92 International Relations Theory of War
Points Document of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson; the formation of the
League of Nations; the Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty, which was
signed by Japan, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States in Washing-
ton in February 1922 and limited the construction of large ships; the Kel-
logg-Briand Pact of 1928, which legally restricted war as a tool of foreign
policy; the Four Power Treaty, which called on Japan, France, Britain, and
the United States not to attack each other’s colonies; and the Nine Power
Treaty, which imposed restrictions on the major powers against occupying
additional territories in China. Despite these actions and arrangements,
the liberal idealist concept failed and did not prevent new hostility among
the major powers. Two decades later, another global war broke out, the
Second World War, which I discuss extensively below.
The Second World WarThe Second World War was of a global scale. It confronted a fascist coali-
tion that was aspiring for global supremacy—the axis powers of Germany,
Japan, and Italy—against a broad alliance of four great powers, which
was unlikely given their competing ideologies—the Soviet Union’s com-
munism and the democratic capitalism of Britain, France, and the United
States. The allies achieved success after six hard years of fighting whose
cost was enormous and that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people
around the world.
In international relations research, there is a prevailing belief that sys-
temic constraints and pressures played an important function in the out-
break of the First World War, whereas systemic factors are not associated
with the outbreak of the Second World War. Schweller argues that fac-
tors at the system level played an important function in the outbreak of
the Second World War as well. Unlike the argument of a few researchers
that the system in 1938 was multipolar,^82 Schweller argues that the system
in that period was tripolar. He stated that the tripolar structure explains
much of the allegiance models and foreign policy strategies of the great
powers before and during the war.^83
Some researchers have pointed at psychological forces that in their view
led to the outbreak of the war. Van Evera argues that those forces included
the dominance of military propaganda in civil discourse, which prepared
the world for war, the enormous wave of ultranationalism that engulfed
Europe, and the collapse of democratic regimes.^84
A number of factors rekindled the German aspirations for hegemony.
Domestically, German nationalism increased latent irredentism—an aspi-
ration to annex homeland territories—and justified the expansion of Ger-
many’s borders to restore provinces that it had previously lost to other
countries in wars and in order to absorb Germans who were living in
Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The growth of fascism drove the
renewed imperial effort. This set of beliefs glorified the “common will” of