism; then Republican France imposed republican-ism upon small border states, and the monarchies at war with France tried tore-establish monarchy there. Napoleon imposed his legal code and other rational-izing institutions. Following his defeat, absolute monarchies imposed their institu-tions on Italy and Germany, while Britain and France (when the latter wasconstitutional) imposed constitutional monarchy. In the twentieth century, commu-nist states generally promoted Marxist-Leninist institutions; fascist states, fascistinstitutions; and the United States and other liberal democracies imposed theirinstitutions more often than not.

Exceptions do occur, however. France intervened on behalf of the Calvinist Dutchin the late sixteenth century. In Liege in 1790, Prussia intervened ostensibly torestore the prince-bishop, but in the end preserved the liberal revolution.52 Follow-ing Napoleon’s defeat, the legitimist monarchies joined constitutional Britain insetting up a constitutional monarchy in France.53 In South Korea, South Vietnam,the Dominican Republic, and Cambodia, the United States forcibly promotedauthoritarian institutions. (As is well known, the United States used various othermeans to support anti-communist dictators in many other states during the ColdWar.)

49. Schelling 1966, chap. 2.50. This finding is compatible with Werner’s finding (1996) that the incidence of postwar regime

imposition increases with the distance between the institutions of the victor and the vanquished.51. Maland 1980, 107.52. Schroeder 1994, 62.53. Broers 1996a, 13.


What Causes Institutional Imposition?

Table 4 presents the patterns in the data that illuminate the causes of forcibleinstitutional promotion I have identified. Certain of these patterns will come as nosurprise to students of international politics. The three historical clusters of violentinstitutional promotion (pattern1), for example, will be familiar to those who knowtheir diplomatic history, and such history informs the realism of such scholars asAron, Hoffmann, and Kissinger. Yet, some of the patterns are inconsistent with orat least problematic for various explanations of U.S. democracy promotion and ofinternational relations in general.

Pattern 2 suggests a serious limitation of neo-Marxist explanations of U.S.democracy promotion. Such explanations have little or nothing to say about the vastmajority of institutional promotion in the past 450 years, but must rather treat U.S.(or democratic-capitalist) foreign policy as unique. Before declaring any country’spolicies unique, however, we must try to subsume such policies under a moregeneral phenomenon involving non-democratic, non-capitalist states. Pattern 2 alsomay be inconsistent with a finding of Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson54 thatdemocracies are more likely than dictatorships or monarchies to impose newinstitutions upon a defeated enemy. My finding would be consistent with theirs onlyif democracies were significantly less likely than dictatorships or monarchies to bewar victors. I do not control for the total number of war victories by each regimetype, but it is worth noting that a scholarly consensus has emerged recently thatdemocracies are as likely as other regime types to be involved in wars, and morelikely to win the wars they fight.55 Presumably, their finding differs in part becausetheir data begin only in 1816 and they use a higher threshold for violence. Myfinding calls into question their claim that democratic governments are under greaterdomestic pressure than non-democratic ones to impose institutions. Either non-democratic states are likewise under such domestic pressure; external pressure ispartly responsible for institutional promotion, a possibility explored below; or both.

Patterns 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9 all suggest that a purely normative explanation ofinstitutional promotion is inadequate. Norms—prevailing notions of right andwrong—are frequently cited in public and scholarly debates as causes of interven-tion to promote democracy for example. Political and journalistic proponents usemoral language to try to compel such interventions, while critics deride the policiesas moralistic. Many scholarly treatments of U.S. foreign policy also at leastemphasize a normative impetus, even if they recognize that other variables areconsequential.56 The data show that the incidence of forcible institutional promotionvaries with several familiar material factors. Relative power influences which stateswill do the promoting (pattern 4). States are likely to become targets whenundergoing civil unrest (pattern 5), which implies that promoting states act when the

54. Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1996.55. Lake 1992.56. Cf. Smith 1994; Doyle 1983; Owen 1997; and McDougall 1997.


marginal utility from a “unit” of force is highest: the less civil unrest occurring ina potential target, the greater the amount of force needed to bring about the changedesired by the potential promoter. States are especially likely to promote institutionsduring hot or cold wars (pattern 6), suggesting that they take the security environ-ment into account. States are especially likely to promote institutions in neighboringstates (pattern 8), which suggests that they are constrained by material costs andbenefits: neighbors tend to be cheaper targets, and implicate a promoter’s intereststo a greater degree, than distant states. The latter also is true of states with strategicvalue (pattern 9). Although morality may motivate some interventions, in most casesit takes more than moral intentions to bring about forcible institutional promotion.

An Anomaly for Structural Realism

Because it ignores domestic institutions, structural realism is inadequate to explainforeign institutional imposition. Even a realism that takes account of the conse-quences of internal institutions for state power cannot account for the phenomenon.States might promote centralizing institutions to strengthen allies, but such promo-tions are not explained by structural realism, inasmuch as they contradict thetheory’s central claim that states seek relative gains in an anarchical world. Whywould a rational state spend valuable resources strengthening an ally, knowing thatthe ally might become its enemy if the distribution of power in the internationalsystem were to change?57

Being unable to account for this type of policy, structural-realist theory mustattribute it to domestic politics—for example, ideological crusading or parochialinterests. But the theory asserts that domestic politics affects a state’s foreign policy

57. Cf. Grieco 1990.

TABLE 4. Patterns in the data

1. Institutional imposition has occurred in the modern states system in three clusters: 1600–48;1790–1849; and 1918–today.

2. Monarchies, republics, fascist states, communist states, liberal democracies, and theocracies allpromote domestic institutions.

3. In all periods a few states do a majority of the promoting (that is, a few states do it repeatedly).4. Promoters strongly tend to be great powers.5. Targets tend to be undergoing civil unrest.6. Promotion correlates to scarcity of international security.7. Promotion correlates to transnational ideological strife.8. In the great majority of cases, the target is located near the promoting state; in a majority of

these cases promoter and target share a border.9. Many targets are of objective strategic value.

10. In the great majority of cases, the intervening state promotes its own institutions in the target.


in inverse proportion to the amount of security competition it faces.58 The lesssecure a state, the less freedom it has to indulge domestic actors who want it tointervene in other states on behalf of ideology or commerce. If that were so, theninstitutional promotion would be least common during major wars. The data revealthe opposite: the highest incidence of forcible institutional promotion takes placeduring such wars, when security is at a premium. Pattern 3 (see Table 4) makes theanomaly even more severe: the same states repeatedly promote institutions, includ-ing during major wars (Tables 1–3), suggesting that the international systemrewards rather than punishes them for the practice when security competition isacute. The data thus present a puzzle: how can one state increase its power orsecurity by promoting particular institutions in another state?

The Interaction of Power and Ideology

As patterns 6 and 7 reflect (see Table 4), the highest incidence of forcibleinstitutional promotion occurs when international insecurity and transnational ideo-logical tensions are highest. Figure 1 shows that 140 of the 198 cases came duringthe Thirty Years’ War, wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the WorldWar II and Cold War, when values were high for both the insecurity and ideologicalvariables. High transnational ideological tension coincident with low to moderateinsecurity is associated with moderate amounts of promotion: the 1600–1619 and1820–49 periods featured between five and ten per decade. High insecurity in theabsence of ideological tension is not associated with forcible institutional promo-tion: the wars of Louis XIV (late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries)featured little of it. Finally, the current period (1991–today) has seen a moderateamount of promotion even though insecurity and ideological tension are relativelylow.

Forcible institutional promotion does not correlate perfectly with any of thesevariables. It evidently has multiple causes, a full consideration of which is beyondthe scope of this article. Because nearly three-quarters of the cases are associatedwith high insecurity and ideological strife, however, and because the associationwith the former variable is anomalous for structural realism, I now consider thecausal relations among insecurity, ideology, and high amounts of promotion.

Transnational ideological tension is tension among two or more ideologicalmovements that cross state boundaries.59 Adherents of one ideology feel a degree ofsolidarity with one another regardless of nationality. Ideologues also feel solidaritywith states ruled by their particular ideology. During the Counter-Reformation,devout Catholics tended to look to Spain, the Empire, and Bavaria for leadership;Protestants looked to England, Sweden, Denmark, and the Palatinate.60 In the late

58. See Krasner 1978; Waltz 1979; and Walt 1987.59. For extended treatment of the effects of such movements on international politics, see the essays

in Skidmore 1997; see also Owen 2001/2002.60. Luard 1986, 38.


eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, actors who wanted to apply Enlighten-ment rationality to politics tended to look to France; conservatives who did not,looked to Austria, Russia, and Prussia. In the twentieth century, communists feltvarying degrees of solidarity with the Soviet Union, fascists with Hitler’s Germanyand Mussolini’s Italy, and liberal democrats with the United States. It follows thatif one of these ideologically exemplary states wanted to increase its influence overa country, it could do so by promoting conditions under which ideologues sympa-thetic to it would rule that country. One such condition is that the target country havethe institutions prescribed by the ideology.61 It stands to reason, then, that state A,an ideological exemplar, may increase its power by promoting in state B whateverinstitutions are likely to place and keep in power ideologues who desire B to haveclose relations with A.62 Consistent with this hypothesis are the findings of severalrecent studies that allies tend to have similar domestic regimes.63 Most to the point,Siverson and Starr have found that domestic regime changes are often followed byalliance changes. The effect is enhanced when foreigners impose the change inregime.64

As Stanley Hoffmann writes, “If one wants an actor to behave in a certain wayon the world stage, what better method is there than to see to it that it has the ‘right’kind of government?”65 The promotion of domestic institutions, then, can alter thebalance of power by extending promoting states’ influence. But here the familiarlogic of the security dilemma may sometimes apply. In extending its power bypromoting institutions in state B, state A may make state C feel less secure, leadingC to promote institutions in state D so as to extend its own power, and so on. Asecurity dilemma may also face ideologues across states. By helping one faction instate B to win, state A weakens the rival ideology within other states as well, causingits adherents to feel more threatened and thereby heightening transnational ideo-logical tension. The promotion-insecurity and promotion-ideological tension rela-tions are recursive: domestic institutional promotion is both cause and consequenceof insecurity and ideological tension. This explains the spikes in the data and thedozens of counter-promotions during major international conflicts.

The United States, Italy, and the Soviet Union, 1943–49

As early as July 1943, Franklin Roosevelt announced that, following the defeat offascism, the Italian people would be free to set up their own democratic institu-tions.66 Following the fall of Mussolini, the U.S. government used the leverageafforded by its occupying troops to promote Italian democracy in several stages. It

61. Cf. Kaplan 1964.62. Cf. Krasner 1999, 154.63. See fn. 14.64. Siverson and Starr 1994.65. Hoffmann 1984, 11.66. Miller 1986, 131–32.


supported the pluralistic provisional post-fascist governments. It pressured theprovisional government in 1946 to reject the communist-socialist plan for anall-powerful, popularly elected costituente that would set up a postwar regime, andto accept instead a plan that made a radical regime much less probable: localgovernments would be elected first, making centralization more difficult; a refer-endum on whether Italy would retain the monarchy would follow, simultaneouslywith costituente elections that would write the constitution; then finally nationalelections would be held.67 By 1947 a liberal-democratic constitution was in place.In the crucial national election of April 1948, the United States acted covertly tolengthen the odds of victory for the communists and socialists, who were lesscommitted to the new constitution. Finally, Washington offered extensive economicaid to Italy, adding credibility to the U.S.-supported regime.

U.S. officials clearly believed that liberal democracy was the best form ofgovernment for Italy, but they were evidently motivated by a desire to heighten U.S.national security. Both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations felt significantpressure from the rising Soviet threat. Virtually all actors involved—U.S., Italian,and Soviet—understood that Italy’s foreign alignment was at stake in the contestover its domestic political structures. As Leffler and Painter write of Europe ingeneral:

U.S. policymakers worried that wherever and however Communist groupsattained power they would pursue policies that served the interests of the SovietUnion. The potential international impact of internal political struggles in-vested the latter with strategic significance and embroiled the United States andthe Soviet Union in the internal affairs of other nations.68

A liberal-democratic Italy was more likely to become a U.S. ally and economicpartner, thereby enhancing American power and security.

The Roosevelt and Truman administrations were presented with incentives topromote liberal-democratic institutions in Italy by the conditions within Italy itself.A transnational struggle raged in Europe between state socialism and its enemies,including constitutional monarchy and liberal republicanism. In Italy, the commu-nist and socialist parties had huge followings, especially in the industrial north. Bothparties were openly pro-Soviet and anti-American. Both called for a rejection ofMarshall aid and NATO membership. Both defended Stalin’s domestic and foreignpolicies, including even the communist Prague coup of 1948.69 The communists’leader, Palmiro Togliatti, had just returned from twenty years’ exile in SovietRussia. Meanwhile, the largest party was the Christian Democratic party, whichcomprised not only democrats but also monarchists who, for religious and culturalreasons, mistrusted American-style institutions.70 In spite of that mistrust, Christian

67. Ibid., 155–58.68. Leffler and Painter 1994, 7.69. Ledeen 1987, 29–49.70. Sassoon 1995, 194–97.


Democrats greatly preferred the United States to the Soviet Union; in the pivotalApril 1948 election, the Catholic Church presented the contest as “Christ versuscommunism.”71

It was imperative that Washington keep the center-right in and the left out. A1945 State Department memorandum, approved by Truman, stated Washington’sgoals for Italy:

Our objective is to strengthen Italy economically and politically so that trulydemocratic elements of the country can withstand the forces that threaten tosweep them into a new totalitarianism. Italian sympathies naturally andtraditionally lie with the western democracies, and, with proper support fromus, Italy would tend to become a factor for stability in Europe. The time is nowripe when we should initiate action to raise Italian morale, make a stablerepresentative government possible, and permit Italy to become a responsibleparticipant in international affairs.72

For the Truman administration, a democratic Italy would ipso facto be pro-Western,a stabilizing force in Europe, and a status quo state.

Although in principle the Italian left could have gained power through democraticelections—and such was the strategy of its theoretician Antonio Gramsci73—itssupport of the Soviet Union cast into doubt its own commitment to democracy andthus its legitimacy. Intentionally or not, Washington impaled the Italian left on thehorns of a dilemma. The problem was evident in the 1948 elections, which theChristian Democrats won with 48.5 percent of the vote (compared to 31 percent forthe communist-socialist Popular Front).74 The election took place two months afterthe Prague coup. Communism’s methods were the central issue in the campaign.75

As Sassoon writes:

The Italian communists could not remain neutral between East and West. Liketheir comrades in the rest of western Europe, they lived through the beginningof the Cold War as something imposed upon them from the outside. . . . As aminority force they defended stubbornly and consistently all the civil rightswhich western democracy afforded them; as communists they defended equallystubbornly all the infringements of these rights in the eastern “people’sdemocracies.” Seldom had a political force found itself so entangled in such aschizophrenic predicament.

They could not remain socialist or communist without identifying with thegenerally acknowledged Soviet model of communism. They could not becomecredible as democrats without disowning that model.76 Washington certainly pres-

71. Miller 1986, 243–47.72. Warner 1972, 47–48.73. Urban 1986.74. Pridham 1988, 42, 52–53.75. Miller 1986, 147–50.76. Sassoon 1995, 198.


sured the Christian Democrats to keep pro-Soviet parties out of power. But the taskwas made easier by the liberal-democratic regime it had helped install in 1946–47.The socialists did not enter an Italian government until 1963, after they had brokenwith the Soviet Union over the 1956 invasion of Hungary and embraced Italy’smembership in NATO.77

Two points must be stressed in conclusion. First, even as U.S. policymakers wereextending their country’s influence at Soviet expense, Stalin was spreading Sovietinfluence in Eastern Europe and elsewhere by imposing communism. Each super-power, then, in considering whether to promote domestic institutions, faced a classicsecurity dilemma: such promotions would degrade the adversary’s security and giveit a powerful incentive to engage in its own promotions. (Recent evidence suggeststhat Stalin would have imposed communism in any case.)78 Second, although theUnited States acted to enhance its security, Italy was no unitary rational actor. Italyjoined the NATO alliance not because the Soviet Union threatened it per se, butbecause the Soviet Union threatened the version of Italy envisaged by the ChristianDemocrats, and the latter (with U.S. help) dominated postwar Italy. For the Italianleft, Moscow was a champion, not a threat. There was no “Italy” apart from aspecific vision of its domestic order.

Other Cases

Similar stories can be told about the forcible promotion of institutions by other statesin other periods. Prima facie, it is difficult to gainsay that in the Thirty Years’ Warthe Holy Roman Emperor sought to restore Catholicism in central Europe to restoreimperial power, and that various Protestant princes wanted the opposite. That theFrench Republicans and Napoleon treated those states on which they imposedinstitutions chiefly as sources of wealth and troops suggests strongly that they werepromoting French institutions for the sake of French power.79 Few would challengethe notion that Soviet, German, and U.S. promotions in times of high insecurity inthe twentieth century were instrumental to the power of the promoters. Each of thesestates used a non-(structural)-realist method to achieve a realist end, and generallysucceeded in doing so. And each thereby typically aggravated the security dilemmaand triggered promotions by other great powers.

Conclusion

For students of international relations, study of the forcible promotion of domesticinstitutions presents an opportunity for a synthesis of insights from realism,

77. Ledeen 1987, 80–83.78. For example, Gaddis 1997.79. See Blanning 1996, 169; and Esdaile 1995, 72.


liberalism, and constructivism. That powerful states promote institutions in weakones affirms Thucydides’ realist dictum that “the strong do what they can and theweak suffer what they must.” Yet, as Thucydides showed, what the strong often dois to alter or preserve the internal institutions of the weak. As liberal IR theory hasalways maintained, domestic politics affects international politics, and not just whenstates are secure enough to indulge the preferences of domestic actors. Under certainconditions, one state’s internal institutions can enhance or degrade another statespower and thereby the international balance of power. Consistent with constructiv-ism, these conditions include the presence of transnational struggles over domesticnorms. When disagreements over the right way to order society are sharp and spanstate boundaries, institutional promotion makes sense and is most likely.

Although this argument emerges from analysis of periods of unusually highforcible institutional promotion, it may also explain cases in other periods. Statesseek power even when secure. Yet, it may not explain many cases during periods ofmore modest amounts of promotion. Structural realism may be correct that, in timesof low insecurity, domestic variables cause forcible institutional promotion. TheConcert of Europe period (1815–49) was a time of relative security among the greatpowers yet high ideological tension throughout Europe and Latin America. Rulersof the legitimist great powers worried (with reason) that, if unchecked, transnationalliberalism would topple the crowned heads of Europe. As mentioned above,Metternich and his Russian and Prussian (and sometimes French) counterparts senttroops to various Italian, German, and Iberian states to overturn liberal revolutions.Also, as noted, the post-Cold War period features moderate institutional promotionyet both low insecurity and low ideological tension. It is plausible that the recentforcible promotions by the United States of liberal democracy in Haiti and theBalkans are caused by ideological and moral pressure from within U.S. society.Americans may not fear for either the physical security of their country or the futureof democracy, but may find that in the so-called unipolar moment their country isable to mold the world into something more in keeping with their liberal norms.Indeed, because most promotions since 1980 have been carried out by the UnitedStates, unipolarity might explain why the third cluster of forcible promotion islasting longer than the first two.

Even so, the nexus of power, domestic politics, and ideology does not evaporatein times of security. Even if the United States is acting from virtuous motives inintervening on behalf of democracy and human rights in the Balkans, the historicalevidence suggests that it is also knowingly or not expanding its influence and henceits power. Certainly the anti-liberal Chinese government and anti-liberal actorswithin Russia and the Muslim world see it that way.80 Not without reason: uponbecoming democratic, most of the former Soviet satellite states of central Europehave sought to join NATO, with three so far having gained membership. The UnitedStates already enjoys an imbalance of power unprecedented in modern history.

80. On China see Shambaugh 1999; on Russia see McFaul 1999.


Democracy promotion, however, can exacerbate that imbalance and aggravate thesecurity dilemma. Although promoting democracy may still be the right policy,those doing the promoting must give power its due.

Appendix on Data Selection

The phenomenon under study is the direct use of force by one state with the object ofconstructing, preserving, or altering one or more political institutions in another state. A stateis a territorial entity enjoying sovereignty. I limit targets to sovereign states because suchcases are most relevant to IR theory. By sovereignty I mean a combination of what Krasner81

calls Westphalian sovereignty and international-legal sovereignty. Westphalian sovereignty is“political organization based on the exclusion of external actors from authority structureswithin a given territory;” and international-legal sovereignty is “mutual recognition, usuallybetween territorial entities that have formal juridical independence.” Excluded from the dataset are not only annexations of territory but also those forms of imperialism wherein a targetentity has some variety of autonomy, such as its own constitution, but is ultimately ruled bythe intervening state, for example, through a viceroy or governor general. Also excluded areattempts to annex a target, such as North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.

In the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg hereditary lands such as Bohemia are not targetswhen the promoter is the empire (that is, the emperor); they are targets, however, for outsidepowers such as Sweden or Transylvania. Other lands in the empire—those not directly ruledby the emperor—are targets for the emperor as well as any non-imperial power. AmongNapoleon’s conquests, those that he ruled directly, such as Flanders, the Balkans, ornorth-central Italy, are excluded; territories ruled by others are included, even thoughNapoleon exerted influence in such areas.82 Territories the Soviet Union annexed, such as theBaltic states, are excluded. Among Hitler’s conquests, those ruled by a military commanderor governor general, such as Poland and Norway, are excluded; those ruled by a sovereigngovernment, such as Vichy France or Denmark (until 1943, when Berlin took direct control),are included. Being militarily occupied per se does not disqualify a state from target status;such occupations are traditionally treated in international law as temporary situations to beresolved at a subsequent peace conference.83

By internal political institution, I mean any norm, or predominant rule, governing therelation of rulers to ruled within a given state’s borders, that is, governing the administrationof the state’s coercive power over its own subjects and their property. Examples includeliberal democracy, state socialism, absolute monarchy, federalism, the Napoleonic Code, andestablished Calvinism. Not included are interventions to replace one ruler or government withanother under the same institutions. Thus wars over monarchical succession do not qualify;neither do U.S. interventions that were intended simply to save or overthrow one leader orfaction, such as in Cuba in 1906–09 or Guatemala in 1954. Interventions in civil wars inwhich no ideological differences among factions are evident are not included as cases. ThusFrench and Libyan interventions in Chad in the 1980s are not included.

81. Krasner 1999.82. Broers 1996b.83. Lemkin 1944, 12–13.


Uses of force must be direct applications of violence, and are thus limited to invasions,sieges, military occupations, naval attacks or blockades, and aerial bombardments by theassets of the intervening state (as distinguished from those of allies or nationals in the targetstate). A state may use any amount of its own forces or mercenaries. I set no threshold fornumbers of troops or battle deaths. Interventions may or may not succeed, so long as theintervenor understood that one object of the intervention was to promote institutions in thetarget.

Concerning the intent of the promoting state, there are two types of cases. In Type I cases,the promoting state seeks to defeat the target state militarily and explicitly states its plan toalter the target’s institutions. Typical examples are the uses of force by the French Republicin the 1790s. In Type II cases, the promoting state seeks to aid one side in a civil war, andamong its reasons is that the side it favors would set up or preserve certain institutions. Atypical example is the intervention by several World War I allies in Russia from 1918 to 1922.When an intervenor favored one side but appeared indifferent or opposed to the institutionsof that side, such as the French intervention on behalf of the Patriots in the United States from1778 to 1783, I do not include the intervention. Motives are of course difficult to assess, butwhen the intervenor’s motive was in doubt, I did not include the intervention.

Not included are implicit or explicit threats to use force, such as military, naval, or aerialexercises. Thus Germany’s 1944 threat to rule Hungary directly unless it began handing Jewsover to the Nazis (thus establishing Nazi-style anti-Semitism) is not included, since theHungarian government complied with the demand. Neither do covert actions such as materialor intelligence support for coups d’etats or revolutions qualify, unless those actions alsoinvolved forcible application of the intervenor’s own military assets.84 A state that sendsmilitary advisors, subsidies, or materiel for use in a target is not applying force directly; thusthe U.S. use of lend-lease prior to its joining the World War II does not count as forcibleregime promotion in Germany and Italy. The main justification for these criteria is ease ofapplication. Doubtless, unexecuted threats, covert actions, subsidies, and other means ofinstitutional promotion would enhance our understanding of institutional promotion. Butidentifying the universe of cases of these events, particularly covert action, is prohibitivelydifficult.85 Looking only at forcible promotions prevents our answering some importantquestions. For example, under what conditions will a government use economic sanctions,international institutions, or covert action, rather than military force, to alter or preserve aforeign country’s internal institutions? This question and others must await further research.

The primary motive of the intervenor need not have been to alter or preserve particularinstitutions in the target; I do not claim that all, or indeed any, of these interventions weremotivated by norms, although neither do I rule that out. The intervenor need only have clearlyintended, for principled or instrumental reasons, to promote particular institutions (its own orotherwise) in the target. Evidence of this intent is found in statements before or during theintervention, in actual behavior following the application of force, or both. Cases in whichmultiple states intervened on the same side are counted once; cases in which two or morestates intervened on opposite sides are counted as two cases.

84. If the general question is, “Why do states promote institutions in other states by whatever means?”then omitting covert actions (as well as economic sanctions, diplomacy, and other methods) biases thesample.

85. Krasner 1999, chaps. 6, 7, analyzes a number of cases in which great powers coerced new statesin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to adopt particular institutions without directly applyingviolence.


Any event may be categorized in several ways. Depending on the purpose of analysis, WorldWar II may be classified as a war, a hegemonic war, a global war, an ideological war, animperialistic war, a moral struggle, or a tragedy. Many of the cases in the data set could be (andhave been) classified as wars, interventions in civil wars, aid to secessionists, or instances ofinformal imperialism. What they have in common are the features described above.

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The Foreign Imposition of Domestic Institutions

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