| Description |
Why do secondary powers cooperate with the United States in the post-Cold War unipolar international system and what factors determine their level and type of cooperation? Why did the United States have difficulties enlisting Turkey, a steadfast US ally, behind its military-political agenda in some cases, while it obtained Turkey's support successfully in others? To answer these questions, this dissertation examined the boundary conditions of when secondary powers are likely to engage in bandwagoning strategies, i.e., follow the stronger side in a militarized international dispute taking place in a regional security complex (RSC). The central claim of this dissertation is that what determines whether a secondary power will bandwagon is not the distribution of power at the global systemic level, i.e., independent variable, but the dynamics of the regional and domestic environments within which the foreign policy executive (FPE) operates to execute its country's foreign policy, which this study treated as intervening variables, mediating systemic influences. I developed a multilevel foreign policy model that delineates the independent and intervening variables at different levels and identifies elaborate causal linkages between the systemic incentives and the dependent variable, i.e., different foreign policy outcomes in the form of secondary state bandwagoning. |
