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In contrast, the Munich analogy did not warn of the dangers of making a hard response to aggressions by the Japanese and Germans in the 1930s. Although the Munich analogy could account, as did the Korean analogy, for the rejection of the nonintervention options in 1965, it was unable to suggest why, among the intervention options, the least hard one was selected.398

In this excellent study, Khong has shown how an imaginative, disciplined research design that combines congruence and process-tracing methods can be used to confront the extremely complicated, difficult task of distinguishing between a justificatory role and an information processing function of historical analogies in foreign policy decision-making. His study is the most rigorous and disciplined treatment we know of for dealing with the theoretical and methodological issues associated with determining whether historical analogies are being used by policymakers solely to justify their decisions or whether the analogies play a genuine causal role in the information processing that leads to the decisions taken. Khong states his conclusions with appropriate cautions, noting a number of limitations and questions that remain, but he has raised the discussion of this difficult problem to a new level of analytical sophistication.399

RITTBERGER’S STUDY OF GERMANY’S POST-UNIFICATION FOREIGN POLICY A study organized by Volker Rittberger also employed both the congruence method and process-tracing, this time to assess competing theories for predicting German foreign policy after the unification of the two Germanies. 400 The bulk of literature on this question predicted that post-unification German foreign policy would be dominated by the question of whether its improved power position should lead to a significant change in its foreign policy. The research question posed in Rittberger’s study was whether there would be continuity or significant change in post-unification foreign policy. Three theories were formulated and submitted to a carefully constructed empirical test: neorealism (and a modified version of it that introduced variation in security pressures); utilitarian liberalism; and constructivism (which holds that state actors follow a logic of appropriateness whose behavior is shaped by international and societal norms).

To conduct an empirical test of these three theories, the authors selected four issue areas that provide a representative cross-section of German foreign policy and that include both issues of “high politics” and “low politics.” These are German security policy within NATO; German constitutional policy vis-à-vis the European Union; German foreign trade policy within the European Union and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); and German human rights policy within the United Nations. The research design included a before-after component that enabled the authors to evaluate the extent to which post-unification Germany changed its foreign policy behavior. Three independent variables were included in the research design: power position, domestic interests, and social norms. The methodology of structured, focused comparison was employed in a series of case studies, each consisting of one or more observations of post-unification policy on a particular issue and one or more observations of pre-unification foreign policy on the same issue.

The congruence procedure was the centerpiece of the research design. The degree of consistency between a theory’s predictions and the observed values of the dependent variable was regarded as the most important indication of its explanatory power. This test was employed in a differentiated manner that took into account tough tests and easy ones, dealt with instances in which several theories made correct predictions, and evaluated evidence based on additional observable implications a theory was able to make. These additional observable implications were studied via process-tracing, except for the implications of neorealism, which