Pride of Place: The Origins of German Hegemony

Abstract

Using a game-theoretic model of international interactions, the author shows that systemtransforming wars can result from a relatively small dispute between rivals who are basically satisfied with the international status quo. Such wars are likely to be relatively low in costs even if they are profound in their consequences. The possibility of such system-transforming wars is overlooked by the theories of power-transition, or hegemonic, war. The Seven Weeks' War is an example of a system-transforming conflict that can be understood by combining the insights of theories concerned with differential growth rates and of those derived from the game-theoretic perspective suggested here. The combination of these two perspectives expands the explanatory potential of existing theories of system-transforming wars.