Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca,N.Y.

: Cornell University Press,

1991),

Main Claim: develops a domestic-political explanation for overexpansion in an ambitious effort to account for the
"overexpansion" of the major great powers since the nineteenth century. The international environment permits
aggression, but systemic factors alone do not explain why overexpansion occurs. We need to understand the
dynamics of policy formation within the nation-state, and especially the role of competing interest groups within
various political structures to explain this outcome.

Snyder draws heavily on Alexander Gerschenkron's distinction between early and late industrializers. The early
industrializers - Britain and the United States - were less prone to overexpansion because their political systems
were resistant to "cartelization" and capture by a small number of interest groups; instead, a variety of contending
interests clashed in the domestic political sphere.

Late industrializers, like Germany and Japan, in contrast, were misled by a coalition of powerful economic and
political interest groups, which shared a desire for geographic expansion and were able to capture the government
and cartelize policy formation. The "myth of empire" - or of the state's alleged need to engage in imperial expansion
- was thus created by those groups that favored such expansion for political and/or economic reasons. In the process
of logrolling political favors, the demand for expansion got out of hand, and overexpansion resulted; overexpansion,
or the provoking of a countervailing balance, was an outcome that no single group wanted but that the coalition-
captured government was unable to prevent.

Essentially, this is a snowball theory of overexpansion. Overexapnasion is a function of the timing of

industrialization with correlates with the concentration of powerful interest groups (level of cartelization) that act
rationally and create strategic myth to obtain they preferred policies.

Evidence: Five case studies Hitler Germany, Cold War US and Soviet Union, Victorian Britian, and interwar Japan
that compare with and across countries based on a theoretically (mis)guided narratives that rely on secondary
sources.

Where does it fit into the literature?

- a continuation of past efforts to attack structural realism on its "home ground" of national security by
emphasizing the domestic sources of international relations.

Critique:

- given the limited number of cases and myriads of factors that go into the decision of a state to `over
expand’ it seems ridiculous to try to isolate the explanatory contribution of certain factors. This research
design ask much too big of a question that we will ever be able to answer with the given course of history
(how many empires, late, late late, and early industrializes vs how many possible factors???)
- difficult to know a priori what a dictator will do with respect to foreign policy. Snyder acknowledges this
lack of generalizability.
- he claims that overexpansion occurred in Germany and Japan in the 1940s but only moderate geopolitical
behavior of the Soviet Union and the United States during the cold war. However, I am not sure that the
Soviet Union did not overexpand
- Does it fit for China?
- How exactly is overexanpsion measured?
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