CLASIFICACIÓN DE LOS ACEROS

The goal this dissertation intends to achieve is to contribute alternative operational indicators for national interests. This study provides the first latent variable frame- work and empirical evidence showing that a more comprehensive understanding about states’ interests is required. Interest is still a fuzzy concept, and scholars of inter- national relations lack a robust, or at least agreed upon, multidimensional measure in the discipline. Nonetheless, previous scholarly works only focus on a single policy indicator, which might give us a partial vision of states’ interests. Interests may have different dimensions and aspects, and these diversified categories of states’ interests may result in the misleading causal relationship on peace. For instance, it is near universal practice to rely on alliance portfolios alone, regardless of the measure of interest similarity. This is problematic because states do not always show their true preferences through alliance portfolio. Besides, alliances are a relatively rare occur- rence in the contemporary international system. This causes some validity issues when we adopt alliance portfolios to represent states’ interests.

This dissertation adopts a different approach from previous studies. With the confirmatory factor analysis introduced, it helps us solve the complexity by mapping out the structures of interests. The statistical results in Chapter Two offer parsi- monious evidence for the core value of states’ interests. Interests basically contain three types of policy concerns: security, community, and economic domains. These three types of concerns in turn are important determinants covering wide ranges of specific interests for countries in the world. The theoretical and empirical discussions in Chapter Two clearly point out that there is a hierarchical structure within the belief system of all countries when making decisions on their policy choices. One of

the advantages of using this method is that we can easily identify how and under which conditions states organize their specific policy interests.

Chapter Three, after assessing the face validity of the operationalizations of the key variable, probed the plausibility of the five central hypotheses with statistics. We cannot say whether a particular hypothesis is fully supported by these initial probes, but we can say whether the hypothesis appears more plausible on its face. This chapter investigated the occurrence of general interest similarity, including different policy concerns in security, economic, and community similarity, and their pacifying impacts on interstate conflicts. From Table 3.1, we are able to see that there was a strong support for hypothesis one with the general indicator of interest similarity. It informs us that dyads with greater levels of interest similarity had fewer MIDs onset. From Table 3.1, we also can confirm that the pacifying effects of security and economic interest similarity are supported (hypothesis two and three in Chapter Three). However, it was only hypothesis four, which showed that community interest increases peace among states, that failed to receive the possible support.

There was also strong support for hypothesis five. We already know from previous research that the relationship between democratic and non-democratic countries is not as peaceful as other dyads (Russett and Starr 2000). However, mixed dyads are still likely to maintain peace if they have similar ideas about world politics. The empirical evidence has shown that there is a general interest-to-peace phenomenon for the mixed-dyads model, especially when they encounter security relevant issues. Mixed dyads with relatively high security interest dissimilarity experienced most of the interstate conflicts.

The results from Chapter Three provided added support for the five central hy- potheses as we moved to the multivariate tests of the theory. Since Chapter Three mainly tested the onset of militarized conflicts, Chapter Four discussed particular instances of conflict escalation. A selection model was used to conduct the tests in

this chapter because of the concern that selection bias would become an issue if we looked only at the dyads that had conflicts. The support for the two hypotheses in Chapter Four mirrored the support received in the empirical examinations in Chapter Three. It shows that interest not only influences conflict onset, but also escalation.

The argument that interest similarity creates pacifying impacts on conflict escala- tion was clearly supported in the multivariate tests in Chapter Four by the presence of statistically significant terms. The empirical result in the first model (Chapter Four) demonstrates that the degree of security interest similarity should decrease conflict severity. The statistical results in Table 4.1 confirm hypothesis 1a in this chapter. In addition, the results from Table 4.2 also lend strong support to the notion that secu- rity interest not only has effect on the all-dyad model, but also on the mixed-dyads model (hypothesis 2a).

Based on the statistical results from Chapter Three, states with similar economic interests will tend to have a lower possibility of conflict onset. Therefore, this dis- sertation offers a useful linkage connecting the theoretical arguments with current discussions in capitalist peace literature. Different kinds of capitalist peace models were distinguished and discussed in the last empirical chapter. I then adopted four different prestigious capitalist models in Chapter Five: trade, capital openness, size of public sector as free-trade market, and contract-intensive economy as social-market theory for the further inspections. Analyses of these causal mechanisms indicate that not all previous capitalist theories are viable explanations for world peace. The model of the public sector has the weakest relations with other capitalist idea, and also was trivially related with democracy.

Applications of the theories to the peace of cross-Strait relations yields similar results. An examination of this case study in China’s economy and its relationship with Taiwan illustrates how economic interest affects both Beijing and Taipei’s con- cerns in domestic politics and foreign policy decisions. I chose this dyad because even

though China shows no intention of initiating its democratization, and Taiwan has experienced many years of “coherent” democracy since 1992, the two countries in this dyad still have maintained a peaceful bilateral relationship for the past 40 years. From 1960 to 2000, only one militarized interstate dispute occurred between these two countries, and it did not result in fatalities. Thus, we need an examination of this case study in China’s economy illustrating how economic interests might affect both Beijing and Taipei’s concerns in domestic politics and foreign policy decisions. It is the presence of economic interests which have some effect in the reduction of large scale militarized disputes between these two countries.

An important lesson from this dissertation is that the ability to make such a detailed statement about how certain interest similarity within a dyad will make conflicts more, or less, likely is not possible unless we posit this question by including both the democracy variable and a variable measuring interests. This is what scholars tells us to do, and when we do it, we are rewarded with rich findings that help us to answer the valuable ‘democracy-interest’ question. Simply having measures of both variables with single indicator, however, is not enough. Without a clear investigation of the content and latent framework of national interest, we will reach the same results: inconclusive discussions and debate about the causal relationships between democracy and interest. This is why the results reported here differ from, and in fact improve upon, the existing literature.