Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [58]
8. E. H. Carr, German-Soviet Relations between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1951), chaps. 3–4; Hans W. Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany (New York: Norton, 1969), chaps. 4–5; George W. F. Hallgarten, “General Hans von Seeckt and Russia, 1920–1922,” Journal of Modern History 21, no. 1 (March 1949): 28–34; Gustav Hilger and Alfred G. Meyer, The Incompatible Allies: A Memoir-History of German-Soviet Relations, 1918–1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1953); Vasilis Vourkoutiotis, Making Common Cause: German-Soviet Relations, 1919–22 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
9. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Holt, 2005), chaps. 9–10.
10. Martin Fackler, “Japanese Split on Exposing Secret Pacts with U.S.,” New York Times, February 9, 2010; John M. Glionna, “Japan’s Secret Pact with U.S. Spurs Debate,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2010; Robert A. Wampler, ed., “Nuclear Noh Drama: Tokyo, Washington and the Case of the Missing Nuclear Agreements,” The National Security Archive, October 13, 2009, http://www.gwu. edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb291/index.htm.
11. One might argue that masking incompetence is more likely in a democracy, because leaders are accountable to their people, who will punish them if they find out about their ineptitude. While I believe this is true, lying of this sort is done for selfish purposes, not for the good of the country. In other words, it would be an ignoble cover-up, not a strategic cover-up; as emphasized earlier, the former kind of lie falls outside the scope of this book. One might also argue the opposite: there is likely to be less need to hide mistakes in democracies, because democracies do a better job of making strategic choices than nondemocracies. See David A. Lake, “Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 1 (March 1992): 24–37; Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). However, a careful review of the logic and the evidence behind this claim shows that there is no meaningful difference in the ability of democracies and nondemocracies to make intelligent decisions in the foreign-policy realm. See Michael C. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Alexander B. Downes, “How Smart and Tough Are Democracies? Reassessing Theories of Democratic Victory in War,” International Security 33, no. 4 (Spring 2009): 9–51; Sebastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (November 2003): 585–602.
Chapter 6
1. This is not to say that a country’s master narrative about its past is simply comprised of myths; it may also contain some truthful stories.
2. Stephen Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International Security 18, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 27.
3. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45.
4. Dominique Moisi, “France Is Haunted by an Inability to Confront its Past,” Financial Times, December 12, 2005.
5. Van Evera notes that “nationalist myths can help politically frail elites to bolster their grip on power,” and they can “bolster the authority and political power of incumbent elites” (“Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” 30). While this is certainly true, selfish lies of this sort fall outside the scope of this book.
6. The best book on this subject is Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture (New York: