H-Diplo Article Review 668 on “Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Cooperation, 1941-45: Normative Insights from the Dyadic Democratic Peace Literature.” Intelligence and National Security 30:6
H-Diplo
Article Review
No. 668
8 December 2016
Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Web and Production Editor: George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux
Ryan E. Bock. “Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Cooperation, 1941-45: Normative Insights from the Dyadic Democratic Peace Literature.” Intelligence and National Security 30:6 (Dec. 2015): 890-912. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2014.900267.
URL: http://tiny.cc/AR668
Review by James Igoe Walsh, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Ryan E. Bock’s “Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Cooperation, 1941-1945: Normative Insights from the Dyadic Democratic Peace Literature” is an ambitious attempt to apply international relations theory to the domain of cooperation between intelligence agencies. Bock’s starting point is the dyadic democratic peace literature, which finds that liberal democracies do not go to war with each other. He uses this to hypothesize that intelligence cooperation should be more frequent and deeper among pairs of states that are democratic, compared to pairs where one state is not a democracy. Building on research on the transition to democracy, [1] he theorizes that joint democracy facilitates cooperation through two mechanisms. The first is contingent consent, when the parties agree that they will not exploit temporary power imbalances in their favor to permanently undermine or exclude the others. The second is bounded uncertainty, a set of actions that parties agree are unfair and prohibited. Bock’s key argument is that these mechanisms allow democratic pairs to sustain and deepen their intelligence cooperation. He then assesses this argument’s validity with a plausibility probe of cooperation within the democratic-autocratic dyad of Great Britain and the Soviet Union during the period when both states were combatants in the Second World War. Consistent with the article’s theoretical expectations, he finds that there is a decline in the number of direct contacts between British and Soviet intelligence officials, as well as in the “volume and granularity” (901) of the intelligence they shared with each other.
This article has a number of important strengths, and it is in many ways a model of the modern study of intelligence and national security issues. It is a good example of the trend to align more closely the study of intelligence matters with scholarly inquiry in the social sciences generally and security studies specifically, where the development of theory in order to state and test general explanations is an important goal. Bock’s extension of the dyadic democratic peace literature allows him to outline a number of observable implications of the theory for the practice of intelligence sharing.
In this approach, the case study remains of intrinsic interest, but is used primarily as a vehicle to assess the plausibility of these more general propositions about state behavior. A second strength of Bock’s piece is the development of consistent and reproducible measures of intelligence sharing. Here Bock blends archival research, a long-standing approach in the study of intelligence, with the development of straightforward quantitative measures of cooperation between the British and Soviets over the course of the war from 1941 onwards. This is a novel approach to the difficult problem of measuring the degree of cooperation between intelligence agencies. Like all such measures, it does not capture every nuance and aspect of cooperation.
A third strength of the article is the careful treatment of the historical record. Bock makes detailed comparisons between the expectations he derives from the dyadic democratic peace for intelligence sharing and the information available about the actual course of Anglo-Soviet collaboration in this domain. Particularly useful here is Bock’s willingness to state these expectations clearly and specifically enough that evidence which is and is not consistent with the theory can be more clearly identified. This leads to a nuanced set of conclusions that do not push the findings beyond the limits of what the evidence demonstrates. Bock is also cautious in his use of sources. Much of the evidence is based on contemporary documents in British archives,[2] giving him an inside view of the intelligence relationship, although he points out that this view may be incomplete due to the inaccessibility of similar documentary evidence produced by the Soviet Union.
In terms of theory development, one issue concerns the viability of extending insights from the dyadic democratic peace literature to the domain of intelligence sharing. This research finds that liberal democracies do not go to war with each other; such states certainly have conflicts of interests, often serious ones, but are able to settle these disputes without resort to arms. In Bock’s formulation, peaceful dispute resolution is analogous to deep and sustained intelligence cooperation; war is analogous to the absence of such collaboration. But is this justified? One might argue that the absence of armed conflict is distinct in fundamental ways from cooperation that generates at least some benefits for some participants. The inability of states to engage in intelligence cooperation leads them not to war, but instead to forgo any benefits that cooperation promises and to engage in intelligence activities without a foreign partner. Intelligence cooperation might be conceptualized as a form of bargaining, where states (including democratic states) exploit power and information asymmetries to capture as many of the net benefits from collaboration as possible.
The article presents some historical information that would seem to be consistent with this sort of account. According to Bock, during 1941-43 the Soviet Union was most heavily engaged with German forces. The Eastern Front was a crucial campaign not only for the USSR, but also for its allies Britain and the United States; a Soviet collapse would have allowed Germany to turn the full weight of its resources against the western powers. This meant that the British had a primary interest in sustaining the Soviet willingness and capacity to fight. It also, though, provided the Soviets with considerable bargaining leverage over the British, who continued to supply intelligence (as well as military materiel) even as the Soviets declined to reciprocate in a meaningful way.
These issues aside, “Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Cooperation” is an important contribution to the literature on intelligence collaboration and sharing. Its ambition to develop a general understanding of the conditions under which regime type influences such activities, combined with the deep knowledge and sophisticated parsing of an important historical case, provides important insights and a useful model for integrating the study of intelligence with international relations and security studies.
James Igoe Walsh is Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from American University. His research interests include the military and political consequences of advanced weapons, links between natural resources and conflict, and intelligence and national security. His book, The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), was named an Outstanding Title by Choice. His work has been supported by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, and the Minerva Research Initiative.
© 2016 The Authors | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License
Notes
[1] Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and world politics,” American Political Science Review 80:4 (1986): 1151-1169, William Dixon, “Democracy and the peaceful settlement of international conflict,” American Political Science Review 88:3 (1994): 14-32, Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes of the Democratic Peace, 1946-1986,” American Political Science Review 87:3 (1993): 624-638.
[2] The National Archives (Kew, England): WO 178, War Office: British Military Missions: War Diaries, Second World War (193901946). The article relies most heavily on collections dealing with 30 Mission: WO 178/25, WO 178/26 and WO 178/27.
Post a Reply
Join this Network to Reply