Multipolarity, Perceptions, and the Tragedy of 1914

In ‘‘Does Chain-Ganging Cause the Outbreak of War,’’ Dominic Tierney critiques our work on alliance politics in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Tierney incorrectly ascribes to us a theory about the outbreak of conflict based on a ‘‘chain-ganging theory’’ in which war occurs because states become so tightly tied to their allies that they lose volition and find themselves in conflicts not of their own choosing. In fact, we do not try to explain the origins of war, but instead explain why wars in Europe escalated to a continent-wide scale. Here we briefly restate our argument and demonstrate how Tierney misconstrues it. We also show how some of the factors that we discuss in our original work are useful for assessing Tierney’s claim that the causes of conflict and alliance dynamics hinge on whether states are hawks or doves.