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Confidence and Crisis: Mania in International Relations

Larson, Kyle David
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0772-0687
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153415534911431

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Political Science.
Why do states sometimes adopt wildly overconfident foreign policy choices – choices that have unreasonable expectations about potential benefits of success and unreasonable expectations about the absence of risks of failure? In this dissertation, I argue that extreme cases of these choices can occur as a consequence of mania: a wave of irrational, excessive optimism. One example of mania in foreign policy was the drive to enlarge NATO to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine in 2007 and 2008, prior to the Russian invasion of Georgia and later invasion of Ukraine. Derived ultimately from the work of John Maynard Keynes in economics, I argue that mania in international relations is both expected and inevitable under certain circumstances. Manias primarily occur as part of a three stage process: a sudden, unexpected shock that changes the nature of the international system (“displacement”), followed by new stories that explain both the causes of the shock and explain their consequences for the future (“New Era Thinking”). The new era opens up possibilities for foreign policy success that had not existed before, leading policy elites to “invest” in foreign policies. If those policies do not fail, skepticism about New Era Thinking diminishes and optimism about future success grows. This process produces a feedback loop where New Era Thinking and policy choices interact with each iteration – and with each iteration have higher expectations for gains and lower cognizance of risk. Similar to the psychological dynamics that drive stock market bubbles in economics, the result is a foreign policy process that dismisses both uncertainty and risk, creating the potential for failure. I will show how the end of the Cold War was a displacement that produced New Era Thinking, and that as NATO enlargement – which was predicated on New Era Thinking – progressed eastward it became manic. Mania has its basis in the human need to overcome uncertainty: the inability to know the future. To overcome uncertainty, humans use confidence: a combination of estimating the future based on the weight of the available evidence (generally, the assumption that the future will reflect the present) and animal spirits: a sense of optimism that we can control the future that exists despite the absence of evidence to support it. Confidence can easily become collective overconfidence: a shared feeling of unreasonable assurance about the future. It is from this possibility that the potential for mania derives. As a consequence, we can expect mania to be a recurrent phenomenon in international relations, of which NATO enlargement is but one recent example.
Jennifer Mitzen, PhD (Committee Chair)
Christopher Gelpi, PhD (Committee Member)
Alex Wendt, PhD (Committee Member)
259 p.
International Relations; Political Science
Confidence; Overconfidence; Mania; Policy Bubbles; Animal Spirits; Foreign Policy; NATO; New Era Thinking;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Larson, K. D. (2018). Confidence and Crisis: Mania in International Relations [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153415534911431

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Larson, Kyle. Confidence and Crisis: Mania in International Relations. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153415534911431.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Larson, Kyle. "Confidence and Crisis: Mania in International Relations." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153415534911431

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu153415534911431
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.