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International Organization
Autumn 1997
This article reformulates liberal international relations (IR) theory in nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science. Liberal IR theory elaborates the basic insight that state-society relations--the relationship between governments and the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded--are the most fundamental determinant of state behavior in world politics. In the liberal view state-society relations influence state behavior by shaping "national preferences"--the fundamental social purposes that underlie state strategies--not, as realism argues, the configuration of national capabilities and not, as institutionalist regime theory maintains, the configuration of information and institutions. This article codifies this basic liberal insight in the form of three core analytical propositions, derives from these propositions three variants of liberal theory, and demonstrates that the existence of a coherent liberal theory has significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications. These implications include the existence of significant omitted variable bias in recent realist and constructivist studies, and the analytical priority of liberal theory, which emerges as the most fundamental among major IR theories because it defines and explains the conditions under which realist and institutionalist, as well as constructivist, factors matter.
Different societies of states develop different fundamental institutions to govern relations between their constituent units. Whereas the governance of modern international society rests on the institutions of contractual international law and multilateralism, no such institutions evolved in Ancient Greece. Instead, the city-states developed a sophisticated, and successful, system of arbitration to facilitate ordered interstate relations. Because existing neorealist, neoliberal, and constructivist accounts of international institutions struggle to explain such variation, I develop a new constructivist account of fundamental institutional development. Societies of states are shaped by constitutional structures, which are coherent ensembles of three constitutive values: a shared belief about the moral purpose of the state, an organizing principle of sovereignty, and a norm of pure procedural justice. These deep normative structures constitute and constrain institutional design and action. Because international societies emerge in different cultural and historical contexts, they evolve different constitutional structures, leading states to construct different fundamental institutions. I illustrate this theory through a comparison of ancient Greek and modern constitutional structures and basic institutional practices.
This article advances the argument that transnational moral authority may be employed as a power resource to impact transnational outcomes and that it was employed as such in the presovereign system of feudal Europe. Moral authority acquires utility as a power resource in a manner similar to military and economic power resources. These power resources, in different contexts, become the "medium of exchange" to effect principles institutionalized in conventions. Ideas are causally significant to the extent that they assist in the development of new conventions and social institutions, which are sources of power resources. Social hieratic principles derived from the structure of social identities and interests derived from Christian political theology helped to legitimate feudalism as a mode of social and economic organization. Feudal institutions such as sacerdotal kingship were legitimated through principles derived from these social identities. Ecclesial and politico-military authorities competed in ideational initiatives to stimulate the development of the social institutions of "divine right" kingship and the high medieval papacy as sources of "moral authority," which they employed, along with material power resources, as tools of "state"-craft. This article demonstrates that when moral authority was deployed as a weapon, defeat in battles over principles of legitimate rulership spelled disaster for an actor as quickly as defeat in battles between military forces.
World society is not organized around a single state, and the separate national states took up environmental concerns only very belatedly. During the past century, the spread of a scientific culture and the creation of an international associational system--most prominently around the United Nations--helped structure a world environmental regime by other means. The development of this world-level regime took a course different from the one that would be predicted by state-based theories. International nongovernmental associations, rooted in expanding scientific discourse, grew earliest followed by a spate of environmental treaties among governments. Then, after 1945, the United Nations system facilitated a dramatic expansion in the number and scope of intergovernmental environmental organizations. Only late in the process did environmental concerns become structured as major components of national state organizations. We provide qualitative and quantitative descriptions, and report results of longitudinal analyses, elucidating the processes involved. The larger point is that different sectors of world society become structured through more variable processes than are usually considered.
No great power has appeared in the modern Middle East. Most explanations for what is usually characterized as the failure of Pan-Arabism or other national or religious formulas for "regional integration" emphasize the artificial boundaries of colonial states, the inauthenticity of Arab nationalist sentiments, a proliferation of petty jealousies, and economic noncomplementarities. This article contends that the single most important factor explaining the absence of a Middle Eastern great power is a fundamental fact of sequence. I make an analogy to Alexander Gerschenkron's argument and base my analysis on a well-established body of theory about the transformation of some European states into great powers. I contend that Middle Eastern failures to achieve great power status have been substantially determined by the fact that late political developers are caught in a world of legal, strategic, and political barriers against military routes to great power status--barriers erected and maintained by great powers who wield new international norms against aggrandizing war and their own military superiority to prevent aspiring Middle Eastern hegemons from doing what their own European, Asian, and North American progenitors did to enter the great power club.
Industrial democracies vary widely in the degree to which they discourage immigration. To explain these variations, this article emphasizes the geographic concentration of immigrant communities. This concentration creates an uneven distribution of costs and benefits, providing a spatial context for immigration politics. Net public demand for tighter immigration control increases in localities where immigrants concentrate when those areas experience rapid increases in immigration, higher immigrant proportions, higher unemployment, and more generous immigrant access to social services. Each of these conditions exacerbates competition between immigrants and natives and hence native hostility in these communities while employer support for immigration usually diminishes. Yet national politicians may ignore changes in the demand for immigration control unless these constituencies are also able to swing a national election from one party to another. The larger and less "safe" the local constituencies, the greater their influence in this sense. Evidence from the United Kingdom between 1955 and 1981 is consistent with these propositions.
Analysts have argued that states do not support secessionist movements if they are vulnerable to separation themselves, and this vulnerability has motivated states to respect international norms and to create international organizations. Rather than constraining states, ethnic politics can cause politicians to support secessionists. Politicians need support to gain and maintain office, so potential and existing supporters' preferences shape the policies politicians support. Ethnic ties between a politician's supporters in one state with a combatant in an ethnic conflict elsewhere significantly influence the supporters' preferences and, consequently, the politician's preferred foreign policies. Therefore, states support the side of an ethnic conflict that shares ethnic ties with the supporters of the policymakers. To test the competing arguments--vulnerability versus ethnic ties--this article applies them to the international relations of three secessionist crises: the Congo crisis, the Nigerian Civil War, and the disintegration of Yugoslavia.