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International Organization
Spring 1999 (Volume 53 Issue 2)
I build on the Stolper-Samuelson theorem from international trade theory to argue that profound and rapid changes in the costs and risks of international economic exchange can significantly influence the security politics of states. Increasing exposure to the international economy will increase the state’s difficulty of mobilizing locally abundant resources for security purposes and ease the difficulty of mobilizing locally scarce resources. Declining exposure reverses these effects. A preliminary survey of the five European great powers before World War I supports the pattern of shifting economic constraints predicted by the theory and further suggests that international economic expansion was an important cause of World War I. The theory thus challenges the conventional wisdom that trade promotes peace. It also has important implications for several other areas of international relations, including the relationship between trade and military power, the relative gains debate, and the dynamics of hegemonic theory.
I contrast two perspectives on how democratic institutions affect international crisis behavior and offer an empirical test designed to discriminate between them. The institutional constraints argument suggests that democratic leaders face greater political risks in waging war because voters can easily sanction them for failed or costly policies. The informational perspective suggests that democratic institutions help reveal information about a government’s preferences either by increasing the transparency of decision making or by enhancing the credibility of its signals. A formal model of crisis bargaining shows that the two perspectives make opposite predictions about how target states respond when challenged by a democratic state. Competing hypotheses are tested using a data set of militarized disputes, and the results are consistent with the predictions of the informational perspective. In particular, challenges made by democratic states are less likely to be resisted militarily than those made by nondemocratic states.
Studies of international regimes, law, and negotiation, as well as regional integration, near universally conclude that informal political leadership by high officials of international organizations — “supranational entrepreneurship” — decisively influences the outcomes of multilateral negotiations. Scholarship on the European Community (EC), in particular, has long emphasized informal agenda setting, mediation, and mobilization by such officials. Yet the research underlying this interdisciplinary consensus tends to be anecdotal, atheoretical, and uncontrolled. The study reported here derives and tests explicit hypotheses from general theories of political entrepreneurship and tests them across multiple cases - the five most important EC negotiations - selected to isolate informal entrepreneurship and control for the parallel actions of national governments. Two findings emerge: First, supranational entrepreneurship in treaty-amending EC decisions is generally redundant or futile, occasionally even counterproductive. Governments can and do almost always efficiently act as their own entrepreneurs. Second, rare cases of entrepreneurial success arise not when officials intervene to help overcome interstate collective action problems, as current theories presume, but when they help overcome domestic (or transnational) collective action problems. This suggests fundamental refinements in core assumptions about the level and source of transaction costs underlying general theories of international regimes, law, and negotiation.
Even as social constructivist approaches make inroads into the field of security studies, the study of coercive international bargaining continues to be dominated by materialist models. Bargaining theorists ranging from Thomas Schelling to James Fearon tell us that coercion works primarily through rational material means: nations give in when they face credible threats from more powerful nations. In this article I borrow from work in the field of social psychology that identifies several ways in which coercive bargaining outcomes tend to vary, depending on the social context in which they take place: pressure tends to produce more concessions when exercised within a social hierarchy, when a threat is regarded as legitimate under operative social norms, and when the parties trust one another. Arguing that we ought to see similar patterns in international coercive bargaining, I then test the plausibility of these hypotheses by examining recent trends in U.S.-Japan economic bargaining. The empirical case is also used to examine the relatively neglected question of what drives the process of change in norms and other aspects of the social context.
Neoliberal institutionalists believe that alliances, within their boundaries, create “zones of stability” and cooperation. Structural realists, on the other hand, deny that alliances can independently shape the behavior of their members. In contrast, I unite the liberal belief that institutions matter with the classical realist skepticism as to their effects and argue that under certain conditions alliances can intensify conflict between their members. I develop a number of “realist institutionalist” propositions, borne out in the Greco-Turkish case, regarding the effects of membership in a multilateral alliance on small powers. The fate of these Aegean neighbors within the Atlantic alliance serves as a cautionary tale for NATO expansion, balancing the success story of Franco-German reconciliation. If Greece and Turkey’s past becomes East-Central Europe’s future, enlargement will prove far most costly than anyone presently anticipates.
The idea that the legitimacy of international institutions affects state behavior is increasingly common in discussions of international relations, and yet little has been said about what the term legitimacy means or how it works. This is peculiar, since legitimacy is widely cited in domestic social studies as a major reason, along with coercion and self-interest, that actors obey rules. I examine the concept of legitimacy, defined as the internalization of an external rule, as it is used in domestic studies and in international relations, and find that the existence of institutions that states accept as legitimate has important implications for theories of international relations. Using the norms of sovereign nonintervention as an illustration, I compare coercion, self-interest, and legitimacy as three motivations for rule-following by states. Self-interest and coercion, alone or together, are insufficient to sustain the pattern of behavior we recognize as the system of sovereign states. The degree of settledness of borders, especially among states of unequal power, indicates that the institution of sovereignty owes part of its persistence to the widespread acceptance by states of the norms of sovereignty as legitimate. This is important for international relations because the existence of legitimate rules signals the presence of authority, which is inconsistent with the received image of the international system as anarchic. I conclude the article by charting a course of further research into the ideas of legitimacy, authority, and anarchy.
Analysts of the European Union (EU) and international bargaining have generally failed to appreciate how the shift within the EU from unanimity to qualified majority voting has affected European bargaining positions and international outcomes. I analyze the international effects of changes in EU decision-making rules with a simple spatial model and assess the utility of the model in two cases that span the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty. The EU can decisively shape international outcomes by concentrating the weight of its fifteen member states on a single substantive position and rendering that position critical to any internationally negotiated agreement. The findings generalize to numerous areas of EU external relations and suggest that analysts should attend specifically to the EU and more generally to domestic and regional institutional factors in explaining international bargaining outcomes.