Borrowed Power: War Finance and the Resort to Arms

当路易十二在1499年考虑入侵米兰时，流亡的特里瓦尔齐奥指出，要想在战争中取得成功，“三件事是必要的：钱；更多的钱；还有更多的钱。”如果这一说法属实，那么在现代，对一支有能力的军队进行异常昂贵的维护，情况就更是如此。战争财政的方法影响着战争的时间和方式，以及战争的解决条件。然而，大多数关于国际冲突的理论都奇怪地脱离了这一点。最广为流传的解释认为，权力分配--也就是受金融影响的东西--是固定的，或者其动态不在参与者的控制范围之内。即使是最近的允许参与者改变权力分配的理论，也没有研究他们的努力是如何获得资金的。这个项目是第一个研究金融形式如何影响战争的开始、持续时间和结果的项目之一。如前期工作所示，Cobine提出了主权债务特有的特征，以改变就和平条件讨价还价的动态，使战争一旦开始，可能持续更长时间，更难解决。战争资金不是战争的一个无害方面，而应被视为解决和旷日持久冲突的重要原因。该项目旨在推广一个博弈论模型，该模型可用于研究资源贫乏的行为者与外国金融市场准入之间的相互作用、决定政府债务成本的金融和政治制度的影响以及吸引国内外贷款人的方法。从该模型得出的假设随后将被用来检验与上述因素有关的假设。除了生成模型及其影响外，还将创建一个关于1815年至今各国债务融资的数据集。这个数据集将被用来测试该模型，也将向其他可能研究类似主题的学者提供。对国家安全问题感兴趣的政策制定者也可以使用这项研究。对战争财政的研究，特别是关于政府如何筹集收入来资助其军事开支以及这如何影响其军事努力的研究，可能会引起一般政治学家的兴趣，但经济学家和社会学家也会感兴趣，他们一直对战争如何塑造一个国家的政治经济感兴趣，但很少提出这个项目中涉及的问题。这些项目也是现代战争理论发展的下一步，现代战争理论已经内化了权力分配。该项目的影响可能是变革性的，因为该项目表明，不能脱离金融结构来研究因果关系机制。

When Louis XII contemplated the invasion of Milan in 1499, the exile Trivulzio pointed that out for success in war, "three things are necessary: money; more money; and still more money." If that statement was true then, it is even more the case in modern times with the extraordinarily, expensive upkeep of a capable military. The method of war finance affects when and how wars are fought, and on what terms they are settled. Yet most theories of international conflict are oddly divorced from this. The most widespread explanations assume that the distribution of power - the very thing that is affected by finance - is fixed or that its dynamics are outside the control of the actors. Even recent theorites that do allow actors to alter the distribution of power do not examine how their efforts are funded. This project is one of the first to examine how the form of finance can affect the initiation, duration, and outcome of war. As shown in preliminary work, features specific to sovereign debt cobine to change the dynamics of bargaining over peace terms in a way that wars, once begun, can last longer and be harder to settle. War finance is not an innocuous aspect of war, but should be regarded as an important cause of both settlement and protracted conflict. This project aims to generalize a game-theoretic model that can be used to study interactions between resource-poor actors with access to foreign financial markets, the effects of financial and political systems that determine the costs of government debt, and the methods of attracting lendors, both domestic and foreign. Hypotheses derived from this model will then be used to to test hypotheses concerning the factors mentioned above. Besides generating the model and its implications, a data set will be created concerning debt financing for countries from 1815 to the present. This dataset will be used to test the model and will also be made available to other scholars who might be studying similar topics. The reuslts of this research will aslo be made available to policy makers who are interested in issues of national security.The study of war finance, especially of how governments raise revenue to fund their military expenses and how this affects their military efforts, is likely to be of interest to political scientists in general, but also to economists and sociologists who have been interested in how war shapes the political economy of a state but rarely raised the questions addressed in this project. The projects is also the next step in the development of modern theories of war which have endogenized the distribution of power. The impact of the project is potentially transformative because the project suggests the causation mechanism can not be studied in isolation from financial structures.