International Military Alliances, 1648-2008 - Douglas M. Gibler

The Changing Nature of Military Alliances

from the early days of the Westphalian system to the Concert of
Europe and Bismarck’s system. But these regional trends
demonstrate clearly that alliance practices, including bilateral
alliance treaties and large multilateral alliance organizations,
have spread around the globe. As alliance treaties are now a
commonly used tool on all the continents, the percentage of the
system in an alliance (Figure 1) has continued to increase.

Changing Purposes of Alliances

One reason alliances have become ubiquitous in the interna-
tional system is their ability to adapt to different situations. Tra-
ditionally used as tools for balancing the capabilities of rival
states, alliances have evolved into tools for conflict management
that serve far-ranging purposes, from controlling insurgencies
to confirming state recognition.
This section focuses on a type of alliance treaty that is com-
mon within the alliance data but is often missed by traditional
theories that focus on power: the territorial settlement treaty.
These treaties have existed for centuries and have had strong
pacific effects on alliance members and their surrounding states
but have been largely ignored by alliance scholars. Many
alliances, however, have evolved to mirror the purposes of the
territorial settlement treaty. Large, regional alliances have
repurposed their institutional structures so that interstate coop-
eration can continue, and this cooperation often involves reso-
lution of border disputes and other territorial issues.

Evolution of Alliance Goals

Alliances have often been used as tools for balancing power, but

alliances have served other purposes as well. As close readers of

the treaties contained in this volume realize, alliances have been

formed to recognize the independence of states, to clear passage

or territory for trade, to put down insurgencies on both land

and sea, to create regional organizations, and even to exchange

or secure territories among alliance members. As the introduc-

tion to these volumes pointed out, all of these purposes are at

odds with traditional alliance theory, but it is this last purpose

that is perhaps most unconventional in terms of theories that

emphasize balance of power.

Territorial settlement treaties often attempted to avoid war

by removing the most contentious of issues from the system.

Instead of trying to establish peace through realist prescriptions

of balancing, these alliances resolved disputes by removing the

issue of territory from the agendas of states. The territorial set-

tlement treaty is an alliance that also contains provisions for the

maintenance of the status quo by states in a given region, or it

contains an agreement between the alliance partners to

exchange territories. The alliance signed after the territorial set-

tlement formalizes the states’ commitments to the agreement.

The Quadruple Alliance that established the Congress of

Vienna and the Concert of Europe in 1815 is one of the best

examples of a territorial settlement treaty. In the period imme-

diately following the Napoleonic Wars, the major states had the

choice of creating a traditional balance of power system or of

devising a new international status quo based on universalism

FIGURE 2 State Experience in Alliances, by Region of the World, 1648–2000

Sources: Author’s data; Correlates of War (www.correlatesofwar.org) system membership data were used for total number of states in the system for

each year.

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