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Spontaneous Coalition Forming. Why Some Are
Stable?
Serge Galam
Laboratoire des Milieux Desordonnes et Heterogenes,
Universite Pierre et Marie Curie,
Tour 13 - Case 86, 4place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France
Laboratoire associe au CNRS (UMR n
◦
800)
galam@ccr.jussieu.fr
Abstract.
A model to describe the spontaneous formation of military
and economic coalitions among a group of countries is proposed using
spin glass theory. Between each couple of countries, there exists a bond
exchange coupling which is either zero, cooperative or conflicting. It de-
pends on their common history, specific nature, and cannot be varied.
Then, given a frozen random bond distribution, coalitions are found to
spontaneously form. However they are also unstable making the system
very disordered. Countries shift coalitions all the time. Only the setting
of macro extra national coalition are shown to stabilize alliances among
countries. The model gives new light on the recent instabilities produced
in Eastern Europe by the Warsow pact dissolution at odd to the pre-
vious communist stability. Current European stability is also discussed
with respect to the European Union construction.
1
Introduction
Twenty years ago, using physics to describe political or social behavior was a
very odd approach. Among very scarce attempts, one paper was calling on to the
creation of a new field under the name of “Sociophysics” [1]. It stayed without
real continuation. Only in the last years did physicists start to get involved along
this line of research [2]. Among various subjects [3,4], we can cite voting process
[5,6], group decision making [7], competing opinion spreading [8,9,10], and very
recently international terrorism [11].
In this paper we adress the question of spontaneous coalition forming within
military alliances among a set of independant countries [12,13,14]. A model is
built from the complexe physics of spin glasses [15]. While coalitions are found
to form spontaneously, they are unstable. It is only the construction of extra-
territory macro organizations which are able to produce stable alliances.
The following of the paper is organised as follows. The second part contains
the presentation of the model. Basic features of the dynamics of spontaneous
froming bimodal coalitions are outlined. The building of extra-territory coaltions
is described in Section 3. The cold war situation is then analysed in Section 4.
Section 5 is devoted to the situation in which only one world coalition is active. A
