International Conflict

One of the great debates in the study of international conflict involves the relation between the polarization of an international system and the outbreak of war. In its simplest form, this debate centres on whether "bipolarity" or "multipolarity" is more likely to lead to war. This paper analyzes these concepts with examples from World War I and the Korean War. More specifically, this paper will seek to answer the question as to why the United States waited three years in a mulitpolar world to go to war (World War One), and only 2 days in a bipolar world (Korean War). I will first provide an overview of polarity in the international system, an overview of both wars, and finally analyze both wars in relation to polarity and the United State's entry into each war. This paper does not so much concern itself with the details of each of the wars as so much as the overall analysis of each war. (D'Anieri 15-20)

Waltz counters with the thesis that bipolarity is more stable than multipolarity. Selecting the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union as a bipolar system, he argues that the second-strike capabilities and militarily dominant position of the two superpowers (1) deterred any possible attack the one might launch on the other, and (2) allowed each to control extremists in their own camps (as, for example, the United States did against Britain and France when they seized the Suez Canal in 1956). The result of these two restraints was a relatively peaceful Cold War era despite high tensions. Waltz also addresses the matter of divided attention, but argues that as the number of poles increase, divided attention breed miscalculation and thereby increases the probability of war. With the definitions of polarity explained, we will now go into brief overviews of each of the wars. (Azar 14-15)

The First World War was the first war that involved nations spanning more than half the globe. It lasted from 1914 to 1918 and was called The Great War or the war to end all wars until World War II started. Some scholars consider the First World War merely the first phase of a 30-year-long war that spans the time frame of 1914 to 1945. Ostensibly, the triggering event for the war was the death (June 28, 1914) of the heir to the Austrian throne, Francis Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, Bosnia at the hands of a pro-Serbian nationalist assassin (a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip), but the real reasons were far more complex.

The outbreak of the conflict is often attributed to the network of European alliances established over the previous decades - Germany-Austria-Italy vs. France-Russia; Britain and Serbia being aligned with the latter. In fact none of the alliances was activated in the initial outbreak, though Russian general mobilization and Germany's declaration of war against France were motivated by fear of the opposing alliance being brought into play. Britain's declaration of war against Germany (August ...