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International Organization
Summer 1997
Between 1940 and 1990, enemies in civil wars have almost always failed to reach successful negotiated solutions to their conflicts unless an outside power guaranteed their safety during the ensuing transition period. I argue that civil war opponents avoid negotiated settlements because this requires them to relinquish important fall-back defenses at a time when no neutral police force and no legitimate government exist to help them enforce the peace. Knowing they will enter a period of intense vulnerability, neither side can credibly commit to an agreement that becomes less attractive once implemented. Evidence from forty-one civil wars between 1940 and 1990 shows that civil war adversaries do, in fact, require the added reassurance of outside security guarantees before they willfully implement peace treaties. This suggests that resolving the underlying issues over which civil wars are fought is not enough to bring peace to war-torn states. Both short-term security guarantees and long-term institutional arrangements seem necessary to ensure stable and durable settlements.
During the last decade the U.S. government has taken numerous bilateral actions intended to reduce other countries' border or internal regulations that were said to restrict U.S. exports, investments, and property rights. Judging from the data for 1984 to 1993, the U.S. Trade Representative paid attention to countries with large bilateral trade surpluses with the United States, and to those with larger and faster-growing economies, and not particularly to those with higher trade barriers. The United States actually took greater action, on the other hand, toward those whose identifiable barriers were high. These patterns of behavior do not appear to vary by presidential administration. Japan received more bilateral pressure than its economic characteristics would appear to warrant, but little evidence indicates that this pressure has had its desired effects. The United States achieved greater change in countries whose economies were more dependent on the U.S. market and on issues covered by international rules.
Japan's low level of defense expenditure relative to the size of its economy has long been viewed as an important anomaly among major industrialized countries, yet there has been little effort to subject it to a theoretically informed explanation. The most obvious factors, those linked to theories of the international system, provide an incomplete explanation for the phenomenon. Domestic factors need to be examined but in ways that are grounded in theory rather than ad hoc. This article focuses on the process through which postwar Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and like-minded successors entrenched a minimalist defense policy, making it resistant to significant changes over time. In doing so, the article discusses the theoretical basis of three different techniques for institutionalization: the creation of formal rules and organizations, the promulgation of informal boundaries that serve as "focal points" for bargaining and conflict, and the shaping of public ideology through dissonance resolution. The article also examines the implications of this analysis for theories of institutions and for future Japanese defense policies.
Between 1990 and 1996 domestic agricultural policies in the United States and the European Union (EU) underwent significant reforms. To what extent did these reforms derive from an international negotiation, specifically the 1986-93 Uruguay Round of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) negotiations, where agricultural reform had been a major objective? Two-level game theory suggests that international negotiations can--through synergistic linkage--create greater political space to pursue domestic reform. Yet the Uruguay Round added little to the content or the pace of reform in the EU and actually slowed the pace of reform in the United States, due in part to the unexpected emergence of synergistic linkages that were negative rather than positive. Furthermore, delays encountered due to U.S.-EU differences over agriculture slowed the completion of the rest of the Uruguay Round at a significant opportunity cost to world income growth.
International relations scholars largely focus on realism's common features: what has been overlooked is that realists diverge regarding a series of assumptions about state behavior. This article divides realism into two competing branches by exposing these latent divisions. Realists are shown to diverge regarding (1) whether states are conditioned by the possibility--or alternatively the probability--of conflict, (2) how states weigh short-term versus long-term objectives, and (3) how states trade off military security versus economic capacity. To demonstrate the significance of these divergent assumptions, competing hypotheses are outlined regarding German and Japanese foreign policy, nuclear proliferation in Ukraine, and regional economic cooperation among developing countries. Dividing realism on this basis opens up avenues for cumulative intra-realist debate that have heretofore been closed. Furthermore, a clear understanding of realism's two branches helps to explain why past interchanges with nonrealist theories have generally been disappointing and should make it possible to initiate more productive future dialogue.
Review essay--The Political Economy of European Monetary Unification edited by Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden; States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s by Eric Helleiner; Currencies and Politics in the Unites States, Germany, and Japan by C. Randall Henning; The Political Economy of Policy Coordination: International Adjustment Since 1945 by Michael Webb.