Choucri and North are among the few foreign conflict analysts to systematically specify domestic and international determinants of major power international expansion and conflict. They argue that major powers characterized by a growing population, technology, and military capability along with an increasing reliance upon external supplies of raw materials, when denied access to such products will acquire sovereignity over resource producing territories and in the process become more conflict oriented than their major power counterparts. / This perspective is both plausible and well rooted in the literature. However, because Choucri and North omitted the key resource scarcity concept from their model they were unable to directly evaluate their thesis. Consequently, its reassessment is justified and necessary. / The period chosen for this purpose, the interwar years, was selected for several reasons. First, foreign policy analysts have long argued that strategic material shortages played a crucial part in the territorial expansion and foreign conflict directed plans and policies of Italy, and especially Germany and Japan during the time. Second, Choucri and North consider the period a legitimate and intriguing testing ground for their thesis. Finally, empirically oriented foreign conflict analysts have largely overlooked the period. Not much is known, then, about the foreign conflict dynamics of the major powers during the period. / It was found that the territorial expanding and foreign conflict-oriented powers had international access to needed resources (especially petroleum) but chose to acquire territories and wage interstate conflict in any event. Yet these territories could do little to satisfy the resource needs of the expanding powers. Indeed the most important international strategic material suppliers were sovereign nations, notably the United States, and the Soviet Union, whose products were all too readily available to the expanding powers. Consequently, the Choucri-North framework, with its emphasis upon resource shortages being the catalyst of international expansion and conflict, does not advance our understanding of the major power international expansion and conflict dynamics in the period between the First and Second World Wars. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-09, Section: A, page: 2880. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75178 |
| Contributors | ZUK, GARY., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 206 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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