Dottorato in STUDI POLITICI

Titolo della tesi: Where Eagles Do Not Dare. Understanding Moderate Revisionism in International Politics

The cyclical rise of revisionist powers is regarded as a constant of international politics. Once peace or major arrangements are settled and a new international status quo arises, states dissatisfied by the new conditions might mount challenges against it. Usually, they end up waging a full-scale war or a general competition against the status quo and those powers willing to preserve and defend it. However, war and competition are not the only forms of revisionism which can instead entail more moderate options. This fashion of moderate revisionism has been largely neglected by International Relations schools of thought despite it has both a relevant theoretical significance and a historical-empirical profundity. The present research’s guiding question will be: “When and how do great and medium powers conduct moderately revisionist foreign policy towards the international status-quo?”. Treasuring what a long-standing literature has written on the topic, I hypothesize that revisionism is a product of four different configurations of power/dissatisfaction. i. Willingly moderate revisionism is produced when great powers harbour limited dissatisfaction towards the status quo. ii. Carefully moderate revisionism is produced when middle powers harbour limited dissatisfaction towards the status quo. iii. Unwillingly moderate revisionism is produced when middle powers harbour total dissatisfaction towards the status quo. iv. Revolutionary revisionism is produced when great powers harbour total dissatisfaction towards the status quo. This, however, falls beyond the scope of the present research which focuses on moderate revisionism. Moderate revisionism is understood as the constant preference for less risky foreign policy means and strategies which are – albeit the moderation – employed to the modification of the status quo. Moderate revisionism will, for instance, include strategies to alter the territorial status quo without triggering dangerous escalations or sweeping territorial reconfigurations or will combine strategies to alter the distribution of military capabilities but without starting costly and risky arms race with the status quo powers. These theory-derived hypotheses will be tested through in-depth studies of the following cases: a) The United States of America from 1879 to 1891. An increasingly strong country, harbouring limited dissatisfaction towards the UK-led status quo in the Americas ended up mostly siding with its former colonizer rather than radically challenging its order. b) The Kingdom of Italy under Fascist rule from 1922 to 1928. Rising to power in the wake of three tumultuous years after the end of the Great War, Mussolini was able to capitalize on limited national dissatisfaction and elaborated a revisionist foreign policy constrained by the middle size of the country. c) Maoist China from 1949 to 1958, when radical ideology fuelled total dissatisfaction which was however burdened by limited national power and capabilities.