International Relations (Core Concepts and Institutions)

Hoffman, Stanley. “An American Social Science: International Relations.” 1977.

“Without s study of political relations, how could one understand the fumblings and failures of international law, or the tormented debates on the foundation of obligation among sovereigns unconstrained by common values or superior power” (213).

“But international politics remained the sports of kings, or the preserve of cabinets – the last refuge of secrecy, the last domain of largely hereditary castes of diplomats” (214).

“There was to be sure one country in which foreign policy was put under domestic checks and balances, knew no career caste, and paid little respect to the rules and rituals of the initiated European happy few: the United States of America” (214).

“And yet, a World War that saw the mobilization and slaughter of millions, marked the demise of the old diplomatic order, and ended as a kind of debate between Wilson and Lenin for the allegiance of mankind, brought forth little ‘scientific analysis’ of international relations” (215).

“It was the United States that international relations became a discipline” (216).

“The circumstances were, obviously, the rise of the United States to world power, a rise accompanied by two contradictory impulses: renewed utopianism, as exemplified by the plans for post-war international organization; and a mix of revulsion against, and guilt about, the peculiar pre-war brew of impotent American idealism” (216).

“If our discipline has any founding father, it is Morgenthau” (216).

“The model interstate relations which Morgenthau proposed, and the precepts of ‘realism’ which he presented as the only valid recipes for foreign policy success as well as for international moderation, were derived from the views of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century historians of statecraft” (217).

“First, by definition, political scientists are fascinated with power – either because they want it, or because they fear it and want to understand the monster…” (221).

“The political preeminence of the United States is the factor I would stress most in explaining why the discipline has fared so badly, by comparison, in the rest of the world” (224).

“But the predominant doctrines have remained American, as if even in the more abstract efforts at theorizing about a weapon that has transformed world politics, it mattered if one was the citizen or host of a country with a worldwide writ” (224).

“There are two reasons why the Washingtonian temptation is so strong. There is the simple fact that international politics remains the politics of states: whether or not, in the abstract, the actor is the shaper or is shaped by the system, in reality there is no doubt that the United States remains the most potent player” (235).

“There has, instead, been a drive to eliminate from the discipline all that exists in the field itself – hence a quest for precision that turns out false or misleading” (237).

“In a way, the key question has not been ‘What should we know,’ it has been ‘What should we do?’ about the Russians, the Chinese, etc…” (238).

“Born and raised in America, the discipline of international relations is, so to speak, too close to the fire. It needs triple distance: it should move away from the contemporary, toward the past; from the perspective of a superpower (and a highly conservative one), to ward that of the weak and revolutionary…” (240).

“Scholars in international relations have two good reaons to be dissatisfied: the state of the world and the state of their discipline” (241).

Angell. “The Great Illusion.” 1933.

The author attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed ; that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed; that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers…in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which peoples strive” (59-60).

“Germany could not turn Canada or Australia into German colonies – i.e stamp out their language, law, literature, traditions, etc., by ‘capturing’ them” (61).

“War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest: it involves the survival of the less fit” (62).

“War does not arise because consciously wicked men take a course which they know to be wrong, but because good men on both sides pursue a course which they believe to be right, stand, as Lincoln stood when he made war, for the right as they see fit” (71).

“Since, by universal admission, the maintenance of the nation’s power is the condition of its continued prosperity, he intends, so long as he is able, to maintain that power, and not yield it, even in the name of altruism” (74).

“The wealth, prosperity, and well-being of a nation depend in no way upon its military power; otherwise we should find the commercial prosperity, and the economic well-being of the smaller nations, which exercise no such power, manifestly below that of the great nations which control Europe, whereas this is not the case” (89).

“The relative economic situation of the small States gives the lie to it all. This profound political philosophy is seen to be just learned nonsense when we realize that all the might of Russia or Germany cannot secure the for the individual citizen better general economic conditions that those prevalent in the little States” (95).

“Two features characterize the economic and financial apparatus of that world: interdependence and various complexities” (117).

Osiander, Andreas. Rereading Early Twentieth Century IR Theory: Idealism Revisited” 1998.

“I contend that [Idealist] writers ground their interpretations of international relations on a shared paradigm that has hitherto gone largely unrecognized” (409).

“The most fundamental difference between Idealism and Realism is their respective philosophy of history – directional, as I seek to establish, in the former case, cyclical, as is well known in the latter” (410).

“I will argue that far from Idealism representing a break with long-established tradition both it and Realism are a by-product of industrialization, relatively new ways of thinking triggered by the attempt to come to terms with each other, the two are in fact intellectual twins” (410).

“The work of the early-Twentieth century IR authors discussed here was an ongoing, explicit or implicit dialogue with the position later labeled Realist. This in itself constitutes an important, though very rarely acknowledged characteristic of their work that is crucial for a proper assessment” (415).

“Like other authors, Zimmern stresses the increasing integration of the world and its component states as a result of technological innovation, more specifically the increasing speed and ease and hence volume of global communication” (417).

“Realism adopts a static or cyclical interpretation of history, for which, in Martin Wright’s famous words, interstate politics is the realm of recurrence and repetition” (418).

“For Zimmern, the present was an age of transition which meant that ‘we are in fact living through an interregenum in political science’ (418).

“Kant too saw history as a process of increasing integration between states, not least through growing economic links…” (420).

“But realism – not for notihn proud of an assumed millennial tradition that today coopts figures like Thucydides, Machiavelli, or Hobbes as its intellectual forbears – is a doctrine that, insistently and tenaciously, takes its cues from pre-industrial historical experience” (421).

“As a result, Realism naturally discounts the importance of economic interdependence” (422).

“It would now appear that it was the early twentieth century IR Idealists who had the correct long-term prognosis, while the adoption of the rival realist paradigm by academic IR since the late 1930s was based on a shortsighted interpretation of events at that time” (430).

Haas, Ernest. “Beyond the Nation-State.” 1964.

“Functionalists, in the specific sense of the term, are interested in identifying those aspects of human needs and desires that exists and clamor for attention outside the realm of the political” (6).

“Everything that actually occurs must occur because of some systemic need. What interests us here is whether the functions involved refer to the results of an action, the implicit needs leading to the action, or the explicit purposes underlying the action in the minds of the actors” (5).

“The philosophical reasoning underlying this program does not at the moment concern us. What matters is the notion of function: it is according to the explicit content of the Functionalists writers, equivalent in meaning to organizational task” (6).

“Functionalism then becomes both an analytical tool for criticizing the deplorable present and an ideological prescription for ushering in a better future” (6).

“Does not the Functionalist notion of function also carry the connotation of cognitively perceived need on the part of the actor leading to the creation of an organizational task designed to meet the need” (6).

“This prescriptive intent is central to Functionalist theory: the Functionalists claim to possess a theoretical apparatus capable of analyzing existing society and of pinpointing the causes of its undesirable aspects; they claim, further to know the way in which a normatively superior state of affairs can be created” (7).

“Pre-industrial and pre-national primary occupational groups were the true focuses for human happiness because they afforded a sense of participation in the solution of practical problems” (9).

“But at this point Functionalist thought must be sharply distinguished from simple internationalism of the ‘one world’ variety. He Functionalist’s emphasis on social and economic primacy in the elements of a future international order is combined with a recognition that group loyalty and national attachments are more real than vague international good will” (11).

“International conflict is best tamed by entrusting the work of increasing human welfare to experts, technical specialists, and their professional associations. Being interested in tasks rather than power, they can be expected to achieve agreements where statesmen will fail” (11).

“Social conflict is not considered natural and inevitable by the Functionalists if and when there is an abundance of economic resources; only scarcity reflects conflict” (20).

“The Functionalist’s critique of other theories of international order consists of disputing the validity of a series of propositions fundamental to the so-called realist school of thought’ (21).

“It is precisely the merit of Functionalism that it broke away from the clichés of Realist political theory. Its fault lies in not having broken radically enough” (24).

“In the balance-of-power system, integration was achieved by the balancing nation’s playing its proper role, that of balancing the system so as to prevent the hegemony of any one alliance or sate. Within the system, one state always had to have the ‘role function’ of balancing; if nobody played the role, the system was transformed because the failures of the international regulatory process were fed back into the national units, which – because of excessive democracy – were unable to play their part properly” (59).

“But in order to indicate which functions would serve as needs, and where they would pus the system, we must abandon the system-oriented emphasis and turn to scholarly efforts that stress the phenomenal approach to international systems theory” (59).

“A final appeal; the functional analysis of international integration is not necessarily ideologically loaded in favor of ‘one world’. Functional analysis has no intrinsic commitment to an ideological position” (85).

Keohane and Nye. “Interdependence in World Politics.” 1989.

“We live in an era of interdependence. This vague phrase expresses a poorly understood but widespread feeling that the very nature of world politics is changing” (3).

“Interdependence affects world politics and the behavior of states; but governmental actions also influence patterns of interdependence. By creating or accepting procedures, rules or institutions for certain kinds of activity, governments regulate and control transnational and interstate relations” (5).

“For those who wish the United States to retain world leadership, interdependence has become part of the new rhetoric, to be used against both economic nationalism at home and assertive challenges abroad” (7).

“Traditional maxims of international politics – that states will act in their national interests or that they will attempt to maximize their power – become ambiguous” (8).

“Interdependence means mutual dependence” (8).

“Two different perspectives can be adopted for analyzing the costs and benefits of an interdependent relationship. The first focuses on the joint gains or joint losses to the parties involved. The other stresses relative gains and distributional issues” (10).

“We must be careful not to define interdependence entirely in terms of situations of evenly balanced mutual dependence. It is asymmetries in dependence that are most likely to provide sources of influence for actors in their dealings with one another” (10-11).

“The traditional view was that military power dominated other forms, and that states with the most military power controlled world affairs. But the resources that produce power capabilities have become more complex” (11).

“Understanding the concept of interdependence and its relevance to the concept of power is necessary to answering the first major question of this book – what are the characteristics of world politics under conditions of extensive interdependence” (19).

“Yet, as we have indicated, relationships of interdependence often occur within, and may be affected by, networks of rules, norms, and procedures that regularize behavior and control its effects. We refer to the sets of governing arrangements that affect relationships of interdependence as international regimes” (19).

‘The rules of the game include some national rules, some international rules, some private rules – and large areas of no rules at all” (19).

“Structure is therefore distinguished from process, which refers to allocative or bargaining behavior within a power structure. To use the analogy of a poker game, at the process level analysts are interested in how the players play the hands they have been dealt. At the structural level they are interested in how the cards and chips were distributed as the game started” (21).

“The structure of the system (the distribution of power resources among states) profoundly affects the nature of the regime (the more or less loose set of formal and informal norms, rules and procedures relevant to the system)” (21).

“In this chapter we shall construct another ideal type, the opposite of realism. We call it complex interdependence” (23).

Complex interdependence has three characteristics:

1. multiple channels connect societies including informal ties between governmental elites as well as formal foreign office arrangements (transgovernmental relations for example)
2. the agenda of interstate relationships consists of multiple issues that are not arranged in a clear or consistent hierarchy
3. military force is not used by governments toward other governments within the region, or on the issues, when complex interdependence prevails (25).

“In a world of complex interdependence, however, one expects some officials, particularly at lower levels, to emphasize the variety of state goals that must be pursued” (30).

“Under complex interdependence, such congruence is less likely to occur. As military force is devalued, militarily strong states will find it more difficult to use their overall dominance to control outcomes on issues in which they are weak” (30).

“The fact that world politics under complex interdependence is not a seamless web leads us to expect that efforts to stitch seams together advantageously, as reflected in linkage strategies, will, very often, determine the shape of the fabric” (31).

“Our second assumption of complex interdependence, the lack of clear hierarchy among multiple issues, leads us to expect that the politics of agenda formation and control will become more important” (32).

“International regimes help to provide the political framework within which international economic processes occur” (38).

“Political scientists tend to focus on power, whereas, ‘if we look at the main run of economic theory over the last hundred years we find that it is characterized by a strange lack of power considerations” (39).

“There is nothing new about certain kinds of interdependence among states. Athens and Sparta were interdependent in military security at the time of Thucydides” (42).

“Our analysis implies that more attention should be paid to the effect of government policies on international regimes” (221).

“In the traditionalist view, to know the distribution of the resources that provide power capabilities is to know the structure of world politics; and if we know the structure, we can predict patterns of outcomes” (224).

“But to predict and understand outcomes, we must give equal attention to the bargaining process in which power resources are translated into effective influence over outcomes” (225).

“A strong argument could even be made that complex interdependence will increasingly characterize world politics because each of the three conditions of complex interdependence corresponds to a long term historical change with deep causes of tis own’ (227).

Morse, Edward L. “Modernization and the Transformation of International Relations.”

“With the exception of Germany and Italy, formed in the last half of the nineteenth century, these powers were the same one that had dominated the interstate system since the consolidation of the modern European states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (1).

“Finally changes in the normative aspects of international politics, including the rise of pacifism and demands on the part of poorer societies of the world for a redistribution of wealth, stem largely from the politicization of ever-increasing sectors of the population everywhere for a more adequate material basis for life” (3).

“Effective decision making for both domestic and international affairs now requires centralization or collaboration between governments in increasing number of areas” (3).

“It seems to me that the underlying sources of the recent and dramatic changes in statecraft are better understood through the concept of ‘modernization’ evan at the risk of placing an empty label on a syndrome of phenomena, because its usage has been so diluted and is full of contradictions” (4).

“Although elements of modernity have virtually always existed in societies, the unique syndrome of characteristics associated with modernized societies (in terms of specialization of organized units, their self-sufficiency, level of centralization for decision making, etc.) emerges only in the nineteenth century, and it is only within the last seventy years or so that higher levels of modernization have occurred” (8).

“In fact the scientific revolution is usually identified with Newtonian physics in the seventeenth century just as the origin of the modern state system is usually dated from that time” (8).

“The first structural change that accompanied modernization, and one of the most important, was the creation of high levels of interdependence in the relationships among most societies” (9).

“The cumulative effects of knowledge and the consequent dependence of continuous modernization upon the development of institutions of higher education were largely a product of changes in the more modernized societies” (10).

“In summary then there are two significant ways in which modernization has affected the structure of the international system that can be derived directly as consequences of exponential growth: the emergence of certain forms of interdependence among a large set of states and the transitional nature of the international system” (14).

“A fourth effect imposed on international society by the revolution of modernization has to do with the paradox of change” (15).

“A fifth effect of change on international political behavior in the twentieth century is the inevitable and increasingly destabilizing lag between perceptions of what the world is and external reality” (16).

“A sixth transformation in international society stemming from modernization has been the unprecedented growth of transnational activities” (17).

“In fact, diplomatic historians have often pinpointed a specific date for the origins of the modern state system, namely 1648, the year of the Peace of Westphalia, which brought an end to the Thirty Year’s war.” (23).

Westphalia: “Its settlement marked the end of the notion of a universal Christian community as well as the beginning of the secularization of politics” (24).

“Masterless man was freed of the shackles of medieval society and had the power to shape the new societies as he willed. His new freedom included the freedom to order the political community” (24).

“One of these assumptions was that the highest political good is political order, which could be found only in political society, that is, in the state” (26).

Central tenets of traditional statecraft:

1. mercantilist system of trade
2. states are formally and equally sovereign
3. principal of the primacy of foreign policy over domestic policy
4. heroic framework of diplomacy
5. balance of power was the principle notion that was invoked to describe the structure of the international system (28).

“As a lawmaker a sovereign could not himself be bound by the laws he made, but also could not simply rule arbitrarily” (33).

“The concept of sovereignty implied an ontological as well as a normative divorce between the conduct of domestic affairs and the pursuit of foreign policy” (34).

“The Westphalia system emerged in a period of political heroism that idealized the capacities of ‘master builders’ of the new political order” (36).

“Like the balance of trade, a core concept of mercantilism, the balance of power was viewed as a permanent feature of international life that rulers were interminably attempting to tilt it in their own favor” (38).

“But very few statesmen seem to follow to precepts of political realism and their societies have persevered’ (43).

Two types of interdependence:

1. strategic interaction: involves the purposeful action of two or more governments when the choice of actions of each depends upon the choices of others
2. systemic interdependence: brought about via technological change which changes transportation costs and occurs fundamentally different from strategic interaction

Waltz, Kenneth. “Theory of International Relations’ 1979.

“Though many students of international politics believe that the balance-of-power game requires at least three or four players, [but] two will do’ (163).

“With more than two states, the politics of power turn on the diplomacy by which alliances are made, maintained and disrupted. Flexibility of alignment means both that the country one is wooing may prefer another suitor and that one’s present alliance partner may defect” (165).

“If pressures are strong enough, a state will deal with almost anyone” (166).

“Alliances are made by states that have some but not all of their interests in common. The common interest is ordinarily a negative one: fear of other states” (166).

“States or parties in wartime or in electoral alliance, even as they adjust to one another continue to jockey for advantage and to worry about the constellation of forces that will form once the contest is over” (167).

“Conversely they have believed that bipolar worlds are doubly unstable – that they easily erode or explode. This conclusion is based on false reasoning and scant evidence” (168).

“This cannot be the case in a bipolar world, for third parties are not able to tilt the balance of power by withdrawing from one alliance or by joining the other” (169).

“In balance-of-power old politics style, flexibility of alignment made for rigidity of strategy or the limitation of freedom of decision. In balance-of-power politics new style, the obverse is true: rigidity of alignment in a two-power world makes for flexibility of strategy and the enlargement of freedom of decision’ (170).

“Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has to make itself acceptable to other states; they do have to cope with each other” (170).

“In a bipolar world there are no peripheries. With only two powers capable of acting on a world scale, anything that happens anywhere is potentially of concern to both of them” (171).

“…overreaction by either or both of the great powers is the source of danger in a bipolar world” (172).

“A system of two have many virtues” (176).

“Where each state must tend to its own security as best it can, the means adopted by one state must be geared to the efforts of others” (185).

“Power maintains an order; the use of force signals a possible breakdown” (185).

“Two great powers can deal with each other better than more can” (193).

Krasner, Stephen. “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables” 1982.

“Regimes can be defined as sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ preferences converge in a given area of international relations. Principles are beliefs of fact, causation, and rectitude. Norms are standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action. Decision-making procedures are prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice” (186).

“Regimes must be understood as something more than temporary arrangements that change with every shift in power or interests” (186).

“Changes in rules and decision-making procedures are changes within regimes, provided that principles and norms are unaltered” (187).

“If the principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures of a regime become less coherent, or if actual practice is increasingly inconsistent with principles, norms, rules and procedures, then a regime has weakened” (189).

Three views on regimes:

Realists: “Conventional structural views the regime concept as useless, if not misleading” (190).

Modified structural view (Keohane and Stein): “suggest that regimes may matter, but only under fairly restrictive conditions” (190).

Groatian view (Young and Puchala): “sees regimes as much more pervasive, as inherent attributes of any complex, persistent pattern of human behavior’ (190).

“In a world of sovereign states the basic function of regime is to coordinate state behavior to achieve desired outcomes in particular issue areas” (191).

Groatian: “Hopkins and Puchala conclude that ‘regimes exist in all areas of international relations, even those, such as major power rivalry, that are traditionally looked upon as clear-cut examples of anarchy” (192).

“Oran Young finds that… if the observer finds a pattern or interrelated activity, and the connection in the patterns are understood, then there must be some form of norms and procedures” (193).

More Young: Oran Young has taken up this last issue to create an institutional bargaining model of regime formation.[18] He argues that earlier studies have been too optimistic about reaching an agreement because they do not properly account for the uncertainty actors feel about their strategy and that of others. For this reason, states focus on the bargaining process itself rather than distributive issues, which make cooperation more likely. Through integrative bargaining, uncertainty is reduced and a requirement of unanimity also helps reduce fears.

Causal variables associated with regimes:

1. egoistic self-interest
2. political power

- power in the service of the common good

- power in the service of particular interests

c. norms and principles

d. usage and custom

e. knowledge

Krasner, Stephen. “Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes and Autonomous Variables” 1982.

Two realist views: billiard balls and tectonic plates.

Realism’s “first tradition in encapsulated in the billiard ball metaphor. The international system is composed solely of states. States are interested in maximizing their power” (498).

Realism’s “second tradition envisions a more complicated universe. Here the issue is the impact of the distribution of state power on some external environment’ (498).

“The appropriate metaphor for this perspective is not billiard balls but tectonic plates. One plate can be envisioned as the distribution of power among states, the other as regimes and related behavior and outcomes” (499).

“Pressure between the plates vary over time. When regimes are first created there is little pressure. Over time pressure develops at the interface of the plates as they move at different rates” (499).

“Once regimes do not necessarily change even though the basic causal variables that led to their creation in the first place have altered. Lags between shifts in basic causal variables, especially the distribution of power, and regimes and behavior, can become a central phenomenon of international relations” (500).

“Lags refer to situations in which the relationship between basic causal variables and regimes become attenuated” (501).

“Lags may arise because of custom and usage, uncertainty, and cognitive failing” (502).

Krasner’s puzzle:

“The game-theoretic and microeconomic analyses of Stein and Keohane suggest that the existence of regimes can alter calculations of interests by changing ‘incentives and opportunities” (503).

“Regimes may change the interests that led to their creation in the first place by increasing transaction flows, facilitating knowledge and understanding and creating property rights” (504).

“A third feedback mechanism from regimes to basic causal variables involves situations in which the regime is used by actors with limited national capabilities as a source of power” (506).

“Finally regimes may alter the underlying power capabilities of their members” (507).

“If regimes matter, then cognitive understanding can matter as well” (510).

Ruggie, John. “Multilateralism: the Anatomy of an Institution.” 1992.

“The fact that norms and institutions matter comes as no surprise to the ‘new institutionalists’ in international relations…But curiously they have paid little attention to a core feature of current international institutional arrangements: their multilateral form” (565).

“The missing qualitative dimensions of multilateralism immediately comes into focus, however, if we return to an older institutionalist discourse, one informed by the postwar aims of the United States to restructure the international order” (566).

“At its core, multilateralism refers to coordinating relations among three or more states in accordance with certain principles” (568).

“Our illustrations suggest that multilateralism is an institutional form which coordinates relations among three or more states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct – that is, principles which specify appropriate conduct for a class of actions, without regard to the particularistic interests of the parties of the strategic exigencies that may exist in any specific occurrence” (571).

“In contrast, the bilateralist form, such as the Schachtian device and traditional alliances, differentiates relations case-by-case based precisely on a priori particularistic grounds or situational exigencies” (571).

Organizing principles are invisible: “This invisibility here is a social construction, not a technical condition; in a collective security scheme, states behave as if peace were indivisible and thereby make it so” (571).

“It follows from this definition and its corollaries that multilateralism is a highly demanding institutional form” (572).

“In sum, what makes a regime a regime is that it satisfies the definitional criteria of encompassing principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge.. what makes a regime multilateral in form, beyond involving three or more states, is that the substantive meanings on those terms roughly reflect the appropriate generalized principles of conduct” (573).

“In the economic realm, the nineteenth century witnessed what economists consider to be paradigms, if not paragons, of multilateralism: free trade and the gold standard” (580).

“Functional theories of international institutions, as we noted at the outset, thus far have focused largely on undifferentiated “cooperation’ and “institutions” not the specific form of multilateralism” (591).

Brooks, Stephen. “Dueling Realisms” 1997.

“International relations scholars have tended to focus on realism’s common features rather than exploring potential differences” (445).

“The first branch is Kenneth Waltz’s well-known neorealist theory; a second branch termed here postclassical realism has yet to be delineated as a major alternative but corresponds with a number of realist analyses…” (446).

“Three assumptions differentiate these two branches of realism. Most significant is whether states are conditioned by the mere possibility of conflict or, alternatively, make decisions based on the probability of aggression” (446).

‘Postclassical realism does not assume states employ worst-case reasoning; rather states are understood as making decisions based on assessments of probabilities regarding security threats” (446).

“In contrast, postclassical realism does not regard long-term objectives as always subordinate to short term security requirements; here, states often make intertemporal trade-offs” (446).

“In postclassical realism, rational policymakers may trade off a degree of military preparedness if the potential net gains in economic capacity are substantial relative to the probability of security losses” (447).

“However, even if these three factors are manifested, this situation by no means compels a rational state to adopt a wrost case/possibilistic perspective – neorealists simply assume that rational states will react in this manner” (449).

“Although this worst case/possibilistic view is only an assumption, it plays a pivotal – although usually unrecognized – role in neorealist theory’ (449).

“The focus of postclassical realism on the probability – and not the possibility – of conflict results in a conception of the international system as often having lower security pressures than neorealists assume” (458).

“Compared to classical realism, postclassical realism envisions states as being more deliberative in their pursuit of power” (462).

“Given realism’s focus on competition in the international system, it is curious that realists have so far refrained from engaging in intellectual competition with each other regarding their theory’s assumptions” (463).

Moravcsik, Andrew. “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics. 1997.

“Liberal IR theory elaborates the insight that state-society relations – the relationship of states to the domestic and transnational social context in which they are embedded – have a fundamental impact on state behavior in world politics” (513).

“For liberals, the configuration of state preferences matters most in world politics – not as realists argues, the configuration of capabilities and not, as institutionalists maintain, the configuration of information and institutions” (513).

Core assumptions of liberal IR theory:

1. the primacy of societal actors

“Liberal theory rests on a ‘bottom-up’ views of politics in which the demands of individuals and societal groups are treated as analytically prior to politics” (517).

2. states represent some subsets of domestic society on the basis of whose interests state officials define state preferences and act purposively in world politics (518).
3. The configuration of interdependent state preferences determines state behavior (520).

Variations of liberalism:

1. ideational liberalism: views the configuration of domestic social identities and values as a basic determinant of state preferences and, therefore, of interstate conflict and cooperation
2. commercial liberalism: explains the individual and collective behavior of states based on the patterns of market incentives facing domestic and transnational economic actors
3. republican liberalism: liberal theory emphasizes the ways in which domestic institutions and practices aggregate those demands transforming them into state policy

Liberal theory’s other claims:

1. liberal theory provides a plausible theoretical explanation for variation in the substantive content of foreign policy
2. liberal theory offers a plausible explanation for historical change in the international system
3. liberal theory offers a plausible explanation for the distinctiveness of modern international politics

“The liberal view of regimes as ‘socially embedded’ can be extended to suggest endogenous causes of regime change over time” (537).

“In short, liberal theory explains when and why the assumptions about state preferences underlying realism or institutionalism hold whereas the reverse is not the case” (543).

Putnam, Robert. “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: the Logic of Two-Level Games” 1988.

“My research suggests first that the key governments at Bonn adopted policies different from those that they would have pursued in the absence of international negotiations, but second, that agreement was possible only because a powerful minority within each government actually favored on domestic grounds the policy being demanded internationally” (428).

“Neither a purely domestic nor a purely international analysis could account for this episode. Interpretations cast in terms either of domestic causes and international effects (second image) or of international causes and domestic effects (second image reversed)…” (430).

“The politics of many international negotiations can usefully be conceived as a two-level game. At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among these groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments” (434).

“The political complexities for the players in this two-level game are staggering. Any key player at the international table who is dissatisfied with the outcome may upset the game board, and conversely, any leader who fails to satisfy his fellow players at the domestic table risks being evicted from his seat” (434).

“Given this set of arrangements we may define the ‘win-set’ for a given Level II constituency as the set of all possible Level I agreements that would win – that is gain the necessary majority among the constituents – when simply voted up or down” (437).

“Conversely, the samller the win-sets, the greater the risk that the negotiations will break down” (438).

“The second reason why win-set is important is that the relative size of the respective Level II win-sets will affect the distribution of the joint gains from the international bargain” (440).

Three factors determine win-set size:

1. distribution of power, preferences and possible coalitions among Level II constituents
2. size of the win-set depends on the Level II political institutions
3. size of the win-set depends on the strategies of the Level I negotiatiors

“Unlike the ‘Second Image’ or the ‘Second Image Reversed’ the two-level approach recognizes that central-decision makers strive to reconcile domestic and international imperatives simultaneously” (460).

Abbot, Keohane, Moravcsik, Slaughter and Snidal. “The Concept of Legalization.” 2000.

“Legalization refers to a particular set of characteristics that institutions may (or may not) possess. These characteristics are defined along three dimensions: obligation, precision and delegation” (401).

“Obligation means that states or other actors are bound by a rule or commitment or by a set of rules or commitments” (401).

“Precision means that rules unambiguously define the conduct they require, authorize or proscribe” (401).

“Delegation means that third parties have been granted authority to implement, interpret and apply the rules; to resolve disputes; and possibly to make further rules” (401).

“Note that we have defined legalization in terms of key characteristics of rules and procedures not in terms of effects” (402).

“A central feature of our conception of legalization is the variability of each of its three dimensions, and therefore of the overall legalization of international norms, agreements and regimes” (404).

“Given the range of possibilities we do not take the position that greater legalization or any particular form of legalization is inherently superior” (408).

“International law also provides principles for the interpretation of agreements and a variety of technical rules on such matters as formation, reservation and amendments” (409).

“Highly legalized institutions are those in which rules are obligatory on parties through links to the established rules and principles of international law, in which rules are precise, and in which authority to interpret and apply the rules has been delegated to third parties acting under the constraint of rules” (418).

Abbott, and Snidal. “Hard and Soft Law in International Governance.” 2000.

“The term hard law as used in this special issue refers to legally binding obligations that are precise and that delegate authority for interpreting and implementing the law” (421).

“The realm of ‘soft law’ begins once legal arrangements are weakened along one or more of the dimensions of obligation, precision and delegation. This softening can occur in varying degrees along each dimension and in different combinations across dimensions” (422).

“One way legalization enhances credibility is by constraining self-serving auto-interpretation” (427).

“A major advantage of softer forms of legalization is their lower contracting costs. Hard legalization reduces the post-agreement costs of managing and enforcing commitments, but adoption of a highly legalized agreement entails significant contracting costs” (434).

“In sum, we argue that states face tradeoffs in choosing levels of legalization. Hard agreements reduce the costs of operating within a legal framework – by strengthening commitments, reducing transaction costs and the like – but they are hard to reach. Soft agreements cannot yield all these benefits but they lower the costs of achieving legalization in the first place” (436).

“More generally, the many forms of legalization reminds us that international politics and international law are not alternative realms but are deeply intertwined. Although one goal of law – as of institutions in general – is to settle key issues so that actors can regularize their interactions, the creation and development of legal arrangements is highly political” (455).

Russett. “Grasping the Democratic Peace.” 1993.

“Immanuel Kant spoke of a perpetual peace based partially upon states sharing republican constitutions” (4).

“The strong norm that democracies should not fight each other seems to have developed only toward the end of the nineteenth century. That time period provides a number of examples in which stable democracies engaged in serious diplomatic disputes that took them to the brink of war, without ever actually going over the edge” (5).

“Largely unnoticed however was the empirical fact that democracies had rarely if ever gone to war with each other during this period” (9).

“But by the 1970s with the increasing numbers of democracies in the international system, the empirical fact of peace among democracies became harder to ignore” (10).

“Still there was little war, or even serious threats of war, to be found in relationships among those democracies” (10).

“Democratically organized political systems in general operate under constraints that make them more peaceful in their relations with other democracies. Democracies are not necessarily peaceful, however, in their relations with other kinds of political systems” (11).

“Democracies are constrained in going to war by the need to ensure broad popular support, manifested in various institutions of government. Leaders must mobilize public opinion to obtain legitimacy for their actions. Bureaucracies, the legislature, and private interest groups often incorporated in conceptualizations of the state must acquiesce” (38).

Rosato, Sebastian. “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory.” 2003.

“Democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resolution and do not trust or respect one another when their interests clash. Moreover, elected leaders are not especially accountable to peace loving publics or pacific interest groups, democracies are not particularly slow to mobilize or incapable of surprise attack, and open political competition does not guarantee that a democracy will reveal private information about its level of resolve thereby avoiding conflict.”

“American interventions to destabilize fellow democracies in the developing world provide good evidence that democracies do not always treat each other with trust and respect when they have a conflict of interest.”

“There are good reasons to believe that accountability, a mechanism common to all five variants of the institutional logic does not affect democratic leaders any more than it affects their autocratic counterparts.”

“First, democratic processes and institutions often reveal so much information that it is difficult for opposing states to interpret it.”

“In the case of the normative logic, liberal democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resolution and do not treat one another with trust and respect when their interests clash.”

“One potential explanation is that the democratic peace is in fact an imperial peace based on American power.”

Ashley, Richard K. “Living on Border Lines: Man, Postructuralism and War.” 1989.

“As poststructuralist understand, modernity is simply not an arching, homogenous order susceptible to analysis in terms of some totalizing narrative: some attempt to uncover some deep and total structure that, as a source, generates the surface experience of the ‘modern’ in all the far reaches of its influence” (260).

“The logocentric procedure is not difficult to understand. Its workings are most plainly seen in relation to familiar practical oppositions: core/periphery for example…” (261).

“What is noteworthy about this logocentric disposition is that it imposes upon modern theory and practice a blindness with respect to the inescabale historicity of subjects, objects, and modes of conduct” (262).

“Encountering conflict, change, or diversity of historical interpretation and practice, a logocentric discourse can acknowledge difference, yes” (262).

“A narrative is a representation that arrests ambiguity and controls the proliferation that is taken to be fixed and independent of the time it represents” (263).

“Even as modern discourse criticizes an ideology, a repressive culture, an order of domination, a ritual of state legitimation, or a pathology of social life – regarding it in some sense as imprisoning, false, or ill – modern discourse must invoke a sovereign subjectivity of man that is taken to be the ultimate origin of freedom, truth or health” (266).

“The problem is that a modern discourse, in order to privilege reasoning man over history, must firsts constitute reasoning man as a being different from and set in opposition to history…” (267).

“In its critical stance, postructuralism refuses to take up a position than can be said to be either within the regime of modernity or, strictly speaking, external to it” (271).

“In contrast to modern social theory poststructuralism eschews grand designs, transcendental grounds, or universal projects of humankind” (284).

Der Derian, James. “The Space of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance and Speed.” 1990.

“First, poststructuralism is a semio-critical activity ever searching for and seeking to dismantle the empirico-rational positions where power fixes meaning” (296).

“The three new forces in international relations that I will examine are simulation, surveillance and speed. The problematic they have generated can be simply put: the closer technology and scientific discourse bring us to the other – that is, the most that the model is congruent with the reality, the image resembles the object, the medium becomes the message – the less we see of ourselves in the other” (298).

Simulation…”in the construction of a realm of meaning that has minimal contact with historically specific events or actors, simulations have demonstrated the power to displace the ‘reality’ of international relations they purport to represent” (301).

“Simulations have created a new space in international relations where actors act, things happen, and the consequences have no origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations themselves” (301).

Surveillance takes the place of Panopticism on an IR scale…

“The politics and power of wealth, war and media have been studied but not their political relationship to speed…” (307).

Walker. “International Relations as Political Theory.” 1993.

“The most important expression of these understandings, indeed the crucial modern political articulation of all spatiotemporal relations, is the principle of state sovereignty” (6).

“At the very least I am concerned to show that much more is going on in the construction of claims about state sovereignty and political realism than is usually apparent from even the most theoretically and methodologically sophisticated literature in the field” (7).

Giddens, Anthony. “States, Society and Modern History.” 1987.

‘The logical connection between agency and power is of the first importance for social theory, but the universal sense of power thus implied needs considerable conceptual refinement if it is to be put to work in the interests of substantive social research” (7).

“Two types of resource can be distinguished -- the allocative and the authoritative. By the first of these I refer to dominion over material facilities, including material goods and the natural forces that may be harnessed in their production. The second concerns the means of dominion over the activities of human beings themselves” (7).

“All social systems, in other words, can be studied as incorporating or expressing modes of domination and it is this concept more than any other that provides the focal point for the investigation of power” (8).

“One of the major characteristics of the modern state, by contrast, is a vast expansion of the capability of state administrators to influence even the most intimate features of daily activity” (10).

“The more a social system is one in which the control exercised by superordinates depends upon a considerable scope of power over subordinates, the more shifting and potentially volatile its organization is likely to be” (11).

“power containers generate power, as has been mentioned, first and foremost through the concentration of allocative and administrative resources” (13).

“But only in cities could direct and regular surveillance be maintained by the central agencies of the state and then with a low degree of success compared with modern organizations” (15).

“All states involve the reflexive monitoring of aspects of the reproduction of the social system subject to their rule” (17).

“What separates those living in the modern world from all previous types of society and all previous epochs of history is more profound than the continuities which connect them to the longer spans of the past” (33).

“The formation of the nation-state and the associated nation-state system is an expression of the dislocations of modern history. It is one such expression among others and in focusing primarily on it I do not pretend to provide a comprehensive treatment of modernity” (34).

Ruggie, John Gerard. “Territoriality and Beyond.” 1993.

“The long and short of it is, then, that we are not very good as a discipline at studying the possibility of fundamental discontinuity in the international system; that is, at addressing the question of whether the modern system of states may be yielding in some instances to postmodern forms of configuring political space” (144).

“The Enlightenment was animated by the desire to demystify and secularize, to subject natural forces to rational explanation and control as well as by the expectation that doing so would promote social welfare, moral progress and human happiness” (145).

“The two distinctively modern programs for mastering international relations are deeply implicated in this project of modernity: realist balance of power thinking and idealist institutionalism” (146).

“And so the postmodernist debate has shifted in barely two decades from the domain of aesthetics, to culture more broadly, to political economy” (147).

“The chief characteristic of the modern system of territorial rule is the consolidation of all parcelized and personalized authority in to one public realm” (151).

“To summarize, politics is about rule. And, the distinctive feature of the modern system of rule is that is has differentiated its subject collectivity into territorially defined, fixed and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion” (151).

“To summarize, the concept of differentiation was the key that allowed us to uncover the historically specific and salient characteristics of modern territoriality” (168).

“The preceding analysis suggests that the unbundling of territoriality also has substantive implications for the study of potential transformation” (171).

Buzan and Little. “International Systems in World History.” 2000

Five lines of thinking that have dominated IR:

1. presentism: the discipline of IR focusing on contemporary history and current policy issues
2. ahistoricism: such a goal is dictated by the desire to emulate the invariant laws of natural science that hold across time and space
3. Eurocentrism: politics centered on observations made about European and Anglo polities
4. Anarchophilia: obsession among mainstream IR theorists with anarchy
5. State-centrism: emphasis on states as the main actor in World politics

“We hope to transcend the weaknesses discussed in this section by developing a very open-ended approach to the international system which does not privilege one sector of activity over another or give precedence to one mode of explanation over another” (22).

“Schmidt demonstrates that the early foundations of IR in the nited States were laid down long before the first World War by political scientists in the process of developing a theory of the state” (24).

“Thinking in terms of systems was very important to the English school, but the approach diverged sharply from the one adopted in American IR. In the first instance, it might seem that the difference is just one of terminology, with the English school referring to a “states-system” rather than the international system” (28).

“In contrast to mainstream American IR, the English school were simply not constrained by the notion that the study of history and the development of theory are incompatible” (29).

“The English school presuppose that to understand the patterns of behavior that emerge in a system, it is necessary to understand the cultural ideas that underpin the actions of the states that are operating in the system” (29).

“Our view is that international relations represents a subject of such immense size and complexity that it is best approached from a systemic or general perspective rather than an event-driven or particularist one” (33).

“The failure of history and theory to join forces has led to an impoverished understanding of international relations” (33).

“Although this line of criticism can be dismissed, the problem remains that IR theorists have failed to generate any consensus about what is meant by a system” (35).

Marx, Weber: “All were interested in redrawing the parameters of society in a way that would permit a greater fulfillment of human aspirations and in understanding how Europe had managed to surge ahead of other centres of civilization” (55).

“The existence of a market provides the basis for a capitalist mode of production and a new kind of world system that Wallerstein defines as a world economy” (64).

Teschke, Benno. “Theorizing the Westphalian System of States: International relations from Absolutism to Capitalism” 2002.

“I argue that the Westphalian system was characterized by distinctly non-modern relations between dynastic and other pre-modern political communities that were rooted in pre-capitalist social property relations” (6).

“The logic of inter-dynastic relations structured early modern European politics until the regionally highly uneven 19^th-centurytransition to international modernity” (6).

Three propositions:

1. although the medieval, early modern and modern geopolitical systems are all characterized by anarchy, they generated fundamentally different principles of international relations
2. the argument is that property relations explain not only variation in political regimes and geopolitical systems, they generate historically bounded and antagonistic strategies within and between political actors that govern international relations
3. this approach entails a theory of systemic change that argues for the centrality of the effects of class conflict on changes in property regimes, forms of political authority and international orders

“Variations in property regimes translate into variations in state forms and, by extension, into variations in the geopolitical patterns of conflict and cooperation” (9).

“Pre-capitalist property relations required political strategies of domestic income extraction by royal houses and their courtly clienteles that demanded by the same token external strategies of geopolitical accumulation. This explains the frequency of war and the persistence of empire-building” (35).

“However, without a systematic inquiry into the property-related social sources of identity-formation, which define determinate sets of interests and generate specific institutions, constructivist claims remain underexplored” (36).

“It follows that capitalism did not cause the territorially based states-system, nor that it required a state-system, but that it is nevertheless eminently compatible with it” (37).

“It follows that the key idea of modern international relations is no longer the war-assisted accumulation of territories but the multilateral political management of the crisis-potential of global capitalism and the regulation of the open world economy by the leading capitalist states” (38).

Hobson, John M. “What’s At Stake in Bringing Historical Sociology Back Into IR?” 2002.

“There is little doubt that much, though clearly not all, of contemporary international relations is ‘historophobic,’ in that it views historical analysis as superfluous, or exogenous, to the subject matter of the discipline” (5).

“By contrast we argue for the employment of a ‘temporally relativist’ or ‘constitutive’ reading of history, in which theorists examine history not simply for its own sake or to tell us more about the past, nor simply as a means to confirm extant theorizing of the present, but rather as a means to rethink theories and problematise the analysis of the present, and thereby to reconfigure the international relations research agenda” (5).

Chronofetishism: the assumption that the present can adequately be explained only by examining the present 9thereby bracketing or ignoring the past) gives rise to three illusions…

a. reification illusion: where the present is effectively sealed off from the past

b. naturalization illusion: where the present emerges ‘spontaneously’

c. immutability illusion: where the present is enternalised

Tempocentrism: failing to recognize the unique forms of the present…an inverted ‘path dependency’

“If chronofetishism leads to a ‘sealing off’ of the present such that it appears as an autonomous, natural, spontaneous and immutable entity, tempocentrism extrapolates this chronofetished present backwards through time such that discontinuous ruptures and differences between historical epochs and states systems are smoothed over and consequently obscured” (9).

“Waltz’s fundamental claim is that international politics has never changed but is repetitive, in that the international has always been a realm of competition between political forms” (15).

Onuf, Nicholas. “Constructivism: a User’s Manual.” 1998.

“In other words, social relations make or construct people – ourselves – into the kind of beings that we are. Conversely, we make the world what it is, from the raw materials that nature provides, by doing what we do with each other and saying what we say to each other” (59).

“Constructivism holds that people make society and society makes people. This is a continuous two-way process” (59).

“By calling international relations anarchic scholars are not saying that there is an absence of rule. This would be chaos, not anarchy. Instead, they seem to be saying that structure – and especially a stable pattern of unintended consequences – rules the day” (62).

“Rules make agents out of individual human beings by giving them opportunities to act upon the world. These acts have material and social consequences, some of them intended and some not” (64).

Held. “Democracy and the Global Order.” 1995.

“At the international level there are disjunctures between the idea of the state as in principle capable of determining its own future, and the world economy, international organizations, regional and global institutions” (99).

“The enumeration of external disjunctures, it should be stressed, is largely illustrative; it is intended to indicate the different ways in which globalization can be said to constitute constraints or limits on political agency in a number of key domains; and the what extent the possibility of a democratic polity has been transformed and altered” (99).

“The doctrine of sovereignty has two distinct dimensions: internal and external” (100).

“Internal: involves the belief that a political body established as sovereign rightly exercises the ‘supreme command’ over a particular society” (100).

External: “involves the claim that there is no final and absolute authority above and beyond the sovereign state” (100).

“In the international context, the theory of sovereignty has implied that states should be regarded as independent in all matters of internal politics…” (100).

Disjunctures:

1. international law: the development of international law has placed individuals, governments and non-governmental organizations under new systems of legal regulation
2. a second major area of disjuncture between the theory of the sovereign state and the contemporary global system lies in the vast array of international regimes and organizations that have been established, in principle, to manage whole areas of transnational activity and collective policy problems
3. there is an additional disjuncture involving the idea of the state as an autonomous strategic, military actor and the development of the global system of states, characterized by the existence of great powers and power blocs
4. the new global communication systems offer access to social and physical settings which may never have been encountered by individuals or groups to ‘overcome’ geographical boundaries which once might have prevented contact…”
5. there is a clear disjuncture between the formal authority of the state and the spatial reach of contemporary systems of production, distribution and exchange which often function to limit the competence and effectiveness of national political authorities

Keck and Sikkink. “Activists Beyond Bordes.” 1998.

“Transnational advocacy networks are proliferating, and their goal is to change the behavior of states and of international organizations. Simultaneously principled and strategic actors, they ‘frame’ issues to make them comprehensible to target audiences to attract attention and encourage action, and to ‘fit’ with favorable institutional venues” (2-3).

“Transnational advocacy networks must be understood as political spaces, in which differently situated actors negotiate – formally or informally – the social, cultural and political meanings of their joint enterprise” (3).

“The actors themselves did: over the last two decades individuals and organizations have consciously formed and named transnational networks, developed and shared networking strategies and techniques and assessed the advantages and limits of this kind of activity. Scholars have come late to the party” (4).

“Instead we draw upon the sociological traditions that focus on complex interactions among actors, on the intersubjective construction of frames of meaning, and on the negotiation and malleability of identities and interests” (4).

“We call them advocacy networks because advocates plead the causes of others or defend a cause or proposition. Advocacy captures what is unique about the transnational networks: they are organized to promote causes, principled ideas, and norms and they often involve individuals advocating policy changes that cannot be easily linked to a rationalist understanding of their interests” (8-9).

“Boomerang strategies are most common in campaigns where the target is a state’s domestic policies or behavior; where a campaign seeks broad procedural change involving dispersed actors, strategies are more diffuse” (12).

Typology of tactics:

1. information politics
2. symbolic politics
3. leverage politics
4. accountability politics

“The recent coupling of indigenous rights and environmental issues is a good example of a strategic venue shift by indigenous activists who found the environmental arena more receptive to their claims than human rights venues has been” (18).

Under What Conditions to Advocacy Networks Have Influence:

1. networks that provoke media attention
2. networks influence discursive positions
3. networks respond to policy change

Gilpin, Robert. “War and Change in World Politics.” 1981.

“This study will draw on both the sociological approach and the economic approach to social theory in an attempt to develop a theory or conception of international political change” (xiii).

“Political leaders, academic observers, and the celebrated ‘man in the street’ were suddenly conscious of the fact that the energy crisis, dramatic events in the Middle East, and tensions in the Communist world were novel developments of a qualitatively different order from those of the preceding decade” (1).

“The ideas on international political change presented are generalization based on observations of historical experience rather than a set of hypotheses that have been tested scientifically by historical evidence; they are proposed as a plausible account of how international political change occurs” (2).

“However, we make no claim to have discovered the ‘laws of change’ that determine when political change will occur or what course it will take. On the contrary, the position taken here is that major political changes are the consequences of the conjuncture of unique and unpredictable sets of developments” (3).

“Thus many believe that the opportunity for peaceful economic intercourse and the constraints imposed by modern destructive warfare have served to decrease the probability of a major war” (7).

“In the present study we take a very different stance, a stance based on the assumption that the fundamental nature of international relations has not changed over the millennia. International relations continue to be a recurring struggle for wealth and power among independent actors in a state of anarchy” (7).

“The argument of this book is that an international system is established for the same reason that any social or political system is created; actors enter social relations and create social structures in order to advance particular sets of political, economic, or other types of interests” (9).

Main assumptions of the book:

1. an international system is stable if no state believes it profitable to attempt to change the system
2. a state will attempt to change the international system if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs
3. a state will seek to change the international system through territorial, political and economic expansion until the marginal costs of further change are equal to or greater than the marginal benefits
4. once an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of further change and expansion is reached, the tendency is for the economic costs of maintaining the status quo to rise faster than the economic capacity to support the status quo
5. if the disequilibrium in the international system is not resoled then the system will be changed, and a new equilibrium reflecting the redistribution of power will be established

“Although every state and group in the system could benefit from particular types of change, the costs involved will discourage attempts to seek a change in system” (11).

“However, the most destabilizing factor is the tendency in an international system for the powers of member states to change at different rates because of political, economic and technological developments” (13).

“In this book, power refers simply to the military, economic and technological capabilities of states” (13).

“Thus the cycle of change is completed in that hegemonic war and the peace settlement create a new status quo and equilibrium reflecting the redistribution of power in the system and the other components of the system” (15).

“For this reason the basic domestic function of the state is to define and protect the property rights of individuals and groups” (17).

“These internal and external functions of the state and the ultimate nature of its authority mean that it is the principal actor in the international system” (17).

“Although this close relationship has changed because of modern industrial and military technology, it is obvious that control over territory is still an important objective of groups and states” (24).

“The second objective of states is to increase their influence over the behavior of other states” (24)

“Thus another aspect of the process of international political change involves the efforts of states (or again groups) to gain control over the behavior of other actors in the international system” (24).

“The third objective of states and in the modern world an increasingly important objective is to control or at least exercise influence over the world economy, or what may more properly be called the international division of labor” (24).

“States create international, social, political and economic arrangements in order to advance particular sets of interests” (25).

“The argument of this study is that the relationships among states have a high degree of order and that although the international system is one of anarchy, the system does exercise an element of control over the behavior of states” (28).

“Prestige is the reputation for power, and military power in particular” (31).

“Prestige, rather than power, is the everyday currency of international relations, much as authority is the central ordering feature of domestic society” (31).

“The critical role of prestige in the ordering and functioning of the international system is significant for our primary concern with the process of international political change” (33).

“In addition to the distribution of power and the hierarchy of prestige, the third component of the governance of an international system is a set of rights and rules that govern or at least influence the interactions among states” (34).

“The most significant advance in rulemaking has been the innovation of the multilateral treaty and formalization of international law” (36).

“Contrary to the Hegelian-Marxist position, however, it is impossible to predict political outcomes or that revolutionary change will in fact take place and, if it does occur, what the consequences will be” (49).

“This nondeterministic approach to the problem of political change should help clarify a major issue currently being debated by scholars of international relations” (49).

Bull, Hedley. “The Anarchical Society.” 1977.

“Even a cursory reading of the Anarchical Society suggests Bull’s many affinities with realism, not least his emphasis on the role power in international relations and the fact that the institutions of international society that he analyses in The Anarchical Society include war, the Great Powers, the balance of power and diplomacy…” (viii).

“Thus, on Bull’s account even conflict and war take place within a highly institutionalized set of normative structures – legal, moral and political” (ix).

“It should rather be understood as a conscious and continuing shared practice in which the actors constantly debate and contest the meaning of the balance of power” (ix).

Bull has some affinities with liberals: “They view norms and institutions as purposively generated solutions to different kinds of collective-action programs” (x).

Bull: “Similarly he places more emphasis on international law as a concrete historical practice and set of normative structures which merit far more direct engagement than has been the case in most constructivist scholarship” (xii).

“Bull believed that brute material facts and cold power politics could act as a powerful check on both the aspirations of practitioners and the methods of the analyst” (xii).

“It is clearly the case that much of Bull’s work was heavily shaped by the concerns of the Cold War and of superpower rivalry; that he was openly skeptical about the possibility of radical change in the character of superpower relations” (xv).

“Bull argued consistently that contemporary trends and features which appear novel – from transnational corporations to the privatization of violence in the form of terrorist groups or warlords – look more familiar when approached from a sufficiently long historical perspective” (xvi).

“One of the most important features of Bull’s work is his view that international relations could neither be understood nor studied solely from the perspective of the powerful’ (xviii).

‘The answer is that its Britishness did not fit with the prevailing American approaches. The emphasis on society seemed strange to realists who studied international relations from the perspective of…states” (xxxiv).

“Thus it is not to be assumed that order as it is discussed in this study, is a desirable goal, still less that it is an overriding one” (xxxiii).

“By international order I mean a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of society of states, or international society” (13).

“A society of states exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions” (13).

“World order is wider than international order because to give an account of it we have to deal not only with order among states but also with order on a domestic or municipal scale, provided within particular states, and with order within the wider world political system of which the states system is only part” (21).

“Within international society however as in other societies, order is the consequence not merely of contingent facts such as this, but of a sense of common interests in the elementary goals of social life; rules prescribing behavior that sustains these goals; and institutions that help to make these rules effective” (63).

“A central theme in this study is that the rules and institutions to which reference has been made carry out positive functions or roles in relation to international order” (71).

Morgenthau, Hans. “Politics Among Nations.” 1993.

Realism “believes that the world, imperfect as it is from the rational point of view, is the result of forces inherent in human nature. To improve the world one must work with those forces, not against them” (3).

“Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects however imperfectly and ode-sidedly these objective laws” (4).

“The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power” (5).

“A realist theory of international politics, then, will guard against two popular fallacies: the concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences” (5).

“A realist theory of international politics will also avoid the other popular fallacy of equating the foreign policies of a statesman with his philosophic or political sympathies and of deducing the former from the latter” (6).

“At the same time political realism considers a rational foreign policy to be good foreign policy; for only a rational foreign policy minimizes risks and maximizes benefits and, hence, complies both with the moral precept of prudence and the political requirement of success” (10).

“A man who has nothing but ‘moral man’ would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence” (16).

“The utopian internationalist, on the other hand, has no direct contact with the international scene. His thought, if it is sufficiently general, can roam over the globe without ever risking collision with the stark facts of politics” (46).

“All politics, domestic and international, reveals three basic patterns; that is, all political phenomena can be reduced to one of three basic types. A political policy seeks either to keep power, to increase power, or to demonstrate power” (50).

Johnston, Alastair. “Treating International Institutions as Social Environments.” 2001.

“This article focuses on two basic microprocesses in socialization theory – persuasion and social influence – and develops propositions about the social conditions under which one might expect to observe cooperation in institutions” (487).

“It is a radical statement for IR theory if one claims that the behavior of actors changes because of endogenous change in the normative characteristics and identities of the actors” (489).

“Morgenthau for example left open the possibility that definitions of power and interests are culturally contingent, implying at least that there is variation in how actors are socialized to conceptualize legitimate ways of pursuing legitimate interests” (490).

“Thus social context is an important variable in how well information reduces uncertainty in a transaction and in which direction this uncertainty is reduced (e.g. clarifying the other as a friend or adversary).

“For social constructivists socialization is a central concept. As Onuf puts it, ‘social relations make or construct people – ourselves – into the kinds of beings we are’” (492).

“Second, when constructivists do begin to look at these microprocesses of socialization and the constitutive effects of social interaction, the focus is almost exclusively on persuasion” (493).

“Persuasion has to do with cognition and the active assessment of the content of a particular message. As a microprocess of socialization, it involves changing minds, opinions and attitudes about causality and affect (identity) in the absence of overly material or mental coercion” (496).

“The most important microprocess of social influence, or at least most relevant to international relations theory given the prevalence of status language in interstate discourse , is the desire to maximize status, honor, prestige – diffuse reputation or image – and the desire to avoid a loss of status, shaming, or humiliation…” (500).

“A constructivist ontology allows (even demands) that the unit of socialization be the individual or small group…” (507).

Krasner, Stephen. “Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier.” 1991.

“There is no single international regime for global communications” (336).

“Global communications have been characterized not by Nash equilibria that are Pareto suboptimal but rather by disagreements over which point along the Pareto frontier should be chosen” (336).

“Where there have been disagreements about basic principles and norms and where the distribution of power has been highly asymmetrical, international regimes have not developed…” (337).

The resolution of distributional conflicts, however, be resolved through a very different route: the exercise of state power:

1. power may be used to determine who can play the game in the first place
2. power may also be used to dictate rule of the game, for instance, who gets to move first.
3. Power may be used to change the payoff matrix

“Market failure analyses, which have dominated the literature on international regimes, pay little attention to power” (342).

“For a power-oriented research program, power is exercised not to facilitate cooperation but to secure a more favorable distribution of benefits” (362).

“The United States was able to secure some movement toward a more market-oriented regime for global telecommunications because some actors in others states feared that they would be put at a competitive disadvantage by unilateral American action” (363).

Mearsheimer, John J. “The False Promise of International Institutions.” 1995.

“This article examines the claim that institutions push states away from war and promote peace” (7).

“My central conclusion is that institutions have minimal influence on state behavior, and thus hold little promise for promoting stability in the post-Cold War world” (7).

“Neverthless, cooperation among states has its limits , mainly because it is constrained by the dominating logic of security competition, which no amount of cooperation can eliminate” (9).

Essence of realism:

1. anarchic
2. offensive military
3. uncertainty
4. survival
5. defensive goals

Patterns of behavior:

1. states fear each other
2. system aims to guarantee survival
3. aim to maximize power position

Three institutional theories:

Liberal institutionalist: focuses on explaining why economic and environmental cooperation among states is more likely

Collective security: confronts issues of how to use institutions to prevent war

“Collective securities proponents express a distaste for balance of power logic and traditional alliances, as well as a desire to create a world where those realist concepts have no role to play” (27).

Critical theory: ultimate aim is normative: increase cooperation to the point and possibility of a genuine peace (14).

“Critical theory is well-suited for challenging realism because critical theory is, by its very nature concerned with criticizing ‘hegemonic’ ideas like realism not laying out alternative futures” (38).

“Critical theorists aim to create an international system characterized not by anarchy but by community” (39).

Four reasons Americans do not like realism;

1. it is a pessimistic theory
2. sees war as inevitable
3. no good or bad states
4. America routinely goes against realism (49).

Keohane and Martin. “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory.” 1995.

“A central fault of Mearsheimer’s realism as a scientific theory – rather than as rhetoric – is that the conditions for the operation of its ‘grim picture of world politics’ typically are not well-specified” (41).

“Institutionalism in contrast seeks to state in advance the conditions under which its propositions apply” (41).

“Contrary to the assertion that institutionalist theory is irrelevant to distributional issues, we argue that distributional conflict may render institutions more important.” (45).

“However, in complex situations involving many states, international institutions can step in to provide constructed focal points that make particular cooperative outcome prominent” (45).

Risse, Thomas. “Let’s Argue: Communicative Action in World Politics.” 2000.

“I claim that Jurgen Habermas’s critical theory of communicative action is helpful in conceptualizing the logic of arguing and can actually be brought to bear to tackle empirical questions in world politics” (2).

“Second, argumentative rationality appears to be crucially linked to the constitutive rather than the regulative role of norms and identities by providing actors with a mode of interaction that enables them to mutually challenge and explore the validity claims of those norms and identities” (2).

“Most social constructivists in international relations and comparative politics emphasize a different rationality, the ‘logic of appropriateness” (4).

“Rule guided behavior differs from instrumentally rational behavior in that actors try to ‘do the right thing’ rather than maximizing or optimizing their given preferences” (4).

“Human rights norms not only protect citizens from state intervention but also (and increasingly define a ‘civilized state’ in the modern world” (5).

“Arguing implies that actors try to challenge the validity claims inherent in any causal or normative statement and to seek a communicative consensus about their understanding of a situation as well as justification for the principles and norms guiding their action” (7).

Habermas: “I speak of communication actions when the action orientations of the participating actors are not coordinated via egocentric calculations of success, but through acts of understanding” (9).

“Agents are not simply the puppets of social structure, since they can actively challenge the validity claims inherent in any communicative action” (10).

“Communication is motivated by the desire to find out the ‘truth’ with regard to facts in the world or to figure out the ‘right thing to do’ in a commonly defined situation” (12).

Arguing processes are more likely to occur both in negotiating settings and in the public sphere:

1. the more actors are uncertain about their interests and identities
2. the less actors know about the situation in which they find themselves and about the underlying ‘rules of the game’
3. the more apparently irreconcilable differences prevent them from reacing an optimal rather than a merely satisfactory solution for a widely perceived problem” (33).

Mitchell and Keilbach. “Situation, Structure and Institutional design: reciprocity, Coercion and Exchange.” 2001.

“States create international institutions in attempts to resolve problems they cannot solve alone” (891).

“In symmetric externalities the fact that all states prefer mutual cooperation to the status quo predisposes states toward narrow institutions that rely on issue-specific reciprocity” (132).

“Downstream states that are stronger than the perpetrators may employ such positive linkage but also can use negative linkage to coerce perpetrators into mitigating an externality and can do so without the aid of an institution” (132).

“Victims of an asymmetric externality realize that perpetrators have no incentives to cooperate unless compensated” (133).

“Finally we seek to explain institutional design, not compliance or effectiveness” (134).

“We hope that by highlighting how incentives to defect influence institutional design, and not just compliance, we will encourage scholars concerned with effectiveness to control more explicitly for, rather than assume that, different regime designs were adopted in equivalent circumstances” (134).

“States have incentives to establish international institutions whenever doing so offers improvements over the status quo” (134).

“With asymmetric externalities, perpetrating actors prefer no institutions because, absent compensation, they would bear the institutional costs but receive no institutional benefits” (135).

“Both symmetric and asymmetric situations give at least some states ongoing incentives to defect. To counter these incentives, states design institutional mechanisms that often rely on altering the relative costs and benefits of cooperation and defection” (137).

“The choices states make in designing international institutions reflect rational efforts to create mechanisms compatible with the incentives in the strategic situations they face” (156).

Wendt, Alexander. “Driving with the Rearview Mirror: On the Rational Science of Institutional Design” 2001.

“Anarchy makes the international system among the least hospitable of all social systems to institutional solutions to problems, encouraging actors to rely on power and interest instead” (1019).

“Imre Lakatos argues that the theory-laden character of observation means we can never test theories directly against the world, only against other theories in light of the world.” (260).

“By identifying potential sociological and constructivist explanations of deeper cause, therefore, I hope at least to challenge rationalists to offer rival explanations for things they often have taken for granted” (261).

“Positive political scientists are after ‘explanatory knowledge’, knowledge about why things happen. This is necessarily backward looking, since we can only explain what has already occurred, although there is hope that with good explanations we can predict the future” (262).

“Positive and normative inquiries are, of course, in many ways distinct, but a science of institutional design that deals only with the former will be incomplete and useful primarily for ‘driving with the rearview mirror’” (262).

“One alternative is that states choose institutional designs according to the ‘logic of appropriateness’: Instead of weighing costs and benefits, they choose on the basis of what is normatively appropriate” (264).

Three ways logic of appropriateness structure international institutions:

1. normative explanations are not really rivals to the rational account because they concern how design problems are framed in the first place, rather than a competing logic

Five measurable dimensions to institutions:

1. membership
2. scope
3. centralization
4. control
5. flexibility

“Wendt correctly observes that even if institutions are designed according to rational-design principles, in practice these principles might themselves be flawed” (319).

Keohane, Robert. “International Institutions: Can Interdependence Work?” 1998.

“To analyze world politics in the 1990s is to discuss international institutions: the rules that govern elements of world politics and the organizations that help implement those rules” (27).

“In reality, however, even the most powerful states were relying increasingly on international institutions – not so much on the UN as other organizations and regimes that set rules and standards to govern specific sets of activities” (28).

“The exchange rate and oil crises of the early 1970s helped bring perceptions in line with reality. Suddenly both tope policymakers and academic observers in the United states realized that global issues required systematic policy coordination and that such coordination required institutions” (29).

“Scholarly disputes about the ‘relative gains question’ were intense but short-lived. It turned out that the question needed to be reframed: not ‘do states seek relative or absolute gains,’ but ‘under what conditions do they forego even mutually beneficial cooperation to preserve their relative power…”

“Even as scholars pursue these areas of inquiry, they are in danger of overlooking a major normative issue: the democratic deficit” (34).

“Democracies should insist that, whenever feasible, international organizations maintain sufficient transparency for transnational networks for advocacy groups, domestic legislators, and democratic publics to evaluate their actions” (36).

Victor, Raustiala, Skolnikoff. “The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments: Theory and Practice.” 1998.

“Implementation for our purposes is the process by which intent gets translated into action” (1).

“Implementation is not the only factor that affects behavior, but we expect that it is one of the most important” (2).

“Putting such accors into practice often entails a complex process of forming and adjusting domestic policy to conform with international standards, plus the added complexity of coordinating activities among many governments implementing different policies in parallel” (2).

“An influential study of domestic policy defined implementation as ‘those events and activities that occur after the issuing of authoritative public policy directives, which include the effort to administer and substantive impacts on people and events” (4).

“Targets are those actors whose behavior an accord ultimately aims to change, including firms emitting wastewater, ships dumping radioactive materials, individuals driving their cars, or industries designing new and cleaner technology” (4).

“Our ultimate concern is effectiveness. We define effect as the extent to which the accord causes changes in the behavior of targets that further the goals of the accord” (6).

“We do not asses effectiveness by whether behavior conforms with the letter of an international commitment, which is the traditional definition of compliance” (7).

“We look for evidence of effectiveness – actual behavioral change by target groups that is caused by and that furthers the goals of the accord” (7).

Other than law, “it is especially important to be aware of other influences that affect behavior within international agreements” (9).

Other influences:

1. the nature of the problem: some problems are easier to address than others
2. configurations of power: powerful states have different threats than weak ones
3. nature of commitments: how international agreements are constructed
4. exogenous factors: economic collapse may lead to better pollution controls (e.g. Russia)
5. public concern: how it influences domestic polities

Systems for Implementation Review: “comprise rules and procedures by which the parties to international agreements exchange data, share information on implementation, monitor activities, assess the adequacy of existing commitments, and handle problems of poor implementation” (16).

“Yet implementation is what turns grand principles and commitments into actual practice, and hence it is an essential part of international environmental affairs” (29).

“Our studies suggest that noncompliance is typically the product of incomplete planning and miscalculation rather than a willful act, though distinguishing between intentional and incidental noncompliance is difficult” (661).

“Second, the studies in this book confirm what is often claimed: almost all countries comply with almost all of their binding international commitments” (661).

“Our cases also suggest that compliance often simply reflects that countries negotiate and join agreements with which they know they can comply” (662).

Young and Levy. “The Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes.” 1999.

“The most intuitively appealing sense of effectiveness centers on the degree to which a regime eliminates or alleviates the problem that prompts its creation” (4).

“Longitudinal data on the evolution of these systems, moreover, are frequently inconsistent or nonexistent” (4).

Approaches to effectiveness;

1. problem-solving approach
2. legal approach
3. economic approach
4. normative approach
5. political approach

“Because international regimes are political institutions, we regard some variant of the political definition as a necessary component of the study of institutional effectiveness. In the absence of perverse exogenous effects, regimes that are effective in the political sense will also be effective in the problem-solving sense” (6).

Young, Oran. “Regime Effectiveness: Taking Stock.” 1999.

“At the outset we can state without hesitation that regimes do matter in international society, so that there is nothing to be gained from perpetuating the debate between neoinstitutionalists and neorealists…” (249).

“Insofar as we conclude that the operation of institutions accounts for a significant proportion of the variance in collective outcomes at the international level, it becomes relevant to think about designing regimes in such a way as to maximize their contribution to solving specific problems in an international society” (274).

“For starters, there is no simple and straightforward way to define effectiveness treated as a dependent variable or target of analysis” (277).

“The demonstration of causal connections between institutions and collective outcomes is a major achievement. Yet we cannot conclude our investigation of regime effectiveness here” (278).

Pollack, Mark. “Delegation, Agency and Agenda Setting in the European Community.” 1997.

“They have divided the two traditional schools of thought in regional integration, with neofunctionalists, generally asserting, and intergovernmentalists generally denying and important causal role for supranational institutions in the integration process” (99).

“This article presents a unified theoretical approach to the problem of supranational influence, based largely on the new institutionalism in rational choice theory” (100).

“Thus, for example, Shepsle and others examined in some detail the ‘agenda-setting’ power of the congressional committees that were the linchpin of his structure-induced equilibrium” (100).

“In this article I join the growing number of scholars who have applied the insights of rational choice institutionalism to the study of the EC” (100).

“The primary virtue of the new institutionalism in rational choice theory is that it allows us to transcend the intergovernmentalist-neofunctionalist debate by acknowledging the initial primacy of the member states and, proceeding from this point, the generate a series of hypotheses about supranational autonomy and influence more precise that those generated by either neofucntionalist or intergovernmentalist theory” (101).

Problems of supranational autonomy (analyzes):

1. types of functions
2. how functions are carried out
3. agenda setting

“I argue that EC member governments have fewer mechanisms available to control the ECJ or the European Parliament which therefore enjoy greater autonomy from the member governments than does the Commission” (101).

“Delegation of authority to an agent – whether a regulatory bureau (as students of U.S. politics have considered) or an international organization (as international relations theorists have) – is considered one particular aspect of institutional design process” (103).

Weakness of fundamentalist approach:

1. the functionalist approach fails to predict the functions delegated to the European Parliament
2. a second and more fundamental weakness of the functional approach to delegation is its assumptions that the institutions adopted are those that most efficiently perform the tasks set out for them by their creators and are chosen for that reason (107).

Two extreme problems of the principal-agent problem:

1. abdication hypothesis: principal abdicates all policymaking responsibility to the agent
2. congressional dominance school: principals retain all control over the agents

“I have thus far hypothesized the supranational autonomy is primarily a function of the control mechanisms established by member states to control their international agents – and that the costs and credibility of these control mechanisms vary considerably from agent to agent and from one issue-area to another for a given agent” (119).

“Formal agenda setting consists of the Commission’s right, and the European Parliament’s conditional right, to set the Council’s formal or procedural agenda by placing before it provisions that it can more easily adopt than amend, thus structuring the choices of the member states in the Council” (121).

“I argued that a functionalists model of delegation does a remarkably good job of explaining the functions delegated to the European Commission and the ECJ but that such a model fails in explaining the powers of the European Parliament and almost certainly underestimates the importance of unintended consequences and supranational agency” (128).

Four factors have emerged as important determinants of supranational autonomy:

1. distribution of preferences
2. exploitation of different preferences
3. role of incomplete information
4. stronger when they can bypass national governments

Nielson and Tierney. “Delegation to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform” 2003.

“The World bank exhibited significant independence from its member governments for nearly a decade then suddenly and repeatedly changed its behavior in response to increasingly coordinated coordinated demands by member governments” (242).

“If problems related to collective action, multiple principles and agent proximity can be overcome – hardly a foregone conclusion – principals can then employ various tools to rein in errant behavior by IO agents…” police-patrol oversight; fire alarm oversight (242).

“Our model illuminates the conditions under which IOs will be given autonomy to pursue their preferences and the conditions under which they will be reined in by member governments” (245).

“The most influential findings from this literature demonstrate that the previously widespread view among scholars – that all powerful bureaucrats often run amok I the policy process – is dramatically overstated” (246).

“The perception of ‘abdication’ to agents may persists in the IO literature because IOs introduce a set of complicating factors that the extant P-A literature has not adequately addressed” (247).

“The most familiar delegation relationships in politics and government involves a collective principal. Voters delegate to politicians, legislators delegate to party leaders and nation states delegate to IOs” (247).

“Ironically, while delegations from a collective principal are quite common in the world of politics, political scientists have written more extensively on the question of multiple principals” (248).

“The nested P-A relationships that are common to IOs further complicate our use of agency theory” (249).

“We have argued that institutional reform resulted from pressure by principals for change, particularly when that pressure was emphasized by threats to recontract with the agent by withdrawing financial support” (266).

“In fact, our insights about the role of a collective principal, multiple principals and proximate principals may be germane to researchers in American and comparative politics, who subjects are either connected by multiple links in a delegation chain or who fit the definition of common agency” (272).

McNamara, Kathleen. “Rational Fictions: Central Bank Independence and the Social Logic of Delegation.” 2002.

“I propose that governments chose central bank independence because delegation has important legitimizing and symbolic properties which render it attractive” (2).

“The theoretical rationale behind the delegation of political authority to independent central banks is straightforward and appears ironclad in its logic: the preference of politicians chasing votes in the next election will be to manipulate the economy in ways that make the populace happy in the short term, disregarding the potential for their monetary policies to produce economic problems in the long run” (3).

“Far from being a value-neutral procedural decision, delegation to independent central banks produces partisan policies with important distributional effects” (3).

“Put simply the view that such delegation is rational, efficient and acceptable in a democratic society is shaped more by power and ideational factors than determined by functional requirements of economic management” (4).

“The basic premise of principal-agent theory is that in centrain instances, one actor (the principal) may gain from delegating power to another actor (the agent) if there is an expectation, first, that the agent’s subsequent actions will be aligned with the principasl’s preferences, and second, that there is in fact some advantage to moving policy capacity to the agent” (5).

“The rational expectations approach to central bank independence parses out the workings of economic markets and examines how individual rationality within those markets produces aggregate outcomes” (6).

“My first critical argument concerns the basic premise underlying the logic of central bank independence: delegation is warranted because of the need for economic expertise to provide more politically neutral policy solutions, policies that are not readily accomplished in the context of democracy” (7).

“However, the argument for central bank independence made by many economists and policymakers pays little attention to the danger of too much autonomy on the part of the agent because of the underlying assumption that the principal (the national government) does not necessarily know its own interests” (9).

“If central bank independence rests on shakier functionalist foundations than is usually assumed, why has there been such a widespread move towards this organizational form” (13).

“Second, in the sociological institutional perspective, the causal mechanisms driving the adoption of an organizational form, such as central bank independence, work through constitutive or phenomenological aspects and are socially constructed rather than being solely based on legal directives or market pressures” (14).

“For these theorists, the replication and diffusion or organizational forms is provoked in part by the need to find legitimacy in terms of the prevailing norms, rather than adaptation to straightforward functional problems” (15).

“This mimetic behavior may be more common under uncertainty as way to legitimate organization despite unclear means-ends relationships or obvious performance criteria” (17).

Alter, Karen J. “Delegation to International Courts; Four Varieties and their Implications for State-Court Relations.” 2003.

“We know about the different roles of courts at the domestic level, yet at the international level we lump the entire category of international courts together, creating great confusion. This manuscript identifies four different roles international courts play – constitutional, administrative, dispute resolution and criminal enforcement – explaining how delegation fundamentally differs by role, and how variation in judicial roles leads to very different relationships” (1).

“Our goal of this manuscript is to break down the category of international court, to better understand variation in the relationship between ICs and states” (2).

How the PA framework does not understand State-IC relations:

1. ICs refuse to see themselves as agents of states
2. States refuse to see themselves as collective principals
3. The nature of delegation as embodied in the role the court plays in the political system, the crafting arguments states use in court, a state’s ability to deny a legal decision-makers crucial information, state’s influence over public opinon… (3).

“It is not entirely clear what has driven this expansion in the creation and use of international courts – thus why states are increasingly delegating authority to ICs” (4).

“States may be willing to delegate broad authority to ICs because they assume that they will be able to take back some authority and exercise control over delegation in moment 2, or limit the ICs ability to actually intervene in moment 3 but they may find that actually they do not have control at moments 2 and 3” (8).

“Courts are by design counter-majoritarian institutions; they are not intended to be directly accountable to the public will” (39).

“It is thus for good reason that states create ICs. At the same time the consequences of delegation to ICs are little understood. There is a tendency to assume that ICs will operate at the international level like they do at the domestic level” (41).

Johnstone, Ian. “The Role of the UN Secretary-General; the Power of Persuasion Based on Law.” 2003.

Risse, Thomas. “Transnational Actors and World Politics.” 2002.

“If we take the 1971 definition by Keohane and Nye referring to regular interactions across national boundaries when at least one actor is a non-state agent” (255).

“While these early transnational movements did not enjoy modern communications technologies such as the Internet, their strategies were remarkably similar and sometimes no less effective than those of their modern successors” (256).

“The failure of traditional international relations theory to at least recognize some underlying trends, pushed many scholars away from structuralist theories such as realism and state-centered institutionalism to a renewed appreciation of domestic politics” (258).

Three characteristics of TNA thinking:

1. the new transnationalism concentrates on non-profit sectors like epistemic communities
2. the recent literature is much more about the interaction between states and transnational society than about replacing a state-centered view with a society dominated approach
3. as to critical theory, neo-Gramscianism and its contribution to the literature on the international political economy has to be mentioned

“Transnational advocacy groups and epistemic communities often perform tasks that states and international organizations either cannot or do not want to carry out” (260).

“The convergence hypothesis holds that the authority of the governments of all states, large and small, strong and weak, has been weakened as a result of technological and fianancial change and of the accelerated integration of national economies into one single global market economy” (263).

Clark, Friedman, Hochstetler. “The Sovereign Limits of Global Civil Society.” 1998.

“Realists and their intellectual allies argue that nation-states retain their central position…” (1).

“We argue that the concept of a global civil society sets a more demanding standard for the evaluation of transnational political processes than has been applied in prior accounts of such activity” (2).

“At the international level it is as yet unclear whether the increase in the number of NGOs with shared transnational goals can be equated with an emerging global civil society” (2).

“To describe the social relations among nongovernmental actors as global is to assume that the complex network of economic, social and cultural practices forming global civil society is widespread enough that actors from all over the world are involved in the interactions” (2).

“The quality of civil participation can be determined by assessing the procedures governing NGO activity at UN world conferences” (4).

“To summarize our conclusions briefly we do find evidence that the construction of a global society is under way but is far from complete. Housands of NGOs have gathered to form a global presence at UN conferences, but significant divisions reamin among them as well as among the participating governments” (5).

“Despite the undeniable profusion of nongovernmental actors and activities at UN conferences there is little consensus on the long-tern consequences of these global interaction on the substance of international politics” (21).

“Table 3 summarizes the uneven achievement of global civil society as compared with the expectations generated from our initial theorizing of the concept” (33).

Cortell and Davis. “How Do International Institutions Matter? The Domestic Impact of International Rules and Norms.” 1996.

“This article seeks to remedy this shortcoming by showing how international rules and norms can affect state behavior through the actions of domestic political actors” (451).

“Our central hypothesis is that government officials and societal interest groups can appeal to international rules and norms to further their own interests in the domestic political arena” (452).

“Second, the evidence shows that the existence of an international regime does not necessarily imply that cooperative outcomes will result. Domestic actors can use international rules to further interests that may not be completely consistent with the original purposes the regime was meant to serve” (452).

Two ways international rules and norms become institutionalized:

1. government and societal actors can invoke an international rule to further their own particularistic interests in domestic policy debates
2. rules are incorporated or embodied in domestic laws (453).

“An international norm’s domestic salience largely derives from the legitimacy accorded it in the domestic political context” (456).

“An international rule lacks domestic salience if the state has denied the rule’s legitimacy” (456).

“The case shows that the United States complied with the tenets of the collective security norm in responding to the Iraqi aggression largely because the norm became enmeshed in the American domestic political debate” (465).

“The fact that debates over U.S. security policy were cast largely in terms of an international norm is a puzzle for students of international security, as norms are generally held to play a very limited role in security affairs” (465).

“Whether Congress constrained the president, or the president constrained the Congress, either outcome illustrates that government officials can appropriate international norms to pursue their interests in national policy debates” (469).

“Whereas most previous analyses of norm compliance are cast at the level of state interaction, this article adopts a different approach. It argues that international rules and norms can affect national policy choices by operating through the domestic political process” (471).

Martin, Lisa. “Democratic Commitments: Legislatures and International Cooperation.” 2000.

“This books approaches the problem of international credibility by examining the domestic sources of commitments. In particular it concentrates on the roles of national legislatures in established democracies” (3).

“First, I find that the degree of legislative influence on international cooperation, in both presidential and parliamentary systems, exceeds usual estimates” (3).

“I argue that institutionalized legislative participation in international cooperation enhances the credibility of states’ commitments, thus leading to more stable and deeper

Patterns of international cooperation” (3).

“Democracy is valuable not only as an end in itself but also has beneficial implication for behavior in the international realm” (5).

“The central questions about legislative-executive interaction, I would venture, are how the nature of legislative participation in processes of international cooperation varies and how it influences the outcomes of international cooperation” (11).

“First, legislative influence is greater than generally appreciated because legislatures retain multiple mechanisms for frustrating implementation of international agreements” (13).

“Second, institutionalized legislative participation in processes of international cooperation enhances the credibility of commitments through a number of mechanisms, relying on signaling and commitment dynamics” (13).

“I adopt a rationalist framework in this book, and find it most useful to think about credibility defined in terms of strategies” (14).

Pevehouse, Jon C. “Democracy from the Outside-In? International Organizations and Democratization.” 2002.

“In addition to the lack of theoretical attention given to the IO-democratization link, little empirical work investigates the relationship between IOs and democratization” (516).

“Most democratization studies present regime transitions as the outcome of a domestic political process that is not influence by actors outside the nation-state” (517).

“The second image reversed literature provides an excellent starting point for examining the relationship between IOs and democratization” (517).

Two potential causal mechanisms of IOs on regime change:

1. pressures generated from organization can compel autocratic regimes to liberalize
2. IO membership can lead to the acceptance of liberalization by certain elite groups

“If the preceeding argument is correct, an association should exist between democratic regional organizations and democratization” (531).

“Drawing from theories of rational institutionalism and sociological institutionalism I argue that regional organizations can influence the domestic political processes even in realms of elite behavior” (542).

“Recent research on the democratic peace – specifically the ‘Kantian Tripod’ concept – assumes the IOs play a key role in the maintenance of peace between democracies. However, this research ignores many links between IO membership and democratic development” (543).

Karns and Mingst. “International Organization.”

“War is the fundamental problem in international politics; it has also been a primary factor motivating the creation of IGOs from the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century, to the League of Nations and the United Nations in the twentieth century” (279).

“Complicating many intrastate conflicts are humanitarian disasters resulting from the fighting, from ethnic cleansing or genocide…” (280).

“The changing nature of conflicts and complex humanitarian disasters are two challenges to peace in the twenty-first century . The others are weapons of mass destruction and terrorism” (280).

“The idea of a global organization to promote security among states was born in the early years of the twentieth century..” (282).

“International relations theorists differ sharply in their view of appropriate strategies for responding to the use of armed force and conflicts. Realists come in hard and soft varieties when dealing with threats of force” (288).

“Collective security is based on the conviction that peace is indivisible and that all states have a collective interest in countering aggression whenever and wherever it may appear” (297).

“In principle, peacekeeping has numerous advantages over collective security and enforcement. Here an operation does have the approval of parties to a conflict, there is at least nominal consent to cooperate with peacekeeping forces” (308).

Lake, David A. “Beyond Anarchy: the Importance of Security Institutions.” 2001.

“Neither the Cold War nor U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf would have taken the form it did without the particular security institutions that lay at their core and eventually came to be among their more prominent characteristics” (129).

“Even anarchic institutions – those premised upon the full sovereignty of all members – can solve problems of coordination among states, as in the case of multilateral sanctions and influence international politics” (130).

“Identifying the elements of hierarchy at the core of both the Cold War and Gulf War reveals how taking anarchy as the defining characteristic of international politics – although useful in some circumstances as a simplifying device – actually distorts our vision” (130).

“Given underlying political cleavages, such as those in the Cold War, if third partiesreact strongly to institutional innovations, we can infer that the institution itself was relatively important.” (130).

“The skepticism of neorealists toward institutions is unwarranted” (131).

“By focusing exclusively on anarchic institutions analysts not only ignore important phenomena but also introduce a strong selection bias that significantly weakens their ability to draw causal inferences” (133).

“Although both types of institutions influenced the course of international politics – and therefore mattered in an absolute sense – the Soviet Union’s informal empire prompted a greater reaction from the United states than NATO did from the Soviet Union” (139).

“The lack of domestic legitimacy was not an impediment to the consolidation of Soviet authority, as often averred, but rather a central element in maintaining Russian control” (141).

“As predicted by the theory and observed in the cases, relatively anarchic institutions, such as NATO, exert relatively smaller constraints on members than do hierarchic institutions, such as the Soviet Union’s informal empire in Eastern Europe” (157).

Wallander and Keohane. “Risk, Threat and Security Insitutions.” 1999.

“One important challenge to international relations theory is the anomaly of NATO’s continuity after the Cold War” (88).

“It is an obvious magnet for states of Central and Eastern Europe; it plays a central role in the former Yugoslavia and it clearly remains the primary instrument of American security policy in Europe” (88).

“In the contemporary case of NATO, it appears that an alliance is being transformed into a security management institution” (89).

“Our key hypothesis is that these more complex alliances are more likely to be able to adapt to the ending of threats by elaborating and developing those practices designed to cope with risks rather than threats. In our terminology, the rules and practices of single-purpose alliances focused only on threat” (89).

“Thus security arrangements may be designed not only to cope with security threats, as are classic alliances, but also with security risks.” (92).

“NATO is changing from an exclusive alliance focused on threats to an inclusive security management institution concerned chiefly with risks” (108).

“NATO’s military functions will decline as threats diminish; and it should gradually expand to encompass all democratic European states that are committed to maintaining peaceful, friendly relations on the basis of the territorial status quo” (108).

Krebs, Ronald R. “Perverse Institutionalism: NATO and the Greco-Turkish Conflict.” 1999.

Regarding NATO: “I argue that, although the alliance did not create the divisive issues separating these longtime antagonists, it bears a significant degree of responsibility for the tensions between them” (344).

“In this article I seek to bridge the gap between these two approaches by taking the first steps toward a “realist institutionalism,” marrying the belief that institutions matter with a skepticism as to their effects” (344).

“First, when accession to the alliance brings security guarantee to small states, it eliminates the primary threat from their horizon and allows them to focus on secondary foreign policy objectives. This shift becomes dangerous when it exposes potentially militarizable conflicts of interest with fellow allies, often long-standing regional rivals” (345).

“Second, membership in an institutionalized multilateral alliance often bestows greatly improved military capability on both the qualitative and quantitative dimensions, as more powerful alliance partners provide better equipment and training” (345).

“Third, alliances like other institutions, provide states with the means for issue linkage as well as with greater transparency, but such institutional functions need not yield cooperation and will contribute, under conditions specified later, to the deterioration of relations” (345).

Reiter, Dan. “Why NATO Enlargement Does Not Spread Democracy.” 2001.

“My central argument in this article is that NATO membership has not and will not advance democratization in Europe” (42).

Why Not: the Russian threat

1. First, a NATO commitment to defend new members will have very low credibility. The deployment of U.S. troops to defend Eastern Europe from a Russian invasion is not popular with the American public
2. Second, NATO enlargement is likely to increase the chances of renewed Russian belligerence, rather than provide a useful insurance policy against it

Why It Could Spread democracy:

1. the first mechanism is that the prospect of NATO membership can be used as a carrot to induce potential new allies to become democratic
2. second, NATO membership can be used as a stick to spur democratization: Any new member that reverts to authoritarian rule would be ejected from the alliance
3. mitigates relations between civil-military groups (54).

“In total, NATO membership has exerted only minimal influence on democratization” (58).

Other countries not “democratic” via NATO: Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary (60-61).

“NATO’s inability to spread democracy is a telling blow against arguments for further enlargement” (67).

Finlayson and Zacher. “The GATT and the Regulation of Trade Barriers: Regime Dynamics and Functions.” 1981.

“Our objective in this essay are to describe the GATT trade barriers regime, to assess its strength, and to explore some of the regime’s functions in international trade and political relations” (275).

“The former Director-General of GATT, Eric Wyndam-White has written that the principle of nondiscrimination was the ‘cornerstone’ of the GATT” (278).

“The basic GATT commitment to nondiscrimination – or ‘unconditional most-favored-nation treatment, as it is usually termed – appears in article 1:1…and requires that ‘any advantage, favor, privilege, or immunity granted by any contracting party to any product originating in or destined for any other country shall be accorded immediately and unconditionally…” (278).

“Throughout the history of the GATT regime the major source of erosion of the nondiscrimination norm has come from ‘regional’ and other trade arrangements that involve discrimination in the use of trade barriers against nonmember contracting parties” (279).

“The norm of liberalization or free trade is often regarded as central to the GATT regime, but it did not have the paramount of nondiscrimination in the immediate postwar years” (282).

“Large tariff reductions were accepted by the four major participants – the U.S., the EEC, the UK and Japan” (284).

“The primary concern when supervising rule implementation has not been to ‘punish’ transgressors but rather to maintain the delicate balance of reciprocal advantages that constitutes the most valued achievement of the GATT regime” (289).

Three conclusions:

1. first, it must be emphasized that it is the norms of a regime, and the importance the most influential members attach to them that largely determine the regime’s rules and rule implementation as well as its decision-making mechanisms
2. second, recognition of the fact that the relative importance of regime norms varies over time is critical for an adequate understanding of regime evolution
3. third, norms do not live in isolation; many are either mutually supportive or to some extent in conflict

“By facilitating the conclusion of commercial accords, encouraging constraint on the part of members, and offering many smaller states a modest opportunity to influence the international regulation of trade barriers, the GATT regime has performed three important specific functions” (313).

Krueger, Anne. “The WTO as an International Organization.”

“Until the end of 1994, there was no multilateral of international organization that dealt with trade issues between countries” (1).

Three ironies within the system:

1. the growth and liberalization of the international trading system has been the most prominent success of the postwar period, even though the nations participating in deliberations over the postwar international economic system were unable to produce a charter for an international trade organization
2. the very success of the multilateral tariff negotiations conducted under the aegis of the GATT was so remarkable that the world has become interdependent at an unprecedented rate
3. concerns over the ramifications of increased interdependence gave rise to great gloominess over the prospects for a successful outcome of the Uruguay round, yet the round achieved far more for those instigating it anticipated (3).

Busch and Reinhardt. “Transatlantic Trade Conflicts and GATT/WTO Dispute Settlement.”

“The story of dispute settlement at the World Trade Organization is, in large part, the story of the transatlantic relationship between the United States and European Community” (465).

“Early settlement continues to be a pillar of the system, even though compliance with rulings is no more frequent. We thus argue that, in light of the track record to date, procedural legal reforms per se have not improved the outcomes of US-EC disputes” (466).

“If as we speculate below, the more legalistic WTO processes may actually hinder pre-ruling bargaining, then the efficacy of US-EC dispute settlement may be at greater risk now than in the GATT era…” (466).

“Let us be clear on this point: we are encouraged by the pattern of concessions we observe in US-EC disputes, notably with regard to early settlement, but find that the DSU’s reforms per se have not helped in this regard, and may ultimately hurt” (482).

Schmitz, Hans and Sikkink. “International Human Rights.” 1998.

“Human rights are sets of principled ideas about the treatment to which all individuals are entitled by virtue of being human” (517).

“Human rights are clear examples of what constructivists call social constructions – invented social categories that exist only because people believe and act as if they exist, that nevertheless come to have the capacity to shape the social and political world” (517).

“Indeed, the growing influence of human rights norms in international politics makes us more aware of their violations and often inadequate responses by governments and international organizations” (517).

Reasons human rights violations occur:

1. political: focuses on regime type and real or perceived threats to regimes such as civil and international war
2. economic: highlight such broad factors as levels of economic development, material inequality, etc.
3. cultural, ideological and psychological: deeply ingrained patters of inter-communal hatred or revenge for past abuses

How rules persist:

1. claims that rules become part of the identity of actors through an active process of socialization and internationalization (Risse)
2. a second version argues that individuals and groups rhetorically adopts such rules not because they inherently believe in them, but because they conform or emulate scripts of legitimate statehood (522).

“We argue that the growing rhetorical commitment to human rights norms affects how state actors calculate their self-interests and make decisions” (532).

Moravcsik, Andrew. “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes” Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe.” 2000.

“The fiftieth anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights marks an appropriate moment to reconsider the reasons why governments construct international regimes to adjudicate and enforce human rights” (2000).

European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (ECHR)

“Such realist and ideational conjectures, though popular among scholars, rest on a remarkably think empirical foundation. Historians have conducted almost no detailed case studies of the formation of international human rights regimes. Only the UN system – a notably weak regime – has been the subject of significant research, and this body of work focuses on rhetorical statements, such as the UN declaration, rather than arrangements for adjudication and enforcement” (219).

“Although established democracies supported certain human rights declaration, they allied with dictatorships and transitional regimes in opposition to reciprocally binding human rights enforcement – a seldom-noted tendency for which realists and ideational theorists have no explanation. The primary proponents of reciprocally binding human rights obligations were instead the governments of newly established democracies” (220).

“From a ‘republican liberal’ perspective – one related to institutional variants of ‘democratic peace’ theory as well as to the analysis of two-level games’ and public-choice theories of delegation – creating a quasi-independent judicial body is a tactic used by governments to ‘lock-in’ and consolidate democratic institutions” (220).

“I argue that governments will resort to this tactic when the benefits of reducing future political uncertainty outweigh the ‘sovereignty costs’ of membership. It follows that ‘self-binding’ is most use to newly established democracies, which have the greatest interest in further stabilizing the domestic political status quo against nondemocratic threats” (220).

“If realist and ideational explanations view the motivations for establishing human rights regimes as involving international coercion of persuasion, a ‘republican liberal’ explanation views them as resulting from instrumental calculations about domestic politics” (225).

“The…broadest implication of this analysis is that it counsels caution about the uncritical acceptance of certain ideational explanations for the emergence of international norms” (248).

Hafner-Burton, Emilie. “Trading Human Rights: How Preferential Trade Agreements Influence Governments Repression.” 2005.

“My argument is a simple one about institutional design and influence. In the area of human rights, hard laws are essential: change in repressive behavior almost always requires legally binding obligations that are enforceable” (5).

HRA: Human Rights Agreements

PTA: Preferential Trade Agreements

Three hypotheses:

1. first, most HRAs are not likely to effectively reduce violations most of the time…HRAs are principally soft
2. second, PTAs are designed to enforce voluntary commitments to coordinated market policies at a transnational level
3. Third, when they implement hard standards, PTAs influence through coercion: they provide member governments with a mandate to protect certain human rights, while they supply the material benefits and institutional structures to reward and punish member’s behavior (6).

“As I will argue trade agreements are designed to solve a different set of problems than human rights agreements and supply different properties of influence” (9).

“Although many scholars are optimistic that HRAs lacking hard standards are still capable of substantial influence on domestic policy, I argue the contrary: coercion is much more likely than persuasion alone to be effective” (16).

Bessette and Haufler. Against All Odds: Why There is No International Information Regime.” 2001.

“For the past decade the United States and the European Union have been attempting to negotiate an international regime governing information privacy and encryption” (2001).

“We conclude that it will become more likely in these and other commercial arenas that the United States and the EU and potentially other trade partners, will construct partial regimes that preserve national preferences but facilitate international exchange” (69).

“In this paper we examine the threat to individual privacy posed by business use of personally identifiable information and the related threat to national security posed by widespread commercial use of data encryption” (71).

“We explain these failures by looking at institutional and cultural differences between the United States and European Union. American institutions and culture generally favor commercial interests except when national security come into play. European institutions and culture generally are less friendly to commercial interests but at the same time less likely to let national security limit potential commercial benefits” (71).

“In the area of information privacy, we see both a desire to create a common framework and an equally strong impulse to protect existing national approaches. The outcome of recent negotiations is a hybrid system in which the two sides essentially agree to disagree” (88).

“The demands of a global information economy increasingly provided incentives for all sides to gain from a common framework, yet the Europeans threatened cut off all transactions between the United States and Europe in order to retain the European Union’s strict privacy regulations at the international level” (89).

Herrera, Geoffrey. “The Politics of Bandwidth: International Political Implications of a Global Digital Information Network.” 2002.

“’Contemporary analyses of international relations and the digital information revolution are in tentative embrace” (93).

“Technology in the studies cited above appears as an exogenous force in world affairs despite a strong consensus in the history of technology literature that technology is inherently social and political” (94).

“First, I argue that the evolution of a global digital information network, considered rather broadly, is likely to diminish state capacity and autonomy” (95).

“Second, instead of the standard opposing pairs of possibilities – strong or weak state, liberty or Big brother, wealth or poverty – I argue that the effects of a mature digital information infrastructure are best conceptualized as the outcome of a three-way political struggle between centralized political authorities (states), centralized economic entities (firms) and individuals – both as consumers and citizens” (95).

“Evans argues persuasively that the logic of globalization predicts not statelessness, but increased stateness…” (95).

‘The result is that the late modern nation-state has less and less control over economic policy and less and less control over the nature, structure and operation of economic activity within its borders” (101).

“I have argued that the widespread deployment of information technology is helping to undermine state authority and autonomy. But I have also argued that as the technical system that will become the global digital information infrastructure is not yet complete, its full effects cannot yet be divined” (120).

“An open universal digital network will probably ultimately undermine state authority but its is unlikely that an open network will emerge without the state acting to help bring such a system about” (122).

Farrell, Henry. “Constructing the International Foundations of E-Commerce – the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor Arrangement.” 2003.

“The implication of e-commerce for international relations are only beginning to receive proper attention in academic debate. Commercial relations conducted through new communications technologies require the adaptation of old institutions and the creation of new ones” (277).

“However, contrary to many predictions, states are not being displaced in the governance of e-commerce by private actors” (277).

“The emergence of these new forms of governance poses an important puzzle to international relations scholarship. These forms of governance are genuinely unexpected in that they do not represent the retreat of the state in the face of private actors, nor a simple reassertion of state authority, nor yet traditional multilateral institutions” (278).

“In this article I suggest an alternative origin for hybrid regulations, showing how it may result not from an increase in the authority of private actors per se but from the effects of e-commerce on interdependence” (278).

“In the body of this article I assess the merits of constructivist theory in explaining the emergence and form of hybrid arrangements” (279).

“The EU-US differences over e-commerce which emerged most clearly in their disagreement over privacy reflect a clash between two quite different philosophies of social regulation” (288).

“The evidence from Safe Harbor provides a different explanation. While private actors do play an important role in the governance of privacy, this is in large part because of state action” (300).

“Safe Harbor shows that efforts to resolve interdependence can involve just such dialogue. Actors started from different -- and radically incompatible – notions of how privacy should protected” (301).

“Argument thus not only involves one actor, or set of actors, persuading another to adopt a preconceived set of norms; it may disclose previously unconceived possibilities” (301).

Drezner, Daniel. “The Global Governance of the Internet: Bringing the State Back In.” 2004.

“All strands of theory focus on the decline of state autonomy relative to oterh forces in world politics” (477).

“Do globalization and the Internet weaken the ability of states to regulate the global economy? This paper argues that the consensus summarized in the previous paragraph is largely wrong. States, particularly the great powers, remain the primary actors for handling the social and political externalities created by globalization and the Internet” (478).

NGOs: “At times they can act as independent agenda setters but more often they act as the agents of state interests” (479).

Pollack, Mark. “International Relations Theory and European Integration.” 2001.

“Although originally posed as competing theories, I argue realist, liberal and institutional approaches in IR show signs of convergence around a single rationalist model which assumes fixed preferences and rational behavior among all actors in the EU (including individuals as well as member governments and supranational organizations) and examines the ways in which member governments adopt institutions which subsequently constrain and channel their behavior” (222).

“Kenneth Waltz attributed the uneven progress of European integration to the fact that the United States had emerged after World War II as the guarantor of West European security, leaving the Member States of the European Community free to pursue integration without concerns about security threats from their European partners” (223).

“Interestingly for my purposes here, the initial applications of rational-choice institutionalism were a reaction against both neofunctionalism (which was rejected for its lack of microfoundations) and liberal intergovernmentalism (which was rejected for its minimalist account of EU institutions)” (228).

“In place of the old neofuntionalist/intergovernmentalist dichotomy, the last half of the 1990s has witnessed the emergence of a new dichotomy in both IR theory and EU studies, pitting rationalists…against constructivists” (237).

Christansen, Jorgensen and Wiener. “The Social Construction of Europe.” 1999.

“First, constructivism, as a specific position in the philosophy of the social sciences, cannot serve as a substantive theory of European integration. It would be a mistake to compare theories of European integration such as neo-functionalism to constructivism” (530).

“According to most observers working from the perspective of constructivism, it is located somewhere in the middle ground between the two poles of rationalist vs. reflectivist approached…” (536).

Moravcsik, Andrew. “Is Something Rotten in the State of Denmark? Constructivism and European Integration.” 1999.

“Realism highlights the distribution of resources. Institutionalism highlights the institutionalized distribution of information. Liberalism highlights the distribution of underlying societal interest and ideals as represented by domestic political institutions” (1999).

“Hardly a single claim in this volume is formulated or tested in such a way that it could, even in principle, be declared empirically invalid” (670).

“Yet theoretical innovation and empirical testing requires that we focus on specific causal mechanisms” (672).

“In this trivial sense there is little point in debating whether ‘ideas matter’. Existing rationalist theories claim only something far more modest, namely that ideas are causally epiphenomenal to more fundamental underlying influences on state behavior” (674).

“Perhaps then, an opposite view is worth considering, namely that meta-theory is not the solution but the problem” (678).

“Constructivist theories of world politics, Checkel tell us, should focus more on the socialization of influential actors to new norms and beliefs, which in turn alter the underlying preferences of governments and thereby state behavior” (227).

“Checkel seeks to return the study of ideas to the social scientific mainstream. The seriousness of his commitment to primary research alone justifies this work and singles Checkel out from legions of researchers hiding behind meta-theoretical barricades” (228).

Schimmelfennig, Frank. “The Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action and the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union.” 2001.

“Actors who can justify their interests on the grounds of the community’s standard of legitimacy are therefore able to shame their opponents into norm-conforming behavior and to modify the collective outcome that would have resulted from constellations of interests and power alone” (48).

“By contrast, whereas the enlargement preferences of EU member states and the initial bargaining process largely conform to rationalist expectations, the international outcome – that is, the decision to enlarge the EU to central and Eastern Europe – cannot be explained as the result of egoistic cost-benefit calculations and patterns of state preferences and power” (49).

“The medium of this influence is legitimacy. All polities have institutionalized a standard of political legitimacy that is based on the collective identity, the ideology and the constitutive values and norms of the political community” (63).

“I seek to show that the Community has committed itself ideologically and institutionally to the integration of all European liberal societies from its beginnings and has continually confirmed this commitment in it rhetoric” (66).

“Rhetorical action provides one way of disentangling rational choice and ontological materialism and theorizing the context conditions of strategic action, as suggested in recent review s of the rationalism-constructivism debate” (77).

Jupille, Caporaso, Checkel. “Integrating Insitutions: Rationalism, Constructivism and the Study of the European Union.” 2003.

“Our overarching argument is the metatheoretical debate about institutions has run its course and must now give way to theoretical, methodological and carefully constructed empirical dialogue” (8).

Davis, Christina. “Food Fights Over Free Trade.”

“Why have Japan and Europe ignored farmer protest in some negotiations when they accepted U.S. demands for greater access to their agricultural markets, and why have they risked trade wars in other negotiations by their refusal to change agricultural policies?” (2).

“This book is about the politics of negotiations to open sensitive markets. In such negotiations, international pressures for liberalization meets resistance from strong interest groups, ministries with a stake in the status quo, and high levels of politicization” (2).

“The focus here is on such negotiated policy liberalization. It will be shown that two kinds of negotiation structures make governments more likely to liberalize agricultural policies: when a negotiation links together agricultural and industrial issues into a package deal that makes the liberalization in one area conditional upon liberalization of the other; or, when a negotiation frames the agricultural protection policy as a violation of international trade law” (3).

“There is a considerable variation in the degree of liberalization across U.S. agriculture trade negotiations with Japan and Europe” (4).

“Olson explain that as their numbers decline, farmers become better organized and have greater incentives to seek protection and governments can more easily subsidize the small group of remaining farmers” (5).

“Agriculture liberalization by wealthy countries would especially benefit many developing countries, which have been denied fair opportunities to export their goods while at the same time being forced to compete in their local markets with subsidized agricultural products from developed countries” (6).

“Although the United States has led the way to high agricultural trade barriers, U.S interest shifted to favor liberalization in the late 1960s” (7).

“The strong opposition to liberalization in Japan and Europe makes it surprising to observe any agricultural liberalization. Indeed, agriculture remains highly protected compared to other sector. However, within the agricultural sector, some liberalization is evident” (11).

“Yet in the negotiation process, both power and interests are constrained by rules of the game that are recognized by all parties – it matters whether the negotiation takes place in an informal bartering session or in an international court” (14).

“Counter to the expectations of both liberal and realist theories of international relations, rules persuade more than power…” (15).

“Domestic factors will influence the strategies of both sides as each negotiates while looking at their own domestic audience and their opponents domestic costs” (20).

“The study of issue linkage is prominent in both American politics and international relations. Cross-sector issue linkage is the focus of this book” (27).

“The conclusion of this book is that rules persuade more than power” (346).

Vreeland, James. “The IMF and Economic Development.” 2002

“None of these studies, however, accounts for the possibility that unobserved factors may also play a role in selection and performance” (5).

“Note that by blaming a lack of political will when programs fall apart, one implies that countries persevering throughout a program do have political will” (5).

‘The results of this study are striking: after one controls for selection – caused by observed and unobserved factors – IMF programs have a negative effect on economic growth” (8).

“By bringing in the IMF, governments gain political leverage – via conditionality – to help push through unpopular policies. For some constituencies, these policies dampen the effects of bad economic performance by redistributing income upward and thus rewarding elites” (152).

Hall, Peter. “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning and the State.” 1993.

“Social learning has generally been treated as a dimension of policymaking that confirms the autonomy of the state, but it may well be a process that is intimately affected by societal developments rather than one that takes place largely inside the the state itself” (276).

“First and second order change can be seen as cases of ‘normal policymaking’ namely of a process that adjusts policy without challenging the overall terms of a given policy paradigm, much like normal science. Third order change, by contrast is likely to reflect a very different process, marked by the radical changes in the overarching terms of policy discourse associated with a paradigm shift” (279).

“Such an account should begin from the observation that paradigms are by definition never fully commensurable in scientific or technical terms” (280).

Third order change: “These changes are commonly associated with the movement from a Keynesian mode of policymaking to one based on monetarist economic theory” (283).

Schultz and Weingast. “The Democratic Advantage: Institutional Foundations of Financial Power in International Competition” 2003

“Despite the supposed defects of democracy, the historical record suggest that democratic states have, in fact, done quite well in international competition” (3-4).

“Lake argues that domestic institutions constrain rent seeking by the state, therefore leading to a more efficient allocation of resources and enhanced economic growth” (4).

“We contribute to this literature by showing that institutional features generally associated with liberal democratic states provide a significant advantage in prolonged international competition” (5).

“We argue that is it no coincidence that, over the past four centuries, state with representative, limited governments have been particularly successful in this respect” (5).

“The United States was bale to finance the Cold War without large tax increases and to use its impressive access to debt to outspend the Soviet Union militarily without undermining investment and consumption” (6).

Linkage between wealthy states and democratic ones… (6).

Hall and Soskice. “An Introduction to the Varieties of Capitalism.”

Three early approaches:

Modernization approach:

Neocorporatism:

Social system of production:

“We will argue that features of states once seen as attributes of strength make the implementation of many economic policies more difficult; and we seek a basis for comparison more deeply rooted in the organization of the private sector” (4).

“We want to bring firms back into the canter of the analysis of comparative capitalism and, without neglecting trade unions, highlight the role that business associations and other types of relationships among forms play in the political economy” (4).

“The varieties of capitalism approach to the political economy is actor-centered which is to say we see the political economy as a terrain populated by multiple actors, each of whom seeks to advance his interest in a rational way” (6).

Two types of economies: liberal or coordinated