the parties, less tension seems to have arisen than over ‘comparable’ disagreements between the United States and the Soviet Union” (38).
These observations led them to argue that these differences were due to the integrative ties (i.e., their social, political, and economic ties) that connected the United States and Great Britain, as well as France and Great Britain. Thus, they argued that tension is not simply due to the level of disagreements and/or disintegrative forces, but rather is “the ratio of disintegrative forces to integrative ties existing between two nations … at any given point in time (T = D/I).”