I pen these lines with pleasure, vindication, and anticipation.
The pleasure is in introducing International Military Alliances,
1648–2008,the inaugural title in the Correlates of War Series.
Douglas Gibler, a resourceful, thorough, and capable scholar,
has devoted a significant share of his early career to producing
this valuable opus, which carries us as far back as the Treaty of
Westphalia in investigating the complex and elusive link
between alliances and war.
When my students and I launched the Correlates of War
project, there was no question that a long historical sweep
would be essential. It was at the height of the Cold War. We had
survived the Cuban missile crisis; the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy was just ahead; and I was dissatisfied with the
way in which the Soviet-Western rivalry was being interpreted
on both sides of the iron curtain. The policy analysts and schol-
ars were firmly attached to their respective scenarios; the histo-
rians and political scientists were largely content to draw their
lessons of history from the recent past, and few of us were
embarrassed to trot out the Munich crisis of 1939 and the 1941
attack on Pearl Harbor as the bellwether events of our age. We
clearly needed to take a longer view. Although I was quite will-
ing to go back to 1815 and the Congress of Vienna, some
thought that the nineteenth century offered little of value in
helping us understand the twentieth century: it was not rele-
vant; it was a different world.
But some—I think immediately of Jack Levy and Claudio
Cioffi—thought that we needed to go farther back in interna-
tional history. It is to Doug Gibler’s credit, and that of his men-
tor, John Vasquez, that he took up the challenge. The scholarly
inadequacies that had prevailed during the Cold War had been
exacerbated by a limited frame of historical reference. To the
extent that this inaugural study in the Correlates of War series
will lead to an increase in systematic and more scientific
research over a more respectable time horizon—and we may
hope that it will—it stands also to lead to a more nuanced
understanding of world politics during the past two centuries.
Given how badly we have grasped the realities since, let us say,
the guns of August 1914, this longer view should help reduce
unnecessary conflicts in the future, not to mention the ones
that are unfolding in our immediate global environment.
Some may express doubts as to the scientific value of these
volumes. As far back as the Wa g e s o f Wa r,which Melvin Small
and I published in 1972, some of our more enthusiastic quanti-
tative colleagues noted that for research purposes accessing the
ever-expanding sets of data by computer is more efficient than
scanning, copying, or otherwise downloading all these data
matrices from the hard-copy pages of a real book. This is true,
especially since the National Science Foundation has begun to
require that any project it funds be made publicly available in
relatively short order. However, it is one thing to have the num-
bers and quite another to comprehend their significance, such
as the theoretical premises behind the data acquisition, the rea-
soning that justifies the data populations and samples, and per-
haps the coding rules themselves. With International Military
Alliancesand the large number of data sets now available
through the Correlates of War team at Penn State and other
universities, the user of such data is no longer “flying blind” or,
shall we say, need not do so. An increasingly large fraction of
data sets are described and justified in journal articles and data
descriptions, and that is as it should be.
As a result, we can expect less sheer number crunching and a
healthy increase in that scientifically desirable combination of
theoretical awareness and sophisticated statistical analysis.
International Military Allianceswill surely accelerate that trend,
and I commend it with pleasure and confidence.
—J. David Singer
Correlates of War , founderxlviiForeword