I am pleased to comment on the important issues that Daniel Aldrich raises in his thoughtful review.
Aldrich asks whether the base expulsion cases are analytically more important than cases where host countries merely contest basing agreements. But contestation can be practically significant in its own right when it leads to the renegotiation of aspects of basing agreements such as the Status of Forces Agreements, sovereign rights, or compensation packages. Base-related incidents, by themselves, usually do not trigger the contestation of basing agreements unless they occur in the midst of an ongoing anti-base campaign.
Aldrich also wonders whether broader regime change, as opposed to democratic transition, offers a better explanation for certain expulsion cases. Certainly, among the three main causal mechanisms that are responsible for politicizing basing issues—procedural legitimacy, domestic jurisdictional competition, and political party competition—some were evident during the initial stages of certain authoritarian regime changes (Ethiopia, Libya, Kyrgyzstan), as well as De Gaulle's nationalist postelection ouster of U.S. forces in 1966.
Focusing on both expulsion and contestation outcomes, however, risks a more important selection bias. Base Politics seeks to explain varying periods of contestation as well as depoliticization of the U.S. military presence in host countries. Why are U.S. military bases a salient political issue in some countries and eras, but not in others?
Indeed, the more damaging blow to the broader “regime change” hypothesis is that in nearly all U.S. base hosts that are consolidated democracies, the status of U.S. basing agreements has remained depoliticized despite regular regime turnover and even acute security policy disagreements with the United States. After host countries democratically ratify basing accords, they acquire legitimacy that is difficult to challenge on procedural grounds when a new political party assumes power. For example, Spain's Socialist Party in the early 1980s confronted the U.S. bases in Spain as “public bads” and demanded their removal. That same party 20 years later comfortably refers to these same facilities as “democratic commitments,” even when used for unpopular purposes, such as the war in Iraq or the enabling of CIA rendition flights. For many U.S. allies, despite the best efforts of anti-base activists and populist politicians, the once public-bad character of the basing issue has now morphed into public indifference.
When we take into account this full range of possible “base politics” outcomes, the theory has considerable predictive range across many of the non-U.S. cases that Aldrich mentions. Many Francophone African regimes (e.g., Chad, the Central African Republic, Djibouti, Gabon, Senegal) welcomed a postcolonial French basing presence in order to acquire economic concessions and ensure their own survival against external and internal threats. The British endured postindependence democratizing pressures before withdrawing their bases from Iraq, Jordan, and Malaysia and now principally base in overseas territories and dependencies (such as Bermuda, Gibraltar, and Ascension Island), not independent countries (in fact, the bases in Cyprus are strictly sovereign UK territory, not leases). Finally, the Georgian parliament's expulsion of Russian bases in 2004 after the Rose Revolution and the current contestation of the terms of the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol by pro-Western Ukrainian elites suggest that similar domestic political processes are now informing some of the post-Soviet states' changing political attitudes toward hosting Russian military facilities.
The types of dependence that host country rulers have developed on basing agreements have varied with the requirements of their particular regime-survival strategies. Some authoritarian rulers, such as Francisco Franco, Park Chung Hee, or Islam Karimov, prized the international legitimacy that the U.S. presence bestowed on their repressive domestic regimes, while others, such as Adnan Menderes, Ferdinand Marcos, and Askar Akayev, used the basing presence and accompanying aid flows to enrich themselves and their political clients. Consistent with selectorate theory, democratizing and democratic regimes tend to demand more public goods as quid pro quo for base rights.
Aldrich rightly questions the political dynamics of the Okinawan case, yet the island prefecture's history reinforces many of the book's central themes. For example, anti-base activists claim that governing base agreements, including private land leases, are colonial vestiges of U.S. military administration and therefore illegitimate. Much like the siting agencies that Aldrich examines, Japan's Defense Facilities Administration Agency targets Okinawa's local basing municipalities and key interest groups with a sophisticated array of public goods and selective incentives designed to maintain slight majority support, albeit tacit, for the U.S. basing presence. And like the other “island host” cases of Greenland-Denmark, Azores-Portugal, Sardinia-Italy, or Vieques, the basing issue on Okinawa is implicated within a broader struggle between island authorities and the central government over the terms of local political autonomy.
Ultimately, both Aldrich and I explore how states and civil societies strategically compete to emphasize the “public goods” and “public bads” of contentious installations. While civil society activists try to highlight such negative local externalities as environmental damage and accidents, states point to such broader public benefits as national security or energy brought by these installations, even as they exercise soft power over local communities. Clearly, the political dynamism associated with these contentious sites suggests ample opportunity for further theoretical refinement and comparative empirical work on these important issues.
