How Democracies Lose Small Wars
State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam

This 2003 book examines how modern democracies fail in insurgency wars because they are unable to find a winning balance.

Gil Merom (Author)

9780521008778, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 August 2003

310 pages, 2 b/w illus. 16 tables
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.9 cm, 0.414 kg

'Merom's argument is highly timely and his theoretical framework is more developed (both formally and with historical evidence) than that of others who have made a similar argument.' Journal of Peace Research

In this 2003 book, Gil Merom argues that modern democracies fail in insurgency wars because they are unable to find a winning balance between expedient and moral tolerance to the costs of war. Small wars, he argues, are lost at home when a critical minority mass shifts the center of gravity from the battlefield to the market place of ideas. Merom analyzes the role of brutality in counterinsurgency, the historical foundations of moral and expedient opposition to war, and the actions states traditionally took in order to preserve foreign policy autonomy. He then discusses the elements of the process that led to the failure of France in Algeria and Israel in Lebanon. In the conclusion, Merom considers the Vietnam War and the influence failed small wars had on Western war-making and military intervention.

1. Introduction
2. Military superiority and victory in small wars: historical observations
3. The structural original of defiance: the middle-class, the marketplace of ideas, and the normative gap
4. The structural origins of tenacity: national alignment and compartmentalization
5. The French war in Algeria: a strategic, political, and economic overview
6. French instrumental dependence and its consequences
7. The development of a normative difference in France and its consequences
8. The French struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda'
9. Political relevance and its consequences in France
10. The Israeli war in Lebanon: a strategic, political, and economic overview
11. Israeli instrumental dependence and its consequences
12. The development of a normative difference in Israel and its consequences
13. The Israeli struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda'
14. Political relevance and its consequences in Israel.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], General & world history [HBG]