Theory
Simulation
Contact
Dangerous Liaisons is a web site that revolves around the research of Thomas Schmalberger and offers three resources:
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Dangerous Liaisons: A Theory of Threat Relationships in International Politics is a doctoral dissertation that applies a penomenological approach to examine the lifeworld of foreign policy makers and the rules by which they understand and react to threats. The empirical foundation of the theory is the Cuban Missile Crisis. The dissertation can be downloaded. Dangerous Liaisons: A Simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a computer program that resulted from the formalization of the theory developed in the dissertation. It enables the reconstruction of the Cuban Missile Crisis and to develop counterfactual scenarios to explore historical what-if questions relating to threats, crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. The program can be downloaded or tested as a demo. |
What do threats and the Cuban Missile Crisis have to do with Dangerous Liaisons?
On the eve of the French revolution, Choderlos de Laclos wrote a novel in which he described "deception and self-deception in high society. It is a tale of love and death which unfolds in just over five months. The action takes place almost exclusively indoors, either in Paris or in a country-house. External nature plays no role in this late eighteenth-century text. In a complex network of relationships, the main characters reveal varying degrees of gullibility and/or duplicity. At the end of the drama, the five major participants leave the stage. ... In an age of sociability, they are socially dead" (Simon Davis, Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1987:9).
The resemblance to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, in fact to the Cold War is striking. The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded in only thirteen days, in which the two main protagonists, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, displayed various degrees of duplicity. As I argue, the Cuban Missiles Crisis was about humiliation, prestige and leadership. It was a drama played before the world in which the deception commonly used to enhance one's own prestige at the expense of the other, threatened to destroy the face of the protagonists. We replay and restage this drama whenever we read or write about it. However, what we tend to forget is that for the main protagonists, the policy makers of the American and Soviet governments, the crisis unfolded in the letters they wrote to each other, the reports they received and the actions they ordered. They did not watch missiles being prepared or vessels approaching the interception area. They rather discussed, read and wrote about it.
There is thus a second resemblance which is striking. Laclos wrote in a genre very common at the time, namely he wrote an epistolary novel, that is, a novel consisting of a series of letters. "Words and the letters they compose are fully active. They are action. Letters in an epistolary novel recount and reenact simultaneously, without distinction. Doing and telling are congruent, interchangeable, identical activities." (Peter Conroy V., Jr., Intimate, Intrusive and Triumphant: Readers in the Liaisons Dangereuses, 1987:10). Such is the nature of most state interactions between high-level policy makers, and was characteristic for the Cuban Missile Crisis. The dangerous liaison between the United States and the Soviet Union can be adequately described in the words of the Comte de Valmont:
| We are fated to be conquerors and we must follow our destiny; perhaps at the end of our career we shall meet again, because with all due respect, most lovely Marquise, you are following in my tracks at a pace at least equal to mine, and ever since, for the greater good of mankind, we set out on our separate paths to preach the good word each in our own way, it seems to me that as a missionary of love, you have made more converts than I. (Coderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1995:14) |