Book Review: Vanishing Coup: The Pattern of World History Since 1310

Vanishing Coup: The Pattern of World History Since 1310 by Ivan Perkins. Lanham/Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 343 pp, £44.95 hardcover 978-1-4422-2271-7, e-book 978-1-4422-2272-4

When Russian hostility toward the West boiled over into active violence against Ukraine this summer, Moscow responded to Western sanctions by, among other things, shuttering the famous McDonald’s on Pushkin Square. This dealt a blow to Tom Friedman’s “Golden Arches” peace theory, and led colleagues of mine to assert that perhaps it was simply the case that if two countries with McDonald’s franchises wanted to go to war with one another, one of them would just close its McDonald’s.

But if access to crispy golden deliciousness, or a certain level of middle-class prosperity, isn’t enough to guarantee two nations won’t go to war against each other, what is? Ukraine, for example, has two historic oppressors, Russia and Germany. Why is it ludicrous to think the latter would ever consider invading her again, while the former has?

In his meticulous, persuasive book, Vanishing Coup: The Pattern of World History Since 1310, UCLA Law Professor Ivan Perkins argues that the stability of states that have maintained the peaceful, legal transfer of power over time underwrites international peace. In other words, nations that go coup-free for two generations (Perkins picks 50 years, an admittedly arbitrary cutoff) tend to stay coup-free and overwhelmingly tend not to go to war with one another. This is the key commonality, beyond capitalism, behind democracy, that has underwritten the emerging global, ‘Western’ peace.

Perkins begins his tale in the Middle Ages with the emergence of the maritime Venice as a stable, oligarchic republic. Identifying Venice’s commonalities with the great Anglophone democratic republics – Great Britain and the United States – is perhaps Perkins greatest contribution to the ongoing discussion of democratic peace. Few would think to link the medieval oligarchy and the two modern parliamentary democracies, but Venice’s 487 years (1310-1797) of uninterrupted, peaceful succession surpass the United States (238) or Great Britain (269) almost by a factor of two.

Seen in this light, the initially counterintuitive association becomes intriguing. Perkins then examines the history of the United Kingdom and the United States from the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 and the American Revolution, respectively. From there, stability spread through their ‘children’ – ten coup-free countries that the two have founded, occupied and reformed, or devolved since 1776, plus the eleven other nations, such as the Netherlands, that have not formally been colonized or occupied but nonetheless have benefitted from the Anglo-American ‘security umbrella’ in setting up their own stable regimes.

Perkins argues that seven key commonalities add up to the ‘rule of law’, which in turn strips individuals of the strong personal loyalties and obligations that are essential to pulling off – or at a certain point, even proposing – a coup d’etat. Those seven pillars he identifies are: an established court system, “formal equality under the law”, “fact-finding through rational inquiry”, “procedural protections for criminal defendants”, a “legal profession closely intertwined with political elites”, an “independent judiciary”, “all state actions subject to legal scrutiny”, and “low corruption.” All are based on the legal system and are to some degree independent; once established and maintained for a period of time, Perkins argues, they inevitably remove the ability to build a conspiracy.

Coups, he explains, flourish where leaders have retainers more loyal to them personally than to the state, where betraying a patron or friend carries harsher penalties than treason, and where the likelihood for achieving success through violence outweighs the rewards and protections of justice. In turn, they make military and civilian leaders more interested in personal survival than the national good, leading to drastically increased incentives for war.

Given the emphasis on the courts, can you tell the author is a lawyer? But after the failure of the simplistic democracy promotion movements of the 2000s, which often defined success merely as the holding of a ballot, Perkins’ assessment of what makes for stability is an enriching contribution to a conversation at the heart of Western foreign policy. If we could find a way to replicate Venice’s republican model among nations that are not fully ready for Jacksonian democracy but have cultural leanings toward oligarchic power-sharing, it would do a great deal to advance world peace in non-optimal conditions. Meanwhile, Perkins offers a few interesting proposals on how to promote conditions of true stability beyond just demanding full democracy, such as a $1M “Rule-of-law Fellowship” to incentivize the emergence of Lee Kuan Yew-style leaders, strong men who would nonetheless prize impartial courts and low corruption.

Perkins’ lawyerly side sometimes gets the better of him, as he proves, reproves, and then reproves again the points surrounding stability, coups, and the mechanisms of corruption. At points this can lead to a level of dryness on par with reading the Domesday Book. And those who dislike looking to polyamorous, murderous monkeys for moral or normative advice will dislike his chapter on primate psychology, mischievously titled ‘True Banana Republics.’

By the end of the book, though, it is clear that Perkins’ overall thesis is sound and significant. While he has not isolated the ur-cause of the prevailing Western peace – which almost certainly has multiple causes – nonetheless he has identified an important, and heretofore underappreciated, aspect of it. Indeed, my keenest disappointment in reading this is that the author did not spend more time drawing from the deep narrative well of coup, conspiracy, and foiled plots that is human history. Perkins is at his peak when recounting the barely-thwarted Faliero intrigue of Venice or examining how Galtieri’s coup in Argentina led directly to the Falkland’s War.

Vanishing Coup will make valuable reading for diplomats, scholars, or NGO leaders working in disputed areas. On account of its dry, academic second half, I might not recommend it to the casual reader. But as much as we might wish Perkins had regaled us with a bit more history (and spared some of the academic over-proving), he has identified an essential element to the remarkable peace that seems to have contributed to the cessation of the historical bellum omnium contra omnes in the last 50-150 years.

Nicholas M. Gallagher is a staff writer at The American Interest and is on twitter: https://twitter.com/ngallagherai