Alliance Politics in a Unipolar World

Abstract

Unipolarity is a novel condition in world politics and has had profound effects on the nature of contemporary international alliances. The end of the cold war did not return the world to multipolarity. Instead, a preponderance of power in the hands of a single state-in this case, The United States-has been unprecedented in the modern era. Not surprisingly, this extraordinary imbalance has triggered a global debate. This special issue is a systematic research into the logic and dynamics of alliance formation in Unipolarity. In a world with a single global superpower , a) How will other states choose allies and what strategies will they follow in order to maximize international support and minimize opposition? b) What strategies should we expect the unipole to pursue and with what effects? These various queries offer a fairly complete menu of the most common motivations-"Hard-balancing", "Soft-balancing", "Leash-slipping", "Neutrality", "Bandwagoning" and "Regional balancing"-for alliance formation in a Unipolar world. These responses are ideal types, of course, and reality will usually be considerably more complex.