The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 7, Issue 1, Winter 2018 | Page 37

instead, appealed to a transcendent principle, an “ultimate evolution of national
destinies, . . . one which seems to be independent of persons, even of the will of
peoples.” 40
Harrison’s model featuring arms races and power conflicts closely
resembles the Steps-to-War thesis published nearly one hundred years later. Paul
D. Senese and John A. Vasquez, who designed the latter, present the same
variables as causal actions, which often contribute to interstate war. These
variables also helped Ryan Maness and Brandon Valeriano design the Risk
Barometer for War model that predicted the Ukraine Crisis two years before its
onset.
Conclusion
In the decades leading up to WWI, Harrison took advantage of open
source publications that came from foreign and domestic resources, hailing from
both the public and private sectors. He harnessed this information and utilized
qualitative reasoning to identify a trend of international-relations behavior that
many of his contemporaries failed to identify. Though his model lacked a
repeatable framework that would have allowed future researchers to analyze other
nation pairs, his approach closely reflects modern scientific peace modeling
methodologies that include such mechanisms. The Steps-to-War theory and its
close descendent—the Risk Barometer for War model—exhibit the importance of
arms races and power conflicts as prewar variables in international relations.
Further research that can either validate or falsify some features of this
study include a re-evaluation of the etymology of reich. Specifically, a content
analysis of German documents written before the Second Reich may reveal a
more accurate narrative of when German-speakers began to use reich to mean
empire. While etymological studies may not directly apply to every peace
modeling exercise, they may help historians understand how nineteenth and
twentieth-century German imperialism transitioned from ethnocentric nation-
building to xenophobic genocide.
Further research that may complement the central phenomenon of this
study may include a comparative analysis of the rise of ethnocentric German
military aggression with other modern movements besides those explored here.
The Russian World thesis and the Turkish-Islamic Union paradigm served only as
two examples of the same phenomenon that Harrison observed in his lifetime.
Similar movements may proliferate today in other parts of the world that peace
advocates should monitor, considering the war-predicting precedent that Harrison
established.
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