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Art of neutrality

In the summer of 1940, after France had fallen to the German blitzkrieg and as the Luftwaffe was escalating the Battle of Britain, Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain, seemed poised to form an alliance with the Axis powers, looking to expand his realm and especially to gain control of Gibraltar. That Franco did not join the Axis in late 1940 can be attributed to an unsung British strategy—a “wedge strategy”—that engineered Spain’s neutrality and thereby freed Britain from having to choose between two dour prospects, either a new front in the Mediterranean (with Spain in the Axis) or an alliance with Franco that would have meant defending Spain against Germany. Britain “did not seek to form an alliance with Spain but rather to de-form a Hispano-German alliance,” writes Timothy Crawford, an assistant professor of political science, in the January–March 2008 issue of Security Studies.

Throughout 1940 Spain negotiated with Germany, insisting that an alliance between the two countries be conditioned on immediate economic aid for Spain, which was still reeling from its civil war. Adolf Hitler promised aid, but it would come only after Spain joined the war. Meanwhile, Samuel Hoare, Winston Churchill’s emissary in Madrid, offered Spain a loan of two million pounds and the shipment of 275,000 tons of wheat—a proposition Hitler would not match. “Had Britain chosen not to aid Spain, and instead to strangle it,” Crawford concludes, “Spain would have been too hungry and weak to turn down Hitler’s bargain.”

Divide-and-balance can be a powerful tool in international relations, Crawford maintains. The example of Spain belies the “illusion that neutrals are passive participants in the power politics of dangerous times.” He points to the more recent example of Israel’s “cold peace” with Egypt as a result of the Camp David Accords. “In the absence of those [wedge] strategies,” he says, “the neutrals would have been fighters not hiders.”

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Power of one

As cellphones, high-speed Internet, and video conferencing turn the world into one big office, employers are increasingly relying on geographically dispersed teams to handle projects. But what balance of far-flung workers produces the best team performance?

To examine this issue, Michael O’Leary, an assistant professor at the Carroll School of Management, and Mark Mortensen, who teaches at MIT, divided several hundred undergraduates at two universities (one U.S., the other Canadian) into teams of six, each having one of four arrangements: all members at one school (6–0); divided equally between two locations (3–3); unbalanced (4–2); and one member isolated (5–1). The teams had three weeks to conduct a research project. Then the participants answered an anonymous survey about their team’s performance, ranking the degree of shared understanding about the project, the coordination of activities, the level of cohesion among members, and the degree of general conflict. The researchers found that participants in equal (3–3) and unbalanced (4–2) groupings tended to bond most closely with local partners, causing problems in all categories. Within unbalanced teams, say the researchers, “the minority subgroup members bear the brunt of the tensions.”

However, these conditions disappear when a single team member works remotely (5–1). Teams with such “isolates” worked as well as or better than teams in one location, suggesting that “isolates may serve unique, beneficial roles, potentially acting as devil’s advocates.” As one team member wrote about an off-site co-worker: “He forced us to be more explicit about how we were going to work together.” O’Leary and Mortensen report their findings in an upcoming issue of Organization Science.

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Exit strategies

Due partly to recent demographic shifts—an increase in college attendance and postponement of marriage—almost 50 percent of young-adult Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 now live with their parents. This trend has led sociologists to declare a new developmental period, “emerging adulthood,” during which children leave the family home and often return, sometimes repeatedly, while trying to achieve financial independence. In an article published in the journal Families in Society, researchers Stephanie Cosner Berzin, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Social Work, and Allison C. De Marco, a fellow at Penn State’s Family Research Consortium, examine the role that a family’s economic status plays in the timing and outcome of emerging adults’ attempts to fly the nest.

Berzin and De Marco analyzed the histories of 1,517 adult children, between 18 and 33, who have been tracked since 1987 by the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and House-holds. They found that living in poverty (with one’s family subsisting at or below the federal poverty line), halved the odds of an emerging adult ever leaving home; furthermore, those who left and returned were less likely to leave again. Limited by circumstance, say the researchers, young adults from poor backgrounds were also 20 percent less likely than more affluent individuals to depart home for school or the military. Berzin and De Marco suggest that “poor families may need additional assistance in providing for older children . . . until they are able to be self-sufficient.” A few states already aid families when a child over 18 is a full-time student, they say. Policymakers might consider another model, the New Deal for Young People, a welfare-to-work program developed in the United Kingdom for long-term unemployed adults between the ages of 18 and 24. The program, which is mandatory for those who qualify, provides training, education, mentoring, and financial assistance.

Paul Voosen is a New York-based writer.

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