Soothing Wounded Vanity

This chapter focuses on national humiliation and the triggering in the 1880s of the Scramble for Africa, an unprecedented land grab by European great powers. It demonstrates that individual-level support for aggressive policies, both vengeful in nature and directed at third-party states, increased within states that are confronted with potentially humiliating international events. The chapter reviews two international events that played an essential role in generating the competitive dynamics of the Scramble for Africa during the 1880s. The first event involved an instance of unexpected national failure, while the second event involved the denial of great power privileges by a higher status state. It also describes the acts of territorial conquest in Africa by France and Germany that generated status and security concerns within Italy and Britain, which led both states to adopt expansionary policies they likely would not have pursued otherwise.

The Cross-National Consequences of Humiliating International Events

This chapter presents statistical evidence in order to support the model of humiliation. The cross-national and within-country approaches used in the chapter shed light on the degree to which the behaviour of recently humiliated states differs from that of states that have not experienced recent humiliation. It examines the relationship between two potentially humiliating events, defeat in conflict and involuntary territorial loss, as well as the levels of subsequent aggression and hostility. The analysis in the chapter also shows that states that have recently experienced these two types of events behave differently than those that have not. States that have experienced recent defeat, for instance, are 42% more likely to initiate conflict in the ten years after a defeat than states that have not recently been defeated. It demonstrates that not all defeats or territorial losses affect states in the same way.