Crisis. What crisis? The origins and evolution of foreign policy crisis

I propose that foreign policy crisis, as a type of event in international relations, arose much later than did the modern state system. Crisis originated at a specific time in response to changes which occurred in the modern state system. I critique the foreign policy crisis literature which tended to obscure both the origins and evolution of crisis because of the static conceptualizations writers had of the modern state system, their positivist methodology, and their ahistorical reasoning. I derived a definition of crisis from the most important writings within the crisis subfield. In order to use the insights of the crisis writers without being limited by their limitations mentioned above, I turned to the critical theory of Robert Cox and the configurative method of Harold Lasswell. Their emphases on origins, recursion, and replication provided a base from which I could inquire after the origins and evolution of crises. Developments in weaponry and the organization of the armed forces, new transportation and communication technologies, the rise of the nation-state, and innovations in conference diplomacy explain both the origins and evolution of crisis. Crisis arose when the decisionmakers of the Great Powers, fearing that Great Power war would lead to revolution after the end of Napoleonic wars, tried to find a way to settle their competing interests short of war. Crises that existed before 1871 were different from those that occurred after that date due to the uneven incorporation of the innovations mentioned above in the workings of the modern state system. Crises before 1871 shared the characteristics of longer duration, weak perception of crisis, and weak nationalism. To illustrate the similarities and differences which I believed existed among crises, I chose those representative of important conflicts among the Great Powers over long-standing diplomatic issues. They are the Anglo-French Near East Crisis of 1840, the Olmutz Crisis of 1850, the Seven Weeks War Crisis of 1866, the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, the Munich Crisis of 1938, and the US-USSR Nuclear Alert Crisis of 1973. I believe that I have demonstrated that these crises were in fact crises but that they also showed differences among themselves depending on what side of the 1871 divide they fell.