Category Archives: International Relations Theory

The Prestige Dilemma of States

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Thucydides argued that states fight for glory, gain, and fear. This suggests that scarcity is a driving motive of interstate conflict.

However, gain is not scarce over time. Growth is not zero-sum. Although Grieco has suggested that scarcity competition will apply somewhat in a concern for relative gains, this is disputed.

But the case is clearer for security and prestige. Jervis has famously described a security dilemma in which an improvement for A automatically means a decrease for B. Security is a zero-sum game.

The same should be said of prestige, but there is little literature on this. The role of prestige is undertheorized in IR. Perhaps because it feels too ideational, it does not seems to appeal to the materialist/empirical bent of realism especially.

But the emergence of peace studies, a normative sub-branch of IR, has made this gap problematic. Peace studies frequently asserts that prestige and questions of political will are the driving force behind conflict (Barash and Webel, 166). Peace researchers are posting, implicitly, a prestige dilemma. Not all states may be equally esteemed, so prestige, like security, is zero-sum. Hence states may use compellance and coercion to advance in the status hierarchy.

A turn toward to prestige as a cause of war would serve the field. It emanates from the second image, and this serves the general move by the field away from structural explanations. As Schweller and Priess have noted (1997), Waltz’ work has become something of a straightjacket now on IR. They argue for nuanced explanations that draw from the state level. A focus on prestige answers that call.

Global Pluralism: States, NGOs and MNCs Around International Organizations

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Research Note: Global Governance as Interest Group Pluralism for the World

States, nongovernmental organizations and multinational corporations now circle international organizations and international regimes in pursuit of their interests in reasonably coherent global public policy process. To be sure, that process is still dominated by large and powerful states, but democratization and instantaneous communication have opened the process other actors – small states, as well as private and non-profit actors.

Realism has no account of non-state actors. To do so, would threaten its sense of identity. State-centricity is such fundamental assumption, that it has nothing really to say about my project.

Constructivism overreads NGOs as successful norm entrepreneurs. While they are norm or identitarian entrepreneurs, this does not mean they succeed in that entrepreneurship. It is a major flaw in the literature on NGOs and affiliated social movements, that it focuses so heavily on the conditions necessary for the successful impact on world politics. This selects on the dependent variable and ‘overprivileges’ constructivist readings of NGOs.

A far simpler explanation of NGOs’ role comes from liberal, or more precisely, rationalist institutionalism. Here NGOs are separate discrete actors, pursuing their goals against IGOs, and deploying various resources against them in rather standard bargaining environments and negotiating tactics. So NGOs protest on the street, write op-ed pieces in the press, attend conferences with representatives of the institutions, hire researchers and consultants to generate position papers, etc.

Hence it is far easier to understand NGO activity around IGOs as a global analogue to that of national interest groups around national governments. Much of the literature on NGOs is from a constructivist vein that focuses on them as ideational actors transforming the world order, compelling states, MNCs, and IGOs to ‘re-think’ themselves, or potential democratizers of an elite-dominated global governance. These large order claims are not wrong in that NGOs like to see themselves in these ways, but the empirical evidence to support a successful prosecution of these strategies is thin. In my work, liberal rationalist explanations of inter-organizational conflict and negotiation explain far more NGO-driven change at the BWI, than any expansive, macro-level claim that the NGOs have successful gotten the BWI to ‘re-think’ themselves.

Therefore, liberals need to intervene more here. I want to build a theory of global pluralism that scales up domestic theories of interest group pluralism. As globalization is increasing the need and efficacy of global governance, NGOs and other private actors are following the power. So as the WTO and BWI have gained in influence and authority in recent decades, so they have increasingly attracted NGOs and other private actors to them. In the same way we think of interest groups swirling about state governments in image of moons around a planet, so the same satellite model can explain the clutch of private actors now revolving around instances of GG.

INGOs as Transnational Interest Groups: After Social Movement Theory

INGOs are settling into a comfortable bureaucratic life around IGOs and International Regimes. As Weber noted, movements that began as charismatic, flamboyant, and spontaneous calcify into structures and institutions over time. NGOs are maturing in this vein. They are leaving the realm of social movement and becoming full institutionalized, expected, participants in global governance. Indeed, the regularity and ‘expectedness’ of NGO participation in global governance is strong evidence that GG exists. But the exciting, street-protesting days of social movements are passing. The fringe of dangerous anarchists de-legitimized the AG movement in the eyes of many in the major IOs of global governance, and more mature, cooperative, and better informed NGOs are stepping into the global non-profit space. While this heralds a more expertise-driven dialogue between NGOs, and states and IOs, it also foresees the ‘bureaucratization’ of NGOs into world politics.’ As the free-spiritedness of NGOs at the UN has been drained by the tedium of ECOSOC bureaucracy, so the World Bank, WTO and IMF are doing as well. Gone are the open ended parallel conferences of the 1990s. Now NGO participants at the BWI Annual Meetings register with the BWI to attend proto-typical policy seminars inside the buildings.

Can Global Governance Survive the Resurgence of US Sovereignty?

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Research Note

Thesis: The resurgence of American hegemonic pretensions threatens the GG project. It suggests a return to a strictly power-driven process informing bargaining outcomes. However the US will not wholly reject GG schemes for three reasons. 1. There are high costs to be carried by going it alone. Cooperation, even with NGOs, has real benefits to the US it will not be anxious to forego. 2. The US controls power domestically through process and law. It is proud of this achievement. This creates internal popular pressures for American power to wielded internationally through processes rather than naked or arbitraty displays of force which would be unacceptable in domestic politcs. 3. The US is pluralist. With a strong civil society tradition at home including its access direct to the public policy process, there would be high domestic reputation and ideology costs were we to seek to exclude civil society and NGOs from the international public policy process.

Why are these relevant?

Realism suggests to us that the distribution of military capabilities and economic capacity among states is the pre-eminent measure of power and ‘outcome-determination’ in world politics. By such a measure, we need not examine ‘global get-togethers’ like the UN mega-conferences or the smaller BWI meetings. The important decisions are made in the capitals of the state-system’s poles, and in unipolarity, there is only one capital that is truly relevant for shaping world political outcomes.

GG scholars respond to this critique in 2 ways.

1. GG theory understands the world political system more sociologically. World politics is a community exercise in administration and management. Few would dispute that states are the most relevant actor, however they move in a world of other actors as well as norms. There is a ‘constitutional architecture’ in which World politics is more communal than neorealism admits.

2. These many actors include IGOs, MNCs and GCS/NGOs. States are more powerful, by realism’s hard indicators on military and economic might. However GG suggests that hard power is not wholly efficacious for the outcomes states seek, and that power is more diffuse than states realize. States ability to win contests of national might are simply not relevant in most dealings in IR. It may be the ultima ratio in the high politics of security, but as Graham suggested in his models 2 and 3, much of most of world politics is low politics – bargaining, arranging, coordinating, sharing on mundane or highly technical issues. Issues such as the environment, trafficking (drugs, human, weapons), development, tracking terrorism and others are simply not amenable to national power traditionally conceived. In lieue of world conquest, even hegemons will come to the table anf bargain and deal with other states and other actors.

Global Governance

GG is the large web of rules and institutions that generate outcomes in world politics. It is the “constitutional architecture” (Reus-Smit) of the world political system and the beginnings of an international public policy process (Commission on Global Governance). Traditionally realists IR scholarship speak of global governance as the provision of a hegemon or k-group. Yet we have learned that much of what states seek to achieve is impossible or far more costly without cooperative global governance. To be more precise, global governance could be raw hegemony to the exclusion of other actors, enforced on the world by the unipole. But even in this era of unrivalled American national might, it hasn’t the power to govern by such diktat. In lieu of global conquest, GG is “complex multilateralism” (O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte and Williams) rather the unipolar fiat. We talk of GG rather than hegemony because the architecture includes more than the superpower and the great powers.

There is much that states cannot do for themselves. Many issues, such as trafficking, the environment or terrorism are not amenable to ‘hard power.’ They require cooperation. Power, the ability to achieve one’s desired outcomes, is diffuse in the world political system, not nearly as concentrated as realists would have us believe. Different actors have different capabilities. Even superpowers like the United States has use for NGOs (for information on human rights, treaty monitoring, or development aid delivery) and IGOs (for coordination and lower transaction costs) and private firms (for impartial credit ratings, e.g.) As Rosenau and many others have observed power cascades through the systems where there is social complexity. New centers of authority, specifically, authoritative knowledge arise. This is not the fall of the state, but the rise in the importance of other actors.

These points bear restating in an era of description of the United States as a colossus that bestrides the world (Economist). Despite the unrivalled might of the United States by the realist measures of military capability and economic capacity, unipolarity does not translate into omnipotence. Even the United States will pay attention to the smallest NGOs which have definitive knowledge in some area of interest. This understanding lies behind the continuing international architecture to which the United States belongs and whose conferences it attends.

1. The resurgence of hard power in international politics has once again proven the centrality of the state. Luck was right.

2. The traditional indices of power – military capability and economic capacity – were never irrelevant. Rather so concentrated in one state were they, that seemed to recess in ‘daily IR’ because almost everyone was bandwagoning or hedging. If everyone signs up for the hegemon’s project, unipolarity can be pleasant (Wohlforth, Stability). Because there was no balancing, in the 1990s the topical debates became did not concern national power. Other concerns like GG and NGOs arose, but only in the shadow of Unipolar power.

3. GG only arose because the unipole was liberal, plural and deomcratic. It is premised on liberal unipolarity. Had the SU won the Cold War, or were China to usurp hegeomic leadership, the cooperative, inclusive bargaining of GG would disappear. Because the hegemon is liberal, it would carry high domestic political costs and world reputational costs if it openly sought to exclude NGOs, MNCs and IOs from relevance. Yet illiberal states with no tradition of openness would hardly permit “complex multilateralism.” They would exploit their hard power advantages to leverage outcomes as they saw fit with little regard for non-state and weak state actors.

3a. There is a polict prescriptive element to the liberal hegemonic basis to GG. NGOs particularly should be more forgiving of the US. The only reason the unipole listens to it and forces some changes in the IFA, is because it is a liberal. If poor states think they are getting a bad deal under the US, imagine the other picks – China, Russia. Even liberal France should be expected to its unipolarity more exploitative than the US as it is an ex-imperial power.

4. However, global governance does try to include the role of the state in its ‘constitutional archiecture’ of world politics (Reus-Smit). “Complex multilateralism” does not debunk the state’s role, but rather seeks to accentuate the role of other actors. Hence the question is whether GG can survive in an environment when one of those actors is vastly more powerful than all the others (even combined). Luck has counseled IO elites not try to makes deals with NGOs around the backs of state decision-makers, because such a 2 vs 1 scheme will backfire due to power inequalities. The result will be state elites’ distrust of both NGOs and IOs and greater state supervision of IOs. (And this ultimately runs counter to NGO goals. NGOs endorse neoliberal institutionalism. They want autonomous IOs. They can be lobbied far more easily than greatpowers.)

Literature:

Peter Spiro, “The New Sovereigntists” Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2000

Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Present Danger” The National Interest spring 2000

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, “The Rocky Shoals of International Law” The National Interest winter 2000

Jesse Helms, “American Sovereignty and the UN” The National Interest winter 2000

John Bolton, “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” Chicago Journal of International Law, Fall 2000

Kal Rustia, “Trends in Global Governance: Do They Threaten American Sovereignty?” hicago Journal of International Law fall 2000

Commentary January 2000 Symposium on American Power