Fighting Yesterday's War: Elite Continuity and Revanchism

Abstract

What explains the revanchism of territorially reduced states? This question has acquired new salience amid Russia’s renewed war against Ukraine in 2022. In this article, we analyze revanchism by advancing a new explanation that emphasizes elite continuity across regimes. Elite continuity across systems matters because the ruling political class in the territorially reduced state, which was socialized under the old regime, preserves certain beliefs about world order and foreign policy. We use the Russian case to evaluate this argument against leading alternatives that emphasize international threat environments, domestic political crises, and individual leaders. We show that elite beliefs, cultivated and nurtured in the Soviet period, encompass the notion that spheres of influence are foundational to international politics and a sense of entitlement over neighboring sovereign territory. By focusing attention on the degree of elite continuity, even where political institutions apparently exhibit major change, our theoretical framework illuminates variation in territorially reduced states’ revanchism by examining the French Third Republic and the interwar German Reich as well.

Keywords: revanchism, elites, Putin, Crimea, Ukraine, postimperial, international relations, Weimar Germany