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Essential Readings in World Politics S E C O N D E D I T I O N

The Norton Series in World Politics Jack Snyder, General Editor

Essentials of International Relations Karen A. Mingst

From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict Jack Snyder

Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development Robert H. Bates

Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations Bruce Russett and John Oneal

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics John Mearsheimer

Lenses of Analysis Richard Harknett

Coming soon:

Stephen Krasner on international political economy

Bahan asal darl Arklb Negara Malaysia

Essential Readings in World Politics

S E C O N D E D I T I O N

EDITED BY

K A R E N A . M I N G S T A N D JACK L . SNYDER

Copyright © 2004, 2001 by W. W. Norton 8c Company, Inc.

CONTENTS

PREFACE ix

S T E P H E N M . W A L T "International Relations: One World, Many Theories" 4

J O H N L E W I S G A D D I S "History, Theory, and Common Ground" 11

T H U C Y D I D E S "Melian Dialogue," adapted by Suresht Bald FROM Complete Writings: The Peloponnesian War 18

I M M A N U E I . K A N T " T O Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch," PROM Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals 20

W O O D R O W W I L S O N "The Fourteen Points," Address to the U.S. Congress, 8 January 1918 26

G E O R G E R K E N N A N ("X") "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" 28

J O H N L E W I S G A D D I S "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System" 33

v

v i C O N T E N T S

H A N S M O R G E N T H A U

J O H N M E A R S H E I M E R

M I C H A E L W . D O Y L E

A N D R E G U N D E R F R A N K

J . A N N T I C K N E R

M A R T H A F I N N E M O R E

"A Realist Theory of International Politics" and "Political Power," F R O M Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace 49

"Anarchy and the Struggle for Power," FROM The Tragedy of Great Power Politics 54

"Liberalism and World Politics" 73

"The Development of Underdevelopment" 86

"Man, the State, and War: Gendered Perspectives on National Security," FROM Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security 94

"Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention" 102

H E D L E Y B U L L

H A N S M O R G E N T H A U

I M M A N U E L W A L L E R S T E I N

R O B E R T J E R V I S

"Does Order Exist in World Politics?" FROM The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics 120

"The Balance of Power," "Different Methods of the Balance of Power," and "Evaluation of the Balance of Power," FROM Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace 124

"The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis" 130

"The Compulsive Empire" 138

S T E P H E N D . K R A S N E R "Sovereignty" 143

A N N E - M A R I E S L A U G H T E R "The Real New World Order" 149

R O B E R T I. R O T B E R G "Failed States in a World of Terror" 157

S A M U E L P. H U N T I N G T O N "The Clash of Civilizations?" 163

EDWARD W . SAID

G R A H A M E . FULLER

"The Clash of Ignorance" 170

"The Future of Political Islam" 173

C O N T E N T S VII

MARGARET G . H E R M A N N

AND JOE D . H A G A N

ROBERT JERVIS

C Y N T H I A ENLOE

"International Decision Making: Leadership Matters" 182

"Hypotheses on Misperception" 189

"The Personal Is International," F R O M Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics 202

M I C H A E L J . G L E N N O N

EDWARD C . L U C K

A N N E - M A R I E SLAUGHTER

IAN H U R D

MARGARET E . K E C K A N D

KATHRYN SIKKINK

S A M A N T H A POWER

HENRY A . KISSINGER

K E N N E T H R O T H

G . JOHN IKENBERRY

JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER

"Why the Security Council Failed" 208

Responses 219

"Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics: Introduction" and "Human Rights Advocacy Networks in Latin America," F R O M Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics 222

"Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen" 233

"The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction" 253

"The Case for Universal Jurisdiction" 258

"Is American Multilateralism in Decline?" 262

"The False Promise of International Institutions" 283

Viii C O N T E N T S

CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

THOMAS C SCHELLING

ROBERT JERVIS

SCOTT D. SAGAN AND

KENNETH N . WALTZ

J O H N M U E L L E R

M I C H A E L W . DOYLE

BARRY R. POSEN

AUDREY K U R T H CRONIN

ROBERT A . PAPE

"War as an Instrument of Policy," F R O M On War 297

"The Diplomacy of Violence," F R O M Arms and Influence 301

"Cooperation under the Security Dilemma" 309

"Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Weapons: For Better or Worse?" F R O M The Spread of Nuclear Weapons 322

"The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World" 341

"International Intervention," F R O M Ways of War and Peace 347

"The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict" 357

"Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism" 367

"The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" 382

ROBERT GILPIN

STEPHEN D. KRASNER

BRUCE R. SCOTT

JESSICA EINHORN

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

"The Nature of Political Economy," FROM U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation 403

"State Power and the Structure of International Trade" 410

"The Great Divide in the Global Village" 421

"The World Bank's Mission Creep" 430

"The Way Ahead," FROM Globalization and Its Discontents 437

DAVID H E L D A N D

A N T H O N Y M C G R E W , WITH

DAVID GOLDBLATT A N D

JONATHAN PERRATON

T H O M A S FRIEDMAN

AMARTYA SEN

"Globalization" 462

"The Backlash" FROM The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization 471

"Universal Truths: Human Rights and the Westernizing Illusion" 477

PREFACE

This reader is a quintessential collaborative effort between the two co-editors and Ann Marcy of W. W. Norton. In a flurry of e-mails during 2003, the co- editors suggested articles for inclusion, traced the sources, and rejected or ac- cepted them, defending choices to skeptical colleagues. It became apparent during the process that the co-editors, while both international relations schol- ars, read very different literatures. This book represents a product of that collab- orative process and is all the better for the differences.

The articles have been selected to meet several criteria. First, the collection is designed to augment and amplify the core Essentials of International Relations text (third edition) by Karen Mingst. The chapters in this book follow those in the text. Second, the selections are purposefully eclectic, that is, key theoretical articles are paired with contemporary pieces found in the popular literature. When possible articles have been chosen to reflect diverse theoretical perspec- tives and policy viewpoints. The articles are also both readable and engaging to undergraduates. The co-editors struggled to maintain the integrity of the chal- lenging pieces, while making them accessible to undergraduates at a variety of colleges and universities.

Special thanks go to those individuals who provided reviews of the first edi- tion of this book and offered their own suggestions and reflections based on teaching experience, Our product benefited greatly from these evaluations, al- though had we included all the suggestions, the book would have been thou- sands of pages! Ann Marcy orchestrated the process, reacting to our suggestions, mediating our differences, and keeping us "on task." To her, we owe a special thanks. Andrea Haver guided the manuscript through the permissions and edit- ing process, a very labor-intensive task.

Essential Readings in Wor ld Politics S E C O N D E D I T I O N

APPROACHES

In Essentials of International Relations, Karen Mingst introduces various theories and approaches used to study international relations. In this section, Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, provides a brief overview of these theories and sets them in the context of new is- sues that are being debated in the field. The scholars thinking about international relations and debating these issues are divided by both theoretical and method- ological differences. Recognizing these divisions in a symposium on history and theory in a special issue of International Security, John Lewis Gaddis, a promi- nent diplomatic historian at Yale University, acknowledges that historians pay too little attention to methodology but chastises political scientists for using methods that overgeneralize by searching for timeless laws of politics. Finding common ground between these divergent approaches, he argues that students of politics should use the past not to try to predict the future, but to help people understand political developments as they unfold.

Both historical analysis and philosophical discourse contribute to the study of international relations. The historian of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, uses the Melian Dialogue. In this classic realist/idealist dilemma, the leaders of Melos ponder the fate of the island, deciding whether to fight their antagonists, the Athe- nians, or to rely on the gods and the enemy of Athens, the Lacedaemonians (also known as Spartans), for their safety. Centuries later, in 1795, the philosopher Im- manuel Kant posited that a group of republican states with representative forms of government that were accountable to their citizens would be able to form an effec- tive league of peace. That observation has generated a plethora of theoretical and empirical research known as the democratic peace debate. In Essentials, Mingst uses the debate to illustrate how political scientists conduct international relations research. Michael Doyle's article on "Liberalism and World Politics," excerpted in Chapter 3, sparked the contemporary debate on this topic. And an important statement on the status of that debate is presented in Bruce Russett and John Oneal's Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (2002) which integrates a comprehensive body of research findings on the democratic debate.

4 C H A P T E R 1 A P P R O A C H E S

S T E P H E N M . W A L T

International Relations: One World,

Many Theories

Why should policymakers and practition-ers care about the scholarly study of in-ternational affairs? Those who conduct foreign policy often dismiss academic theorists (fre- quently, one must admit, with good reason), but there is an inescapable link between the abstract world of theory and the real world of policy. We need theories to make sense of the blizzard of infor- mation that bombards us daily. Even policymakers who are contemptuous of "theory" must rely on their own (often unstated) ideas about how the world works in order to decide what to do. It is hard to make good policy if one's basic organizing princi- ples are flawed, just as it is hard to construct good theories without knowing a lot about the real world. Everyone uses theories—whether he or she knows it or not—and disagreements about policy usually rest on more fundamental disagreements about the ba- sic forces that shape international outcomes.

Take, for example, the current debate on how to respond to China. From one perspective, China's ascent is the latest example of the tendency for rising powers to alter the global balance of power in potentially dangerous ways, especially as their growing influence makes them more ambi- tious. From another perspective, the key to China's future conduct is whether its behavior will be modified by its integration into world markets and by the (inevitable?) spread of democratic princi- ples. From yet another viewpoint, relations be- tween China and the rest of the world will be shaped by issues of culture and identity: Will China see itself (and be seen by others) as a normal member of the world community or a singular so- ciety that deserves special treatment?

From Foreign Policy, no, 110 (spring 1998): 29-44.

In the same way, the debate over NATO expan- sion looks different depending on which theory one employs. From a "realist" perspective, NATO expansion is an effort to extend Western influ- ence—well beyond the traditional sphere of U.S. vital interests—during a period of Russian weak- ness and is likely to provoke a harsh response from Moscow. From a liberal perspective, however, ex- pansion will reinforce the nascent democracies of Central Europe and extend NATO's conflict- management mechanisms to a potentially turbu- lent region. A third view might stress the value of incorporating the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland within the Western security community, whose members share a common identity that has made war largely unthinkable.

No single approach can capture all the com- plexity of contemporary world politics. Therefore, we are better off with a diverse array of competing ideas rather than a single theoretical orthodoxy. Competition between theories helps reveal their strengths and weaknesses and spurs subsequent re- finements, while revealing flaws in conventional wisdom. Although we should take care to em- phasize inventiveness over invective, we should welcome and encourage the heterogeneity of con- temporary scholarship,

Where Are We Coming From?

The study of international affairs is best under- stood as a protracted competition between the realist, liberal, and radical traditions. Realism em- phasizes the enduring propensity for conflict be- tween states; liberalism identifies several ways to mitigate these conflictive tendencies; and the radi- cal tradition describes how the entire system of

siM'i t t 'N M . W A I T : International Relations 5

on the power of states, liberalism generally saw states as the central players in international affairs. Al l liberal theories implied that cooperation was more pervasive than even the defensive version of realism allowed, but each view offered a different recipe for promoting it.

R A D I C A L A P P R O A C H E S

Until the 1980s, marxism was the main alternative to the mainstream realist and liberal traditions. Where realism and liberalism took the state system for granted, marxism offered both a different ex- planation for international conflict and a blueprint for fundamentally transforming the existing inter- national order.

Orthodox marxist theory saw capitalism as the central cause of international conflict. Capitalist states battled each other as a consequence of their incessant struggle for profits and battled socialist states because they saw in them the seeds of their own destruction. Neomarxist "dependency" the- ory, by contrast, focused on relations between ad- vanced capitalist powers and less developed states and argued that the former—aided by an unholy alliance with the ruling classes of the developing world—had grown rich by exploiting the latter. The solution was to overthrow these parasitic elites and install a revolutionary government committed to autonomous development.

Both of these theories were largely discredited before the Cold War even ended. The extensive history of economic and military cooperation among the advanced industrial powers showed that capitalism did not inevitably lead to conflict. The bitter schisms that divided the communist world showed that socialism did not always pro- mote harmony. Dependency theory suffered simi- lar empirical setbacks as it became increasingly clear that, first, active participation in the world economy was a better route to prosperity than au- tonomous socialist development; and, second, many developing countries proved themselves quite capable of bargaining successfully with multinational corporations and other capitalist in- stitutions.

As marxism succumbed to its various failings, its mantle was assumed by a group of theorists who borrowed heavily from the wave of postmodern writings in literary criticism and social theory. This "deconstructionist" approach was openly skeptical of the effort to devise general or universal theories such as realism or liberalism. Indeed, its propo- nents emphasized the importance of language and discourse in shaping social outcomes. However, because these scholars focused initially on criticiz- ing the mainstream paradigms but did not offer positive alternatives to them, they remained a self- consciously dissident minority for most of the 1980s.

D O M E S T I C P O L I T I C S

Not all Cold War scholarship on international af- fairs fit neatly into the realist, liberal, or marxist paradigms. In particular, a number of important works focused on the characteristics of states, gov- ernmental organizations, or individual leaders. The democratic strand of liberal theory fits under this heading, as do the efforts of scholars such as Graham Allison and John Steinbruner to use orga- nization theory and bureaucratic politics to explain foreign policy behavior, and those of Jervis, Irving Janis, and others, which applied social and cogni- tive psychology. For the most part, these efforts did not seek to provide a general theory of interna- tional behavior but to identify other factors that might lead states to behave contrary to the predic- tions of the realist or liberal approaches. Thus, much of this literature should be regarded as a complement to the three main paradigms rather than as a rival approach for analysis of the interna- tional system as a whole.

New Wrinkles in Old Paradigms

Scholarship on international affairs has diversified significantly since the end of the Cold War. Non- American voices are more prominent, a wider range of methods and theories are seen as legiti- mate, and new issues such as ethnic conflict, the environment, and the future of the state

have been placed on the agenda of scholars every- where.

Yet the sense of deja vu is equally striking. In- stead of resolving the struggle between competing theoretical traditions, the end of the Cold War has merely launched a new series of debates. Ironically, even as many societies embrace similar ideals of democracy, free markets, and human rights, the scholars who study these developments are more divided than ever.

R E A L I S M R E D U X

Although the end of the Cold War led a few writers to declare that realism was destined for the acade- mic scrapheap, rumors of its demise have been largely exaggerated.

A recent contribution of realist theory is its at- tention to the problem of relative and absolute gains. Responding to the institutionalises' claim that international institutions would enable states to forego short-term advantages for the sake of greater long-term gains, realists such as Joseph Grieco and Stephen Krasner point out that anar- chy forces states to worry about both the absolute gains from cooperation and the way that gains are distributed among participants. The logic is straightforward; If one state reaps larger gains than its partners, it will gradually become stronger, and its partners will eventually become more vul- nerable,

Realists have also been quick to explore a vari- ety of new issues. Barry Posen offers a realist expla- nation for ethnic conflict, noting that the breakup of multiethnic states could place rival ethnic groups in an anarchic setting, thereby triggering intense fears and tempting each group to use force to improve its relative position. This problem would be particularly severe when each group's territory contained enclaves inhabited by their eth- nic rivals—as in the former Yugoslavia—because each side would be tempted to "cleanse" (preemp- tively) these alien minorities and expand to incor- porate any others from their ethnic group that lay outside their borders. Realists have also cautioned that NATO, absent a clear enemy, would likely face

increasing strains and that expanding its presence eastward would jeopardize relations with Russia. Finally, scholars such as Michael Mastanduno have argued that U.S. foreign policy is generally consis- tent with realist principles, insofar as its actions are still designed to preserve U.S. predominance and to shape a postwar order that advances American interests.

The most interesting conceptual development within the realist paradigm has been the emerg- ing split between the "defensive" and "offensive" strands of thought. Defensive realists such as Waltz, Van Evera, and Jack Snyder assumed that states had little intrinsic interest in military con- quest and argued that the costs of expansion gen- erally outweighed the benefits. Accordingly, they maintained that great power wars occurred largely because domestic groups fostered exaggerated per- ceptions of threat and an excessive faith in the effi- cacy of military force.

This view is now being challenged along several fronts. First, as Randall Schweller notes, the neore- alist assumption that states merely seek to survive "stacked the deck" in favor of the status quo be- cause it precluded the threat of predatory revision- ist states—nations such as Adolf Hitler's Germany or Napoleon Bonaparte's France that "value what they covet far more than what they possess" and are willing to risk annihilation to achieve their aims. Second, Peter Liberman, in his book Does Conquest Pay?, uses a number of historical cases— such as the Nazi occupation of Western Europe and Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe—to show that the benefits of conquest often exceed the costs, thereby casting doubt on the claim that military expansion is no longer cost-effective. Third, offensive realists such as Eric Labs, John Mearsheimer, and Fareed Zakaria argue that anar- chy encourages all states to try to maximize their relative strength simply because no state can ever be sure when a truly revisionist power might emerge.

These differences help explain why realists dis- agree over issues such as the future of Europe. For defensive realists such as Van Evera, war is rarely profitable and usually results from militarism, hy-

pernationalism, or some other distorting domestic factor. Because Van Evera believes such forces are largely absent in post-Cold War Europe, he con- cludes that the region is "primed for peace." By contrast, Mearsheimer and other offensive realists believe that anarchy forces great powers to com- pete irrespective of their internal characteristics and that security competition will return to Eu- rope as soon as the U.S. pacifier is withdrawn.

N E W L I F E F O R L I B E R A L I S M

The defeat of communism sparked a round of self- congratulation in the West, best exemplified by Francis Fukuyama's infamous claim that hu- mankind had now reached the "end of history." History has paid little attention to this boast, but the triumph of the West did give a notable boost to all three strands of liberal thought.

By far the most interesting and important de- velopment has been the lively debate on the "de- mocratic peace," Although the most recent phase of this debate had begun even before the Soviet Union collapsed, it became more influential as the number of democracies began to increase and as evidence of this relationship began to accumulate.

Democratic peace theory is a refinement of the earlier claim that democracies were inherently more peaceful than autocratic states. It rests on the belief that although democracies seem to fight wars as often as other states, they rarely, if ever, fight one another. Scholars such as Michael Doyle, James Lee Ray, and Bruce Russett have offered a number of explanations for this tendency, the most popular being that democracies embrace norms of compromise that bar the use of force against groups espousing similar principles. It is hard to think of a more influential, recent aca- demic debate, insofar as the belief that "democra- cies don't fight each other" has been an important justification for the Clinton administration's ef- forts to enlarge the sphere of democratic rule.

* * *

Liberal institutionalists likewise have continued to adapt their own theories. On the one hand, the

core claims of institutionalist theory have become more modest over time. Institutions are now said to facilitate cooperation when it is in each state's interest to do so, but it is widely agreed that they cannot force states to behave in ways that are con- trary to the states' own selfish interests. On the other hand, institutionalists such as John Duffield and Robert McCalla have extended the theory into new substantive areas, most notably the study of NATO. For these scholars, NATO's highly institu- tionalized character helps explain why it has been able to survive and adapt, despite the disappear- ance of its main adversary.

The economic strand of liberal theory is still in- fluential as well. In particular, a number of scholars have recently suggested that the "globalization" of world markets, the rise of transnational networks and nongovernmental organizations, and the rapid spread of global communications technology are undermining the power of states and shifting attention away from military security toward eco- nomics and social welfare. The details are novel but the basic logic is familiar: As societies around the globe become enmeshed in a web of economic and social connections, the costs of disrupting these ties will effectively preclude unilateral state actions, es- pecially the use of force.

This perspective implies that war will remain a remote possibility among the advanced indus- trial democracies. It also suggests that bringing China and Russia into the relentless embrace of world capitalism is the best way to promote both prosperity and peace, particularly if this process creates a strong middle class in these states and re- inforces pressures to democratize. Get these soci- eties hooked on prosperity and competition will be confined to the economic realm,

This view has been challenged by scholars who argue that the actual scope of "globalization" is mod- est and that these various transactions still take place in environments that are shaped and regulated by states. Nonetheless, the belief that economic forces are superseding traditional great power politics en- joys widespread acceptance among scholars, pundits, and policymakers, and the role of the state is likely to be an important topic for future academic inquiry,

Competing Paradigms

Sects and shapes beliefs and interests, and estab- lishes accepted norms of behavior. Consequently, constructivism is especially attentive to the sources of change, and this approach has largely replaced marxism as the preeminent radical perspective on international affcirs,

The end of the Cold War played an important role in legitimating conttructivist theories because realism and liberalism both failed to anticipate this event and had some trouble explaining it. Con- ttructtvte had an explanation; Specifically, former

Whereas realism and Ltheultsm tend to toe us on material factor, stub .is power or trade, construe trust approaches emphasise the itupatt ol ideas. Instead tut taking the state (or granted and asstun trig that it simply seeks to uirvive, umstun tivist. regard the interests and identities ut states as a highly malleable ptodml ot .pectiu hi.tornai ptoirs.es. They pay close attention to the prevatl tug cltscouiseSil in society because druoutse re

president Mikhail Gorbachev revolutionized Soviet foreign policy because he embraced new ideas such as "common security."

Moreover, given that we live in an era where old norms are being challenged, once clear boundaries are dissolving, and issues of identity are becoming more salient, it is hardly surprising that scholars have been drawn to approaches that place these issues front and center. From a constructivist perspective, in fact, the central issue in the post-Cold War world is how different groups conceive their identities and in- terests. Although power is not irrelevant, construc- tivism emphasizes how ideas and identities are created, how they evolve, and how they shape the way states understand and respond to their situation. Therefore, it matters whether Europeans define them- selves primarily in national or continental terms; whether Germany and Japan redefine their pasts in ways that encourage their adopting more active international roles; and whether the United States embraces or rejects its identity as "global police- man."

Constructivist theories are quite diverse and do not offer a unified set of predictions on any of these issues. At a purely conceptual level, Alexan- der Wendt has argued that the realist conception of anarchy does not adequately explain why con- flict occurs between states. The real issue is how anarchy is understood—in Wendt's words, "Anar- chy is what states make of it." Another strand of constructivist theory has focused on the future of the territorial state, suggesting that transnational communication and shared civic values are under- mining traditional national loyalties and creating radically new forms of political association. Other constructivists focus on the role of norms, arguing that international law and other normative princi- ples have eroded earlier notions of sovereignty and altered the legitimate purposes for which state power may be employed. The common theme in each of these strands is the capacity of discourse to shape how political actors define themselves and their interests, and thus modify their behavior.

D O M E S T I C P O L I T I C S R E C O N S I D E R E D

As in the Cold War, scholars continue to explore the impact of domestic politics on the behavior of states. Domestic politics are obviously central to the debate on the democratic peace, and scholars such as Snyder, Jeffrey Frieden, and Helen Milner have examined how domestic interest groups can distort the formation of state preferences and lead to suboptimal international behavior. George Downs, David Rocke, and others have also ex- plored how domestic institutions can help states deal with the perennial problem of uncertainty, while students of psychology have applied prospect theory and other new tools to explain why decision makers fail to act in a rational fashion.

The past decade has also witnessed an ex- plosion of interest in the concept of culture, a de- velopment that overlaps with the constructivist emphasis on the importance of ideas and norms, * * * This trend is partly a reflection of the broader interest in cultural issues in the academic world (and within the public debate as well) and partly a response to the upsurge in ethnic, nation- alist, and cultural conflicts since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Tomorrow's Conceptual Toolbox

While these debates reflect the diversity of contem- porary scholarship on international affairs, there are also obvious signs of convergence, Most realists recognize that nationalism, militarism, ethnicity, and other domestic factors are important; liberals acknowledge that power is central to international behavior; and some constructivists admit that ideas will have greater impact when backed by powerful states and reinforced by enduring mate- rial forces. The boundaries of each paradigm are somewhat permeable, and there is ample opportu- nity for intellectual arbitrage,

* * *

In short, each of these competing perspectives cap- tures important aspects of world politics, Our un- derstanding would be impoverished were our

confined to only one of them. The "com- role of power, keep liberalism's awareness of do- plomat" of the future should remain cog- mestic forces in mind, and occasionally reflect on of realism's emphasis on the inescapable constructivism's vision of change.

J O H N L E W I S G A D D I S

History, Theory, and Common Ground

mund Freud once pointed out that "it is recisely communities with adjoining terri- fies, and related to each other in other

well, who are engaged in constant feuds ridiculing each other," He called this "the sm of minor differences," explaining it as /enient and relatively harmless satisfaction nclination to aggression, by means of which n the between the members of the commu- made easier."1 Freud had nationalism in

af course, not the long and uneasy relation- tween theorists and historians of world poi- nt shoes may fit several pairs of feet,

we academic nationalists? We have been since graduate school to defend our turf assaults from deans, dilettantes, and adja- sciplines. We organize our journals, schol- rganizations, and university departments precisely demarcated boundaries. We ges-

aguely in the direction of interdisciplinary ation, rather in the way sovereign states put te appearances at the United Nations; real- wever, falls far short of what we routinely se. And we have been known, from time to o construct the intellectual equivalent of for- trenches from which we fire artillery back rth, dodging shrapnel even as we sink ever deeply into mutual incomprehension.

International Security 22 no. 1 (summer 1997):

The world is full of what seem to be ancient patterns of behavior that are in fact relatively re- cent: real-world nationalism is one of them.2

Another, as it happens, is disciplinary professional- ization: a century ago historians and political sci- entists had only begun to think of themselves as distinct communities.3 Might there be a connec- tion? Could we have allowed a "narcissism of mi- nor differences," over the past several decades, to Balkanize our minds?

Laboratory versus Thought Experiments

It might help, in thinking about this possibility, to set aside disciplinary boundaries for a moment and consider a simple question: can we, in investigating phenomena, replicate phenomena?

Certain fields do this all the time. They rely upon controlled reproducible experimentation; they are able to re-run sequences of events, varying conditions in such a way as to establish causes, cor- relations, and consequences. Mathematicians re- calculate pi to millions of decimal places with absolute confidence that its basic value will remain what it has been for thousands of years. Physics and chemistry are only slightly less reliable, for al- though investigators cannot always be sure what is happening at subatomic levels, they do get similar

results when they perform experiments under sim- ilar conditions, and they probably always will. Ver- ification, within these disciplines, repeats actual processes. Time and space are compressed and ma- nipulated; history itself is in effect re-run.

But not all sciences work this way. In astron- omy, geology, and paleontology, phenomena rarely fit within computers or laboratories; the time required to see results can exceed the life spans of those who seek them.4 These disciplines depend instead upon thought experiments: practi- tioners re-run in their minds what their petri dishes, centrifuges, and electron microscopes can- not manage. They then look for evidence suggest- ing which of these mental exercises comes closest to explaining their real-time observations. Repro- ducibility exists only as a consensus that such cor- respondences seem plausible. The only way we can re-run this kind of history is to imagine it.5

Both of these methods—laboratory and thought experiments—are indisputably "scientific." They differ dramatically, though, in their reliance on replication versus imagination.

Science, History and Imagination

We do not normally think of research in the "hard" sciences as an imaginative act. Where would Einstein have been, though, without an imagination so vivid that it allowed experiments with phenomena too large to fit not just his labora- tory but his galaxy? Or Darwin without the ability to conceive a timescale extending hundreds of mil- lions of years? Or Alfred Wegener without visualiz- ing a globe on which whole continents could come together and drift apart? What is the reconstruc- tion of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures from fossils, if not a fitting of imagined flesh to surviving bones and shells, or at least to impressions of them?6

Historians function in just this way, matching mental reconstructions of experiences they can never have with whatever archival "fossils" these

may have left behind.7 Everything we do, in this sense, is a thought experiment, a simulated real- ity—in short, a story.8 A few brave historians have even begun relying upon what they have acknowl- edged to be fictional fragments to fill gaps in the archival record;9 many others have no doubt done so without being quite so honest about it.

And what of the obvious next step, which is the construction of explicitly fictional accounts—nov- els, plays, poems, films? Do these also not simulate reality by revealing aspects of human behavior that would be difficult to document in any other way? Surely Shakespeare's contribution to our under- standing of human nature was at least as great as Freud's—even if he did take liberties with the his- torical record at least as great as those of Oliver Stone.10 My point, then, is that whenever we set out to explain phenomena we cannot replicate, everyone in some way or another relies upon acts of imagination.

Political Science as Laboratory Science?

Where does political science fit within this range of possibilities extending from physics to poetry? From this outsider's perspective, at least, the field seems torn between the substance with which it deals—nonreplicable human affairs—and the methods many of its practitioners want to employ, which are those of the replicable laboratory sci- ences.11 The strains this straddle produces can be painful indeed, It has never been clear to me why political scientists model their discipline on mathe- matics, physics, and chemistry when they could have chosen geology, paleontology, and biology. I am convinced, though, that these disciplinary pref- erences generate most of the conflicts—and the incomprehension—that alienate historians. Con- sider the following:

The quest for parsimony. Political scientists seem to assume that simple mechanisms—some- what like entropy or electromagnetism—drive hu- man events, and that if we can only discover what

they are, we can use them to make predictions. Historians would acknowledge some such pat- terns: people grow old and die; reproduction re- quires sex; gravity keeps us from floating off into space. Reliable though these are, however, we re- gard them as insuffciently discriminating in their effects to provide much useful information beyond what most of us already know.

For international relations theorists to insist that all nations within an anarchic system practice self-help strikes us as a little like saying that fish within water must learn to swim. It is neither un- true nor untrival—just uninteresting. Anyone who knows the nature of fish, water, and states will have already figured it out. Such pronouncements only raise further questions: what is meant by "anar- chy," "self-help," and "system"? But here the an- swers are much less clear because so much depends upon context. From a historian's viewpoint parsi- mony postpones more than it provides—except, perhaps, for the vicarious thrill of appearing to do physics.12

Distinctions between independent and dependent variables. For most phenomena, political scientists claim, there is some determining antecedent: as in chemistry, one seeks to sort out active from inac- tive or partially active agents, thereby establishing causation. But why chemistry, when biology—a field much closer to the human experience-—func- tions so very differently?

Biologists assume all organisms to have arisen from a long, complex, and often unpredictable chain of antecedents extending back hundreds of millions of years. The common roots of human be- ings, as of animals, plants, and whatever newly dis- covered organisms may lie in between, are taken for granted. But exogenous events—shifting conti- nents, global warming or cooling, giant killer aster- oids—ensure that any replay of evolution, were that somehow possible, would produce vastly dif- ferent results,l3 That is why it is hard to find the in- dependent variables for Neanderthals, kangaroos, or pumpkins.

To see the difficulties historians have with such concepts, consider Marc Bloch's famous example of a man falling off a mountain, "He slipped," we

would probably say, in explaining the accident. But this could hardly have happened had the path not been icy, had the victim not decided to traverse it that day, had he not been born, had tectonic processes not uplifted the mountain, had the law of gravity not applied.14 So what are the indepen- dent variables in this instance? Historians might specify the event's immediate, intermediate, and distant causes; but they would surely also insist upon their interdependence.15 Given the example of evolutionary biology, would they be any less "sci- entific" than if they attempted to distinguish inde- pendent from dependent variables?

Accounting for change. Here too political sci- ence tilts toward the replicable sciences despite the nonreplicable character of the subjects with which it deals. Such sciences assume constancy: principles are expected to work in the same way across time and space. International relations theorists fol- low this procedure when they treat concepts like "balancing," "bandwagoning," and "deterrence" as having equivalent meanings across centuries and cultures.16 Historians know, though, that every concept is embedded in a context. We doubt that even the most rigorous definitions fix phenomena in quite the manner that amber freezes flies.

Nonreplicable sciences share our skepticism. Biology, geology, paleontology, and astronomy concern themselves as much with change as with stability; so too does medicine, an applied science that combines a reliance on replication with an ac- knowledgment of evolution. Physicians seek verifi- cation by repeating phenomena, to be sure: that is what case histories are all about. But they find long-term prediction problematic. Particular treat- ments produce known results against certain diseases—for the moment. Viruses, however, can evolve means of defending themselves, so that what works today may not a decade hence.17 Re- producible results, in this field, can make the dif- ference between life and death. They guarantee less than one might think, though, about the future.

Do societies develop the equivalents of medical vulnerabilities and immunities? Can these change, so that what may hold up as a generalization about the recent past—for example, that democracies do

not fight each other—may not for all time to come? Scientists used to think that proteins could not pos- sibly be infectious agents. Now, with mad cows, it appears as though they can.18 But that hardly means that all proteins are infectious—it only means that we need to qualify our generalizations.

Commensurability. Replicable sciences assume commensurate standards of measurement: all who aspire to reproducible experimentation must share the same definitions of kilograms, voltages, and molecular weights. How close are we to agreement, though, on the meaning of terms like "power," or "hegemony," or "democracy"? Many political sci- entists see the "democratic peace" hypothesis as hinging precariously on whether Imperial Ger- many was a democracy in 1914. But historians, who are in the best position to know, disagree on this point, just as observers at the time did. 1 9 The reason is that we have no universally accepted standard for what a democracy actually is.

Would historians then jettison the concept of a "democratic peace" if there should prove to be such a glaring exception to it? I think not, precisely because we distrust absolute standards. We would probably acknowledge the anomaly, speculate as to its causes, and yet insist that democracies really do not fight one another most of the time.20 Like physi- cians seeking to understand how mad cows might infect those unlucky enough to have eaten them, we would qualify what we used to think—whether about proteins or politics—and then move on.

Historians' interpretations, like life, evolve. We live with shifting sands, and hence prefer explana- tory tents to temples. Yet on the basis of what they understand us to have concluded, our political sci- ence colleagues make categorical judgments about the past all the time, confidently incorporating them within their databases.21 No wonder we stand in awe of their edifices, while finding it prudent not to enter them.

Objectivity. Thomas Kuhn showed years ago that even in the most rigorous sciences the tempta- tion to see what one seeks can be overwhelming; postmodernism has pushed the insight—probably further than Kuhn would have liked—into the so- cial sciences and the fine arts.22 Historians have

long understood that they too have an "objectiv- ity" problem: our solution has generally been to admit the difficulty and then get on with doing his- tory as best we can, leaving it to our readers to de- termine which of our interpretations comes closest to the truth.23 The procedure resembles what hap- pens in the "hard" sciences, where it is also possi- ble to construct a consensus without agreeing upon all of the generalizations that make it up. Physicists who could not settle so fundamental an issue as whether light is a particle or a wave man- aged, nonetheless, to build an atomic bomb.24

Do political scientists think objectivity possi- ble? I find this question surprisingly hard to an- swer. To be sure, vast amounts of time and energy go into perfecting methodologies whose purpose seems to be to remove any possibility of bias: the determination certainly exists, more than in his- tory and perhaps even physics, to agree on the fun- damentals before attempting generalization. And yet, it is striking how many articles in international relations theory—especially in this journal—begin with professions of belief, followed by quotations from what would appear to be sacred texts. Dog- mas are defended and heresies condemned, with the entirely predictable result (to a historian at least) that sects proliferate.25 Whether we are really dealing with science or faith, therefor—or per- haps a science bounded by faith—remains unclear.

Seeking Common Ground

Where, then, might historians and political scien- tists find common ground? Surely, as a start, in the subjects with which we deal: we share a focus on people and the ways they organize their affairs, not on processes that take place inside laboratories. We deal inescapably, therefore, with nonreplicable phenomena; this by no means requires, however, that we do so unscientifically. There is a long and fruitful tradition within what we might call the "evolutionary" sciences for finding patterns in par- ticularities that change over time.26 Which of our two disciplines best reflects it is an interesting question.

My preliminary conclusion is that the histori- ans, without trying to be scientific, manage this better than most of them realize; but that the po- litical scientists, by trying to be too scientific, ac- complish less than they might. Historians are "evolutionary" by instinct if not formal training: were they to make their methods more explicit (as they certainly should),2 7 they might find more in common with other sciences than they expect. Po- litical scientists, conversely, are explicit to a fault: their problem is that they cannot seem to decide what kind of science—replicable or nonreplica- ble—they want to do.

But is there really a choice? I detect, among some political scientists, a growing sense that there is not: that insurmountable difficulties arise when one tries to apply the methods of replicable science to the nonreplicable realm of human affairs. This has led, among other things, to an interest in "process-tracing" as a way of extracting generali- ties from unique sequences of events." How is this different, though, from the construction of narra- tives, which is what historians do? It is here, I think—in a careful comparison of what our two fields mean by "narrative" and "process-tracing"— that the most promising opportunities for cooper- ation between historians and political scientists currendy lie.

Any historical narrative is a simulation, a highly artificial modeling of what happened in the past involving the tracing of processes—as well as structures—over time. Such accounts cannot help but combine the general with the particular: revolutions, for example, have certain common characteristics; but the details of each one differ. Historians could hardly write about revolutions without some prior assumptions as to what these are and what we need to know about them: in this sense, they depend upon theory. They also, how- ever, require facts—even awkward ones inconsis- tent with theories—for without these no link to the past could even exist. What results is a kind of tai- loring: we seek the best "fit" given the materials at hand, without the slightest illusion that we are replicating whatever it is they cover, or that our handiwork will "wear well" for all time to come.

Nor can we function without imagination: like a good tailor, we try to see things from the perspec- tive of our subjects and only then make alterations based upon our own. Implicit in all of this is some sense of what might have been; the assumption that history did not have to have happened in the way it did, and that many of our conclusions about what did happen involve an implicit consideration of paths not taken—which is of course fiction. 2 9

Are such methods "scientific"? Of course they are: "hard" scientists ponder alternative scenarios all the time, often on the basis of intuitive, even aes- thetic, judgments.30 Can political scientists live with such methods? If their rapidly developing in- terest in counterfactuals is any indication, they have already begun to do so.31

Our fields, therefore, may have more in com- mon than their "narcissism of minor differences" has allowed them to acknowledge. Both disciplines fall squarely within the spectrum of "nonreplica- ble" sciences. Both trace processes over time. Both employ imagination. Both use counterfactual rea- soning. But what about prediction, or at least pol- icy implications? Most historians shy from these priorities like vampires confronted with crosses. Many political scientists embrace them enthusias- tically. If common ground exists here, it may be hard to find.

Preparing, Not Predicting

Return, though, to our initial distinction between replicable and nonreplicable sciences. The former assume that knowing the past will reveal the future; the latter avoid such claims, but seek nonetheless to provide methods for coping with whatever is to come.

No one can be certain where or when the next great earthquake will occur. It is helpful to know, though, that such upheavals take place more fre- quently in California than in Kansas: that people who live along the San Andreas Fault should con- figure their houses against seismic shocks, not fun- nel clouds. Nobody would prudently bet, just yet, on who will play in the *** World Series. It seems

safe enough to assume, though, that proficiency will determine which teams get there: achieving it, too, is a kind of configuring against contingen- cies.32 Not even the most capable war planner can predict where the next war will occur, or what its outcome will be. But is it equally clear that war planning should therefore cease? The point, in all of these instances, is not so much to predict the fu- ture as to prepare for it.

Training is not forecasting. What it does do is expand ranges of experience, both directly and vic- ariously, so that we can increase our skills, our sta- mina—and, if all goes well, our wisdom. The principle is much the same whether one is working out in a gym, flying a 747 simulator, or reading William H. McNeill. Here too there is, or at least could be, common ground for historians and po- litical scientists: the terrain upon which to train may be more accessible—and hospitable—than at first glance it might appear to be. It deserves, at a minimum, joint exploration.

NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discon-

tents, James Strachey, trans, and ed. (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 72.

2. On nationalism, see E, J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780; Programme, Myth, and Reality (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Benedict Ander- son, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991).

3. Dorothy Ross, in The Origins of American So- cial Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 257-300, discusses how his- torians and political scientists came to regard themselves as distinct communities.

4. We do, however, now have limited real-time evidence for Darwin's theory of natural selec- tion. See Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (New York: Knopf, 1994).

5. Why, for example, does today's North Ameri-

can pronghorned antelope run twice as fast as any of its predators? Perhaps because "ghost" predators now extinct—cheetahs and hye- nas—forced them to do so. There is no way to verify this hypothesis, though, apart from ex- amining the fossil record to see whether ante- lope did indeed once live alongside speedier carnivores. See Carol Kaesuk Yoon, "Prong- horn's Speed May Be Legacy of Past Preda- tors," New York Times, December 24, 1996.

6. Stephen Jay Gould, in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989), provides one of the best explanations of how it is done.

7. John H. Goldthorpe, in "The Uses of History in Sociology: Reflections on Some Recent Ten- dencies," British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 42 (June 1991), pp. 213-214, makes this point ad- mirably.

8. Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History," Past and Present, Vol. 85 (November 1979), p. 3. "What distinguishes 'historical' from 'fictional' sto- ries," Hayden White has argued, "is first and foremost their content, rather than their form. The content of historical stories is real events, events that really happened, rather than imagi- nary events, events invented by the narrator." See Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representa- tion (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1987), p. 27.

9. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Knopf, 1991), and John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Fam- ily Story from Early America (New York: Ran- dom House, 1994).

10. Edmund S. Morgan discusses these issues in reviewing Arthur Miller's screenplay for the film version of The Crucible in the New York Review of Books, Vol . 44 (January 9, 1997), pp. 4-6. For a fine novel that illustrates clearly the gap between what gets left behind in archives and what really happened, see A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (New York: Random House, 1990).

Melian Dialogue

adapted by Suresht Bald

I t was the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian War, but for the last six years the two great feuding empires headed by Athens and Sparta (Lacedaemon) had avoided open hostile action against each other. Ten years into the war they had

From Thucydides, Complete Writings: The Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Modern Li- brary, 1951), adapted by Suresht Bald, Williamette Uni- versity.

signed a treaty of peace and friendship; however, this treaty did not dissipate the distrust that existed between them. Each feared the other's hegemonic designs on the Peloponnese and sought to increase its power to thwart the other's ambitions. With- out openly attacking the other, each used persua- sion, coercion, and subversion to strengthen itself and weaken its rival. This struggle for hegemony by Athens and Sparta was felt most acutely by small, hitherto "independent" states who were

now being forced to take sides in the bipolar Greek world of the fifth century B . C . One such state was Melos.

Despite being one of the few island colonies of Sparta, Melos had remained neutral in the strug- gle between Sparta and Athens. Its neutrality, however, was unacceptable to the Athenians, who, accompanied by overwhelming military and naval power, arrived in Melos to pressure it into submis- sion. After strategically positioning their powerful fleet, the Athenian generals sent envoys to Melos to negotiate the island's surrender.

The commissioners of Melos agreed to meet the envoys in private. They were afraid the Atheni- ans, known for their rhetorical skills, might sway the people if allowed a public forum. The envoys came with an offer that if the Melians submitted and became part of the Athenian empire, their people and their possessions would not be harmed. The Melians argued that by the law of nations they had the right to remain neutral, and no nation had the right to attack without provocation. Having been a free state for seven hundred years they were not ready to give up that freedom. Thucydides cap- tures the exchange between the Melian commis- sioners and the Athenian envoys:

MELIANS: . . . All we can reasonably expect from this negotiation is war, if we prove to have right on our side and refuse to submit, and in the contrary case, slavery.

A T H E N I A N S : , . . We shall not trouble you with spe- cious pretenses—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of the wrong that you have done us—and make a long speech that would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, . . . since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they want. (331)

The Melians pointed out that it was in the in- terest of all states to respect the laws of nations:

"you should not destroy what is our common pro- tection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right. . . ." (331) They reminded the Athenians that a day might come when the Athenians themselves would need such protection.

But the Athenians were not persuaded. To them, Melos' submission was in the interest of their empire, and Melos.

M E L I A N S : And how pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?

A T H E N I A N S : Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.

M E L I A N S : SO you would not consent to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side.

A T H E N I A N S : N O ; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power. (332)

When the Melians asked if that was their "idea of equity," the Athenians responded,

As far as right goes . . , one has as much of it as the other, and if any maintain their independence it is because they are strong, and that if we do not molest them it is because we are afraid.... (332)

By subjugating the Melians the Athenians hoped not only to extend their empire but also to im- prove their image and thus their security. To allow the weaker Melians to remain free, according to the Athenians, would reflect negatively on Athe- nian power.

Aware of their weak position the Melians hoped that the justice of their cause would gain them the support of the gods, "and what we want in power will be made up by the alliance with the Lacedaemonians, who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred."

A T H E N I A N S : . . . Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it

when made: we found it existing before us, and will leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage. But . . . your notion about the Lacedaemonians, which leads you to believe that shame will make them help you, here we bless your simplicity but do not envy your folly. The Lacedaemonians . . . are conspicu- ous in considering what is agreeable honourable, and what is expedient just. . . . Your strongest ar- guments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty as compared to those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious. You will therefore show great blind- ness of judgment, unless, after allowing us to re- tire you can find some counsel more prudent than this. (334-36)

The envoys then left the conference, giving the Melians the opportunity to deliberate on the Athenian offer and decide the best course for them to follow.

The Melians decided to stand by the position they had taken at the conference with the Athenian envoys. They refused to submit, placing their faith in the gods and the Lacedaemonians. Though they asked the Athenians to accept their neutrality and leave Melos, the Athenians started preparations for war.

In the war that ensued the Melians were soundly defeated. The Athenians showed no mercy, killing all the adult males and selling the women and children as slaves. Subsequently, they sent out five hundred colonists to settle in Melos, which became an Athenian colony.

* * *

To Perpetual Peace:

A Philosophical Sketch

* * *

The state of peace among men living in close prox- imity is not the natural state * * * ; instead, the natural state is a one of war, which does not just consist in open hostilities, but also in the constant and enduring threat of them. The state of peace must therefore be established, for the suspension of hostilities does not provide the security of peace, and unless this security is pledged by one neighbor

From Immanuel Kant, .Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), 110-18. Both the author's and the translator's notes have been omit- ted. Bracketed editorial insertions are the translator's.

to another (which can happen only in a state of lawfulness), the latter, from whom such security has been requested, can treat the former as an en- emy.

First Definitive Article of Perpetual Peace: The Civil Constitution of Every Nation Should Be Republican

The sole established constitution that follows from the idea of an original contract, the one on which all of a nation's just legislation must be based, is re- publican. For, first, it accords with the principles of the freedom of the members of a society (as men),

second, it accords with the principles of the depen- dence of everyone on a single, common [source of] legislation (as subjects), and third, it accords with the law of the equality of them all (as citizens). Thus, so far as [the matter of] right is concerned, republicanism is the original foundation of all forms of civil constitution. Thus, the only question remaining is this, does it also provide the only foundation for perpetual peace?

Now in addition to the purity of its origin, a purity whose source is the pure concept of right, the republican constitution also provides for this desirable result, namely, perpetual peace, and the reason for this is as follows: If (as must inevitably be the case, given this form of constitution) the consent of the citizenry is required in order to de- termine whether or not there will be war, it is nat- ural that they consider all its calamities before committing themselves to so risky a game. (Among these are doing the fighting themselves, paying the costs of war from their own resources, having to repair at great sacrifice the war's devastation, and, finally, the ultimate evil that would make peace it- self better, never being able—because of new and constant wars—to expunge the burden of debt.) By contrast, under a nonrepublican constitution, where subjects are not citizens, the easiest thing in the world to do is to declare war. Here the ruler is not a fellow citizen, but the nation's owner, and war does not affect his table, his hunt, his places of pleasure, his court festivals, and so on. Thus, he can decide to go to war for the most meaningless of reasons, as if it were a kind of pleasure party, and he can blithely leave its justification (which de- cency requires) to his diplomatic corps, who are al- ways prepared for such exercises.

The following comments are necessary to prevent confusing (as so often happens) the republican form of constitution with the democratic one: The forms of a nation (civitas) can be analyzed either on the basis of the persons who possess the highest political authority or on the basis of the way the people are governed by their ruler, whoever he may be. The first is called the form of sovereignty * * *,

of which only three kinds are possible, specifically, where either one, or several in association, or all those together who make up civil society possess the sovereign power (Autocracy, Aristocracy and Democracy, the power of a monarch, the power of a nobility, the power of a people). The second is the form of government (forma regiminis) and con- cerns the way in which a nation, based on its con- stitution (the act of the general will whereby a group becomes a people), exercises its authority. In this regard, government is either republican or despotic. Republicanism is that political principle whereby executive power (the government) is sepa- rated from legislative power. In a despotism the ruler independently executes laws that it has itself made; here rulers have taken hold of the public will and treated it as their own private will. Among the three forms of government, democracy, in the proper sense of the term, is necessarily a despotism, because it sets up an executive power in which all citizens make decisions about and, if need be, against one (who therefore does not agree); consequently, all, who are not quite all, decide, so that the general will contradicts both itself and freedom.

Every form of government that is not represen- tative is properly speaking without form, because one and the same person can no more be at one and the same time the legislator and executor of his will (than the universal proposition can serve as the major premise in a syllogism and at the same time be the subsumption of the particular under it in the minor premise). And although the other two forms of political constitution are defective in asmuch as they always leave room for a demo- cratic form of government, it is nonetheless possi- ble that they assume a form of government that accords with the spirit of a representative system: As Friederick II at least said, "I am merely the na- tion's highest servant," The democratic system makes this impossible, for everyone wants to rule. One can therefore say, the smaller the number of persons who exercise the power of the nation (the number of rulers), the more they represent and the closer the political constitution approximates

the possibility of republicanism, and thus, the con- stitution can hope through gradual reforms finally to become republican. For this reason, attaining this state that embodies a completely just constitu- tion is more difficult in an aristocracy than in a monarchy, and, except by violent revolution, there is no possibility of attaining it in a democracy. Nonetheless, the people are incomparably more concerned with the form of government than with the form of constitution (although a great deal de- pends on the degree to which the latter is suited to the goals of the former). But if the form of govern- ment is to cohere with the concept of right, it must include the representative system, which is possible only in a republican form of government and with- out which (no matter what the constitution may be) government is despotic and brutish. None of the ancient so-called republics were aware of this, and consequently they inevitably degenerated into despotism; still, this is more bearable under a sin- gle person's rulership than other forms of govern- ment are.

Second Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace: The Right of Nations Shall Be Based on a Federation of Free States

As nations, peoples can be regarded as single indi- viduals who injure one another through their close proximity while living in the state of nature (i.e., independently of external laws). For the sake of its own security, each nation can and should demand that the others enter into a contract resembling the civil one and guaranteeing the rights of each, This would be a federation of nations, but it must not be a nation consisting of nations. The latter would be contradictory, for in every nation there exists the relation of ruler (legislator) to subject (those who obey, the people); however, many nations in a sin- gle nation would constitute only a single nation, which contradicts our assumption (since we are here weighing the rights of nations in relation to one another, rather than fusing them into a single nation).

Just as we view with deep disdain the attach- ment of savages to their lawless freedom—prefer- ring to scuffle without end rather than to place themselves under lawful restraints that they them- selves constitute, consequently preferring a mad freedom to a rational one—and consider it bar- barous, rude, and brutishly degrading of human- ity, so also should we think that civilized peoples (each one united into a nation) would hasten as quickly as possible to escape so similar a state of abandonment. Instead, however, each nation sees its majesty (for it is absurd to speak of the majesty of a people) to consist in not being subject to any external legal constraint, and the glory of its ruler consists in being able, without endangering him- self, to command many thousands to sacrifice themselves for a matter that does not concern them. The primary difference between European and American savages is this, that while many of the latter tribes have been completely eaten by their enemies, the former know how to make bet- ter use of those they have conquered than to con- sume them: they increase the number of their subjects and thus also the quantity of instruments they have to wage even more extensive wars.

Given the depravity of human nature, which is revealed and can be glimpsed in the free relations among nations (though deeply concealed by gov- ernmental restraints in law governed civil-society), one must wonder why the word right has not been completely discarded from the politics of war as pedantic, or why no nation has openly ventured to declare that it should be. For while Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and others whose philosophi- cally and diplomatically formulated codes do not and cannot have the slightest legal force (since na- tions do not stand under any common external constraints), are always piously cited in justifica- tion of a war of aggression (and who therefore pro- vide only cold comfort), no example can be given of a nation having foregone its intention [of going to war] based on the arguments provided by such important men. The homage that every nation pays (at least in words) to the concept of right proves, nonetheless, that there is in man a still greater, though presently dormant, moral aptitude

to master the evil principle in himself (a principle he cannot deny) and to hope that others will also overcome it. For otherwise the word right would never leave the mouths of those nations that want to make war on one another, unless it were used mockingly, as when that Gallic prince declared, "Nature has given the strong the prerogative of making the weak obey them."

Nations can press for their rights only by wag- ing war and never in a trial before an independent tribunal, but war and its favorable consequence, victory, cannot determine the right. And although a treaty of peace can put an end to some particular war, it cannot end the state of war (the tendency always to find a new pretext for war). (And this sit- uation cannot straightforwardly be declared un- just, since in this circumstance each nation is judge of its own case.) Nor can one say of nations as re- gards their rights what one can say concerning the natural rights of men in a state of lawlessness, to wit, that "they should abandon this state." (For as nations they already have an internal, legal consti- tution and therefore have outgrown the com- pulsion to subject themselves to another legal constitution that is subject to someone else's con- cept of right.) Nonetheless, from the throne of its moral legislative power, reason absolutely con- demns war as a means of determining the right and makes seeking the state of peace a matter of unmitigated duty. But without a contract among nations peace can be neither inaugurated nor guar- anteed. A league of a special sort must therefore be established, one that we can call a league of peace (foedus pacificum), which will be distinguished from a treaty of peace (pactum pacis) because the latter seeks merely to stop one war, while the for- mer seeks to end all wars forever. This league does not seek any power of the sort possessed by nations, but only the maintenance and security of each nation's own freedom, as well as that of the other nations leagued with it, without their having thereby to subject themselves to civil laws and their constraints (as men in the state of na- ture must do). It can be shown that this idea of federalism should eventually include all nations and thus lead to perpetual peace. For if good

fortune should so dispose matters that a powerful and enlightened people should form a republic (which by its nature must be inclined to seek per- petual peace), it wil l provide a focal point for a fed- eral association among other nations that will join it in order to guarantee a state of peace among nations that is in accord with the idea of the right of nations, and through several associations of this sort such a federation can extend further and further.

That a people might say, "There should be no war among us, for we want to form ourselves into a nation, i.e., place ourselves under a supreme leg- islative, executive, and judicial power to resolve our conflicts peacefully," is understandable. But when a nation says, "There should be no war be- tween me and other nations, though I recognize no supreme legislative power to guarantee me my rights and him his," then if there does not exist a surrogate of the union in a civil society, which is a free federation, it is impossible to understand what the basis for so entrusting my rights is. Such a fed- eration is necessarily tied rationally to the concept of the right of nations, at least if this latter notion has any meaning.

The concept of the right of nations as a right to go to war is meaningless (for it would then be the right to determine the right not by independent, universally valid laws that restrict the freedom of everyone, but by one-sided maxims backed by force). Consequently, the concept of the right of nations must be understood as follows: that it serves justly those men who are disposed to seek one another's destruction and thus to find perpet- ual peace in the grave that covers all the horrors of violence and its perpetrators. Reason can provide related nations with no other means for emerging from the state of lawlessness, which consists solely of war, than that they give up their savage (lawless) freedom, just as individual persons do, and, by accommodating themselves to the constraints of common law, establish a nation of peoples (civitas gentium) that (continually growing) will finally in- clude all the people of the earth. But they do not will to do this because it does not conform to their idea of the right of nations, and consequently they

2 4 C H A P T E R 1 A P P R O A C H E S

discard in hypothesis what is true in thesis. So (if everything is not to be lost) in place of the positive idea of a world republic they put only the negative surrogate of an enduring, ever expanding federa- tion that prevents war and curbs the tendency of

that hostile inclination to defy the law, though there will always be constant danger of their break- ing loose. * * *

* * *

HISTORY

Core ideas about international relations, introduced in Chapter I and elaborated in Chapter 3 of Essentials, have emerged as responses to the historic diplomatic challenges of the twentieth century. The selections in this chapter provide insight into the key events and trends that spawned many of the ideas that continue to shape debates about international politics.

The post-World War I peace process led to a clear statement of the liberal per- spective. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points," an address to the U.S. Congress in January 1918, summarizes some of the key points emerging from liberal theory. Wilson blames power politics, secret diplomacy, and autocratic lead- ers for the devastating world war. He suggests that with the spread of democracy and the creation of a "league of nations," aggression would be stopped.

The Cold War also provides the historical setting for the realist / liberal per- spective. In 1947 George F. Kennan, then director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, penned his famous "X" article, which assesses Soviet conduct and provides the intellectual justification for Cold War containment policy. Using real- ist logic, he suggests that counter-force must be applied to prevent Soviet expan- sion. Finally, John Lewis Gaddis describes the Cold War, one of the most important series of events in contemporary times, as a period of prolonged peace. This article argues why, in the face of overwhelming odds, the United States and the Soviet Union refrained from direct confrontation.

These writings provide an important foundation for theoretical debates, one of the major organizing themes in Essentials.

25

The Fourteen Points

. . . It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants en- tered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow now or at any other time the objects it has in view.

We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secured once and for all against their recurrence, What we de- mand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own insti- tutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other people of the world as against force and self- ish aggression. A l l the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. The program of the world's peace, therefore, is our program; and that program, the only possible program, as we see it, is this:

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private

From Woodrow Wilson's address to the U.S. Congress, 8 January, 1918.

international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by in- ternational action for the enforcement of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its main- tenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with do- mestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely im- partial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be de- termined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions af- fecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an un- hampered and unembarrassed opportu- nity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sin- cere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, as-

sistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treat- ment accorded Russia by her sister na- tions in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their com- prehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their in- telligent and unselfish sympathy,

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore con- fidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and de- termined for the government of their re- lations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and va- lidity of international law is forever im- paired.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all,

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recog- nizable lines of nationality.

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be ac- corded the freest opportunity of au- tonomous development,

XI . Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another de- termined by friendly counsel along his- torically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guar- antees of the political and economic in-

dependence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be en- tered into.

XII. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nation- alities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested op- portunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be perma- nently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees,

XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territo- ries inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic indepen- dence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be intimate partners of all the governments and peoples associated together against the imperial- ists. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.

For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but only because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just and stable peace such as can be secured only by removing the chief provo- cations to war, which this program does remove. We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is nothing in this program that impairs it. We grudge her no achievement or distinction of learn- ing or of pacific enterprise such as have made her record very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure her or to block in any way her

2 8 C H A P T E R 2 HISTORY

legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile arrange- ments of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us and the other peace-loving nations of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair deal- ing. We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world—the new world in which we now live—instead of a place of mastery.

Neither do we presume to suggest to her any alteration or modification of her institutions. But it is necessary, we must frankly say, and necessary as a preliminary to any intelligent dealings with her on our part, that we should know whom her spokesmen speak for when they speak to us, whether for the Reichstag majority or for the mili- tary party and the men whose creed is imperial domination.

We have spoken now, surely, in terms too con- crete to admit of any further doubt or question. An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this princi- ple be made its foundation no part of the structure of international justice can stand. The people of the United States could act upon no other princi- ple; and to the vindication of this principle they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, and every- thing that they possess. The moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty has come, and they are ready to put their own strength, their own highest purpose, their own in- tegrity and devotion to the test.

The Sources of Soviet Conduct

The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today is the product of ideology and cir- cumstances: ideology inherited by the present So- viet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia. There can be few tasks of psychological analysis more difficult than to try to trace the interaction of these two forces and the relative role of each in the determination of official Soviet conduct. Yet the attempt must be made if that conduct is to be understood and effectively countered.

It is difficult to summarize the set of ideologi- cal concepts with which the Soviet leaders came

From Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 566-82.

into power. Marxian ideology, in its Russian- Communist projection, has always been in process of subtle evolution. The materials on which it bases itself are extensive and complex. But the outstand- ing features of Communist thought as it existed in 1916 may perhaps be summarized as follows: (a) that the central factor in the life of man, the fact which determines the character of public Life and the "physiognomy of society," is the system by which material goods are produced and ex- changed; (b) that the capitalist system of produc- tion is a nefarious one which inevitably leads to the exploitation of the working class by the capital- owning class and is incapable of developing ade- quately the economic resources of society or of distributing fairly the material goods produced by human labor; (c) that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and must, in view of the inability of the capital-owning class to adjust itself

to economic change, result eventually and in- escapably in a revolutionary transfer of power to the working class; and (d) that imperialism, the fi- nal phase of capitalism, leads directly to war and revolution.

* * *

Now it must be noted that through all the years of preparation for revolution, the attention of these men, as indeed of Marx himself, had been centered less on the future form which Socialism1 would take than on the necessary overthrow of rival power which, in their view, had to precede the in- troduction of Socialism. Their views, therefore, on the positive program to be put into effect, once power was attained, were for the most part nebu- lous, visionary and impractical. Beyond the na- tionalization of industry and the expropriation of large private capital holdings there was no agreed program. The treatment of the peasantry, which according to the Marxist formulation was not of the proletariat, had always been a vague spot in the pattern of Communist thought; and it remained an object of controversy and vacillation for the first ten years of Communist power.

The circumstances of the immediate post- Revolution period—the existence in Russia of civil war and foreign intervention, together with the ob- vious fact that the Communists represented only a tiny minority of the Russian people—made the establishment of dictatorial power a necessity, The experiment with "war Communism" and the abrupt attempt to eliminate private production and trade had unfortunate economic consequences and caused further bitterness against the new revo- lutionary regime. While the temporary relaxation of the effort to communize Russia, represented by the New Economic Policy, alleviated some of this economic distress and thereby served its purpose, it also made it evident that the "capitalistic sector of society" was still prepared to profit at once from any relaxation of governmental pressure, and would, if permitted to continue to exist, always constitute a powerful opposing element to the So- viet regime and a serious rival for influence in the country. Somewhat the same situation prevailed

with respect to the individual peasant who, in his own small way, was also a private producer.

Lenin, had he lived, might have proved a great enough man to reconcile these conflicting forces to the ultimate benefit of Russian society, though this is questionable. But be that as it may, Stalin, and those whom he led in the struggle for succession to Lenin's position of leadership, were not the men to tolerate rival political forces in the sphere of power which they coveted. Their sense of insecurity was too great. Their particular brand of fanaticism, un- modified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexis- tence of rival forces. Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the sub- mission or destruction of all competing power. Outside of the Communist Party, Russian society was to have no rigidity. There were to be no forms of collective human activity or association which would not be dominated by the Party. No other force in Russian society was to be permitted to achieve vitality or integrity. Only the Party was to have structure. All else was to be an amorphous mass.

And within the Party the same principle was to apply. The mass of Party members might go through the motions of election, deliberation, de- cision and action; but in these motions they were to be animated not by their own individual wills but by the awesome breath of the Party leadership and the overbrooding presence of "the world."

Let it be stressed again that subjectively these men probably did not seek absolutism for its own sake. They doubtless believed—and found it easy to believe—that they alone knew what was good for society and that they would accomplish that good once their power was secure and unchal- lengeable. But in seeking that security of their own rule they were prepared to recognize no restric- tions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods. And until such time as that security might be achieved, they placed far down on their

3 0 C H A P T E R 2 H I S T O R Y

scale of operational priorities the comforts and happiness of the peoples entrusted to their care.

Now the outstanding circumstance concerning the Soviet regime is that down to the present day this process of political consolidation has never been completed and the men in the Kremlin have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 1917. They have endeavored to secure it primarily against forces at home, within Soviet society itself. But they have also endeavored to secure it against the outside world. For ideology, as we have seen, taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders. The powerful hands of Russian history and tradition reached up to sus- tain them in this feeling. Finally, their own aggres- sive intransigence with respect to the outside world began to find its own reaction; and they were soon forced, to use another Gibbonesque phrase [from Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire], "to chastise the contumacy" which they themselves had provoked. It is an undeniable priv- ilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiter- ates it frequentiy enough and makes it the back- ground of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.

Now it lies in the nature of the mental world of the Soviet leaders, as well as in the character of their ideology, that no opposition to them can be officially recognized as having any merit or justifi- cation whatsoever. Such opposition can flow, in theory, only from the hostile and incorrigible forces of dying capitalism. As long as remnants of capitalism were officially recognized as existing in Russia, it was possible to place on them, as an in- ternal element, part of the blame for the mainte- nance of a dictatorial form of society. But as these remnants were liquidated, little by little, this justi- fication fell away; and when it was indicated offi- cially that they had been finally destroyed, it disappeared altogether. And this fact created one of the most basic of the compulsions which came to act upon the Soviet regime: since capitalism no

longer existed in Russia and since it could not be admitted that there could be serious or widespread opposition to the Kremlin springing sponta- neously from the liberated masses under its au- thority, it became necessary to justify the retention of the dictatorship by stressing the menace of capi- talism abroad.

* * *

Now the maintenance of this pattern of Soviet power, namely, the pursuit of unlimited authority domestically, accompanied by the cultivation of the semi-myth of implacable foreign hostility, has gone far to shape the actual machinery of Soviet power as we know it today. Internal organs of ad- ministration which did not serve this purpose withered on the vine. Organs which did serve this purpose became vastly swollen. The security of So- viet power came to rest on the iron discipline of the Party, on the severity and ubiquity of the secret police, and on the uncompromising economic monopolism of the state. The "organs of suppres- sion," in which the Soviet leaders had sought secu- rity from rival forces, became in large measure the masters of those whom they were designed to serve. Today the major part of the structure of So- viet power is committed to the perfection of the dictatorship and to the maintenance of the concept of Russia as in a state of siege, with the enemy low- ering beyond the walls. And the millions of human beings who form that part of the structure of power must defend at all costs this concept of Rus- sia's position, for without it they are themselves superfluous.

As things stand today, the rulers can no longer dream of parting with these organs of suppression. The quest for absolute power, pursued now for nearly three decades with a ruthlessness unparal- leled (in scope at least) in modern times, has again produced internally, as it did externally, its own re- action. The excesses of the police apparatus have fanned the potential opposition to the regime into something far greater and more dangerous than it could have been before those excesses began.

But least of all can the rulers dispense with the fiction by which the maintenance of dictatorial

power has been defended. For this fiction has been canonized in Soviet philosophy by the excesses al- ready committed in its name; and it is now an- chored in the Soviet structure of thought by bonds far greater than those of mere ideology.

II So much for the historical background. What does it spell in terms of the political personality of So- viet power as we know it today?

Of the original ideology, nothing has been officially junked. Belief is maintained in the basic badness of capitalism, in the inevitability of its de- struction, in the obligation of the proletariat to as- sist in that destruction and to take power into its own hands. But stress has come to be laid primar- ily on those concepts which relate most specifically to the Soviet regime itself: to its position as the sole truly Socialist regime in a dark and misguided world, and to the relationships of power within it.

The first of these concepts is that of the innate antagonism between capitalism and Socialism. We have seen how deeply that concept has become imbedded in foundations of Soviet power. It has profound implications for Russia's conduct as a member of international society. It means that there can never be on Moscow's side any sincere assumption of a community of aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalism. It must invariably be assumed in Moscow that the aims of the capitalist world are antagonistic to the Soviet regime and, therefore, to the interests of the peoples it controls. If the Soviet Government occasionally sets its signature to doc- uments which would indicate the contrary, this is to be regarded as a tactical maneuver permissible in dealing with the enemy (who is without honor) and should be taken in the spirit of caveat emptor [let the buyer beware]. Basically, the antagonism remains. It is postulated. And from it flow many of the phenomena which we find disturbing in the Kremlin's conduct of foreign policy: the secretive- ness, the lack of frankness, the duplicity, the war suspiciousness, and the basic unfriendliness of pur- pose. These phenomena are there to stay, for the

foreseeable future. There can be variations of degree and of emphasis. When there is something the Russians want from us, one or the other of these features of their policy may be thrust tem- porarily into the background; and when that hap- pens there will always be Americans who will leap forward with gleeful announcements that "the Russians have changed," and some who will even try to take credit for having brought about such "changes." But we should not be misled by tactical maneuvers. These characteristics of Soviet policy, like the postulate from which they flow, are basic to the internal nature of Soviet power, and will be with us, whether in the foreground or the back- ground, until the internal nature of Soviet power is changed.

This means that we are going to continue for a long time to find the Russians difficult to deal with. It does not mean that they should be considered as embarked upon a do-or-die program to overthrow our society by a given date. The theory of the in- evitability of the eventual fall of capitalism has the fortunate connotation that there is no hurry about it. * * *

* * *

* * * [T]he Kremlin is under no ideological com- pulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry. Like the Church, it is dealing in ideological concepts which are of long-term validity, and it can afford to be patient. It has no right to risk the existing achievements of the revolution for the sake of vain baubles of the future. The very teachings of Lenin himself require great caution and flexibility in the pursuit of Communist purposes. Again, these pre- cepts are fortified by the lessons of Russian history: of centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast unfortified plain. Here caution, circumspection, flexibility and de- ception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in die Russian or the oriental mind. Thus the Kremlin has no compunc- tion about retreating in the face of superior force. And being under the compulsion of no timetable, it does not get panicky under the necessity for such retreat. Its political action is a fluid stream which

3 2 C H A P T E R 2 H I S T O R Y

moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power. But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them. The main thing is that there should always be pressure, increasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal. There is no trace of any feeling in Soviet psychology that that goal must be reached at any given time.

These considerations make Soviet diplomacy at once easier and more difficult to deal with than the diplomacy of individual aggressive leaders like Napoleon and Hitler, On the one hand it is more sensitive to contrary force, more ready to yield on individual sectors of the diplomatic front when that force is felt to be too strong, and thus more ra- tional in the logic and rhetoric of power. On the other hand it cannot be easily defeated or discour- aged by a single victory on the part of its oppo- nents. And the patient persistence by which it is animated means that it can be effectively coun- tered not by sporadic acts which represent the mo- mentary whims of democratic opinion but only by intelligent long-range policies on the part of Rus- sia's adversaries-—policies no less steady in their purpose, and no less variegated and resourceful in their application, than those of the Soviet Union it- self.

In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the So- viet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expan- sive tendencies. It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superflu- ous gestures of outward "toughness." While the Kremlin is basically flexible in its reaction to polit- ical realities, it is by no means unamenable to con- siderations of prestige. Like almost any other government, it can be placed by tactless and threat- ening gestures in a position where it cannot afford to yield even though this might be dictated by its sense of realism. The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are

highly conscious that loss of temper and of self- control is never a source of strength in political af- fairs. They are quick to exploit such evidences of weakness. For these reasons, it is a sine qua non of successful dealing with Russia that the foreign gov- ernment in question should remain at all times cool and collected and that its demands on Russian policy should be put forward in such a manner as to leave the way open for a compliance not too detrimental to Russian prestige.

Ill

In the light of the above, it will be clearly seen that the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be con- tained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geo- graphical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of exis- tence. * * *

* * *

IV

* * *•

But in actuality the possibilities for American pol- icy are by no means limited to holding the line and hoping for the best. It is entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions the in- ternal developments, both within Russia and throughout the international Communist move- ment, by which Russian policy is largely deter- mined. This is not only a question of the modest measure of informational activity which this gov- ernment can conduct in the Soviet Union and else- where, although that, too, is important. It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world gener- ally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsi- bilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual

vitality capable of holding its own among the ma- jor ideological currents of the time. To the extent that such an impression can be created and main- tained, the aims of Russian Communism must appear sterile and quixotic, the hopes and enthu- siasm of Moscow's supporters must wane, and added strain must be imposed on the Kremlin's foreign policies. For the palsied decrepitude of the capitalist world is the keystone of Communist phi- losophy. Even the failure of the United States to experience the early economic depression which the ravens of the Red Square have been predicting with such complacent confidence since hostilities ceased would have deep and important repercus- sions throughout the Communist world.

By the same token, exhibitions of indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement. * * *

* * * [T)he United States has it in its power

to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. For no mystical, Messianic movement— and particularly not that of the Kremlin—can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjust- ing itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.

* * *•

NOTES 1. Here and elsewhere in this paper "Socialism"

refers to Marxist or Leninist Communism. * * *

J O H N L E W I S G A D D I S

The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in

the Postwar International System

Systems Theory and International Stability

Anyone attempting to understand why there has been no third world war confronts a problem not unlike that of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that did not bark in the night: how does one account for something that did not happen? How does one ex- plain why the great conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, which by all past stan- dards of historical experience should have devel-

From International Security 10 no. 4 (spring 1986): 92-142.

oped by now, has not in fact done so? The question involves certain methodological difficulties, to be sure: it is always easier to account for what did hap- pen than what did not. But there is also a curious bias among students of international relations that reinforces this tendency: "for every thousand pages- published on the causes of wars," Geoffrey Blainey has commented, "there is less than one page di- rectly on the causes of peace."1 Even the discipline of "peace studies" suffers from this disproportion: it has given far more attention to the question of what we must do to avoid the apocalypse than it has to the equally interesting question of why, given all the opportunities, it has not happened so far.

3 4 C H A P T E R 2 H I S T O R Y

It might be easier to deal with this question if the work that has been done on the causes of war had produced something approximating a consen- sus on why wars develop: we could then apply that analysis to the post-1945 period and see what it is that has been different about it. But, in fact, these studies are not much help. Historians, political sci- entists, economists, sociologists, statisticians, even meteorologists, have wrestled for years with the question of what causes wars, and yet the most re- cent review of that literature concludes that "our understanding of war remains at an elementary level. No widely accepted theory of the causes of war exists and little agreement has emerged on the methodology through which these causes might be discovered."2

Nor has the comparative work that has been done on international systems shed much more light on the matter. The difficulty here is that our actual experience is limited to the operations of a single system—the balance of power system— operating either within the "multipolar" configu- ration that characterized international politics until World War II, or the "bipolar" configuration that has characterized them since. Alternative sys- tems remain abstract conceptualizations in the minds of theorists, and are of little use in advanc- ing our knowledge of how wars in the real world do or do not occur.3

But "systems theory" itself is something else again: here one can find a useful point of departure for thinking about the nature of international rela- tions since 1945. An "international system" exists, political scientists tell us, when two conditions are met: first, interconnections exist between units within the system, so that changes in some parts of it produce changes in other parts as well; and, sec- ond, the collective behavior of the system as a whole differs from the expectations and priorities of the individual units that make it up. 4 Certainly demonstrating the "interconnectedness" of post- World War II international relations is not diffi- cult: one of its most prominent characteristics has been the tendency of major powers to assume that little if anything can happen in the world without in some way enhancing or detracting from their

own immediate interests.5 Nor has the collective behavior of nations corresponded to their individ- ual expectations: the very fact that the interim arrangements of 1945 have remained largely intact for four decades would have astonished—and quite possibly appalled—the statesmen who cob- bled them together in the hectic months that fol- lowed the surrender of Germany and Japan.6

A particularly valuable feature of systems the- ory is that it provides criteria for differentiating be- tween stable and unstable political configurations: these can help to account for the fact that some in- ternational systems outiast others. Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer have defined "stability" as "the probability that the system retains all of its essen- tial characteristics: that no single nation becomes dominant; that most of its members continue to survive; and that large-scale war does not occur." It is characteristic of such a system, Deutsch and Singer add, that it has the capacity for self- regulation: the ability to counteract stimuli that would otherwise threaten its survival, much as the automatic pilot on an airplane or the governor on a steam engine would do. * * *

Does the post-World War II international sys- tem fit these criteria for "stability"? Certainly its most basic characteristic—bipolarity—remains in- tact, in that the gap between the world's two great- est military powers and their nearest rivals is not substantially different from what it was forty years ago,7 At the same time, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States nor anyone else has been able wholly to dominate that system; the nations most active within it in 1945 are for the most part still active today. And of course the most convincing argument for "stability" is that, so far at least, World War III has not occurred, On the surface, then, the concept of a "stable" international system makes sense as a way of understanding the experi- ence through which we have lived these past forty years.

But what have been the self-regulating mecha- nisms? How has an environment been created in which they are able to function? In what way do those mechanisms—and the environment in which they function—resemble or differ from the

configuration of other international systems, both stable and unstable, in modern history? What circumstances exist that might impair their operation, transforming self-regulation into self- aggravation? These are questions that have not re- ceived the attention they deserve from students of the history and politics of the postwar era. * * *

* * *

The Structural Elements of Stability

B I P O L A R I T Y

Any such investigation should begin by distin- guishing the structure of the international system in question from the behavior of the nations that make it up.8 The reason for this is simple: behavior alone will not ensure stability if the structural pre- requisites for it are absent, but structure can un- der certain circumstances impose stability even when its behavioral prerequisites are unprom- ising.9 * * *

* * *

Now, bipolarity may seem to many today—as it did forty years ago—an awkward and dangerous way to organize world politics. 1 0 Simple geometric- logic would suggest that a system resting upon three or more points of support would be more stable than one resting upon two. But politics is not geometry: the passage of time and the accumu- lation of experience has made clear certain struc- tural elements of stability in the bipolar system of international relations that were not present in the multipolar systems that preceded it:

(1) The postwar bipolar system realistically re- flected the facts of where military power resided at the end of World War II 1 1—and where it still does today, for that matter. In this sense, it differed markedly from the settlement of 1919, which made so little ef- fort to accommodate the interests of Ger- many and Soviet Russia. It is true that in other categories of power—notably the economic—states have since arisen capa-

ble of challenging or even surpassing the Soviet Union and the United States in the production of certain specific commodi- ties. But as the political position of nations like West Germany, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong suggests, the ability to make video recorders, motor- cycles, even automobiles and steel effi- ciently has yet to translate into anything approaching the capacity of Washington or Moscow to shape events in the world as a whole.

(2) The post-1945 bipolar structure was a sim- ple one that did not require sophisticated leadership to maintain it. The great multi- polar systems of the 19th century collapsed in large part because of their intricacy: they required a Metternich or a Bismarck to hold them together, and when statesmen of that calibre were no longer available, they tended to come apart.12 Neither the Soviet nor the American political systems have been geared to identifying statesmen of comparable prowess and entrusting them with responsibility; demonstrated skill in the conduct of foreign policy has hardly been a major prerequisite for lead- ership in either country. And yet, a bipolar structure of international relations— because of the inescapably high stakes in- volved for its two major actors—tends, re- gardless of the personalities involved, to induce in them a sense of caution and re- straint, and to discourage irresponsibil-

(3) Because of its relatively simple structure, alliances in this bipolar system have tended to be more stable than they had been in the 19th century and in the 1919-1939 period. It is striking to consider that the North Adantic Treaty Organization has now equaled in longevity the most durable of the pre-World War I alliances, that be- tween Germany and Austria-Hungary; it has lasted almost twice as long as the Franco-Russian alliance, and certainly

3 6 C H A P T E R 2 H I S T O R Y

much longer than any of the tenuous align- ments of the interwar period. Its principal rival, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, has been in existence for almost as long. The reason for this is simple: alliances, in the end, are the product of insecurity;13 so long as the Soviet Union and the United States each remain for the other and for their re- spective clients the major source of inse- curity in the world, neither superpower encounters very much difficulty in main- taining its alliances. In a multipolar system, sources of insecurity can vary in much more complicated ways; hence it is not sur- prising to find alliances shifting to accom- modate these variations.14

(4) At the same time, though, and probably because of the overall stability of the basic alliance systems, defections from both the American and Soviet coalitions—China, Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, and Nicaragua, in the case of the Americans; Yugoslavia, Al- bania, Egypt, Somalia, and China again in the case of the Russians—have been toler- ated without the major disruptions that might have attended such changes in a more delicately balanced multipolar sys- tem. The fact that a state the size of China was able to reverse its alignment twice dur- ing the Cold War without any more dra- matic effect upon the position of the superpowers says something about the stability bipolarity brings; compare this record with the impact, prior to 1914, of such apparently minor episodes as Aus- tria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzego- vina, or the question of who was to control Morocco. It is a curious consequence of bipolarity that although alliances are more durable than in a multipolar system, defec- tions are at the same time more tolerable.15

In short, without anyone's having designed it, and without any attempt whatever to consider the requirements of justice, the nations of the postwar era lucked into a system of international relations

that, because it has been based upon realities of power, has served the cause of order—if not jus- tice—better than one might have expected.

I N D E P E N D E N C E , N O T I N T E R D E P E N D E N C E

But if the structure of bipolarity in itself en- couraged stability, so too did certain inherent characteristics of the bilateral Soviet-American relationship. * * *

* * *

It has long been an assumption of classical liberal- ism that the more extensive the contacts that take place between nations, the greater are the chances for peace. Economic interdependence, it has been argued, makes war unlikely because nations who have come to rely upon one another for vital com- modities cannot afford it. Cultural exchange, it has been suggested, causes peoples to become more sensitive to each others' concerns, and hence re- duces the likelihood of misunderstandings. "Peo- ple to people" contacts, it has been assumed, make it possible for nations to "know" one another bet- ter; the danger of war between them is, as a result, correspondingly reduced.16

The Russian-American relationship, to a remark- able degree for two nations so extensively involved with the rest of the world, has been one of mutual independence. The simple fact that the two coun- tries occupy opposite sides of the earth has had something to do with this: geographical remote- ness from one another has provided little opportu- nity for the emergence of irredentist grievances comparable in importance to historic disputes over, say, Alsace-Lorraine, or the Polish Corridor, or the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem. In the few areas where Soviet and American forces—or their proxies—have come into direct contact, they have erected artificial barriers like the Korean demilitarized zone, or the Berlin Wall, per- haps in unconscious recognition of an American poet's rather chilly precept that "good fences make good neighbors,"

Nor have the two nations been economically dependent upon one another in any critical way. Certainly the United States requires nothing in the form of imports from the Soviet Union that it can- not obtain elsewhere. The situation is different for the Russians, to be sure, but even though the So- viet Union imports large quantities of food from the United States—and would like to import ad- vanced technology as well—it is far from being wholly dependent upon these items, as the failure of recent attempts to change Soviet behavior by denying them has shown. The relative invulnera- bility of Russians and Americans to one another in the economic sphere may be frustrating to their re- spective policymakers, but it is probably fortunate, from the standpoint of international stability, that the two most powerful nations in the world are also its two most self-sufficient.17

It may well be, then, that the extent to which the Soviet Union and the United States have been in- dependent of one another rather than interdepen- dent—the fact that there have been so few points of economic leverage available to each, the feet that two such dissimilar people have had so few oppor- tunities for interaction—has in itself constituted a structural support for stability in relations between the two countries, whatever their respective gov- ernments have actually done.

The Behavioral Elements of Stability

N U C L E A R W E A P O N S

Stability in international systems is only partly a function of structure, though; it depends as well upon the conscious behavior of the nations that make them up. Even if the World War II settle- ment had corresponded to the distribution of power in the world, even if the Russian-American relationship had been one of minimal interdepen- dence, even if domestic constraints had not created difficulties, stability in the postwar era still might

not have resulted if there had been, among either of the dominant powers in the system, the same willingness to risk war that has existed at other times in the past.

Students of the causes of war have pointed out that war is rarely something that develops from the workings of impersonal social or economic forces, or from the direct effects of arms races, or even by accident. It requires deliberate decisions on the part of national leaders; more than that, it requires calculations that the gains to be derived from war will outweigh the possible costs. * * *

For whatever reason, it has to be acknowledged that the statesmen of the post-1945 superpowers have, compared to their predecessors, been exceed- ingly cautious in risking war with one another.18 In order to see this point, one need only run down the list of crises in Soviet-American relations since the end of World War II: Iran, 1946; Greece, 1947; Berlin and Czechoslovakia, 1948; Korea, 1950; the East Berlin riots, 1953; the Hungarian uprising, 1956; Berlin again, 1958-59; the U-2 incident, 1960; Berlin again, 1961; the Cuban missile crisis, 1962; Czechoslovakia again, 1968; the Yom Kippur war, 1973; Afghanistan, 1979; Poland, 1981; the Korean airliner incident, 1983—one need only run down this list to see how many occasions there have been in relations between Washington and Moscow that in almost any other age, and among almost any other antagonists, would sooner or later have produced war.

That they have not cannot be chalked up to the invariably pacific temperament of the nations in- volved: the United States participated in eight in- ternational wars involving a thousand or more battlefield deaths between 1815 and 1980; Russia participated in nineteen.19 Nor can this restraint be attributed to any unusual qualities of leadership on either side: the vision and competency of postwar Soviet and American statesmen does not appear to have differed gready from that of their prede- cessors. Nor does weariness growing out of par- ticipation in two world wars fully explain this un- willingness to resort to arms in their dealings with one another: during the postwar era both nations have employed force against third parties—in the

3 8 C H A P T E R 2 H I S T O R Y

case of the United States in Korea and Vietnam; in the case of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—for protracted periods of time, and at great cost.

It seems inescapable that what has really made the difference in inducing this unaccustomed cau- tion has been the workings of the nuclear deter- rent.20 Consider, for a moment, what the effect of this mechanism would be on a statesman from ei- ther superpower who might be contemplating war. In the past, the horrors and the costs of wars could be forgotten with the passage of time. Generations like the one of 1914 had little sense of what the Napoleonic Wars—or even the American Civil War—had revealed about the brutality, expense, and duration of military conflict. But the existence of nuclear weapons—and, more to the point, the fact that we have direct evidence of what they can do when used against human beings21—has given this generation a painfully vivid awareness of the reali- ties of war that no previous generation has had. It is difficult, given this awareness, to produce the opti- mism that historical experience tells us prepares the way for war; pessimism, it appears, is a permanent accompaniment to our thinking about war, and that, as Blainey reminds us, is a cause of peace.

That same pessimism has provided the super- powers with powerful inducements to control crises resulting from the risk-taking of third par- ties. It is worth recalling that World War I grew out of the unsuccessful management of a situation neither created nor desired by any of the major ac- tors in the international system. There were simply no mechanisms to put a lid on escalation: to force each nation to balance the short-term temptation to exploit opportunities against the long-term dan- ger that things might get out of hand.2 2 The nu- clear deterrent provides that mechanism today, and as a result the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully managed a whole series of crises—most notably in the Middle East—that grew out of the actions of neither but that could have involved them both.

None of this is to say, of course, that war can- not occur: if the study of history reveals anything at all it is that one ought to expect, sooner or later, the unexpected. Nor is it to say that the nuclear de-

terrent could not function equally well with half, or a fourth, or even an eighth of the nuclear weapons now in the arsenals of the superpowers. Nor is it intended to deprecate the importance of refraining from steps that might destabilize the ex- isting stalemate, whether through the search for technological breakthroughs that might provide a decisive edge over the other side, or through so mechanical a duplication of what the other side has that one fails to take into account one's own probably quite different security requirements, or through strategies that rely upon the first use of nuclear weapons in the interest of achieving econ- omy, forgetting the far more fundamental systemic interest in maintaining the tradition, dating back four decades now, of never actually employing these weapons for military purposes.

I am suggesting, though, that the development of nuclear weapons has had, on balance, a stabiliz- ing effect on the postwar international system. They have served to discourage the process of esca- lation that has, in other eras, too casually led to war. They have had a sobering effect upon a whole range of statesmen of varying degrees of responsi- bility and capability. They have forced national leaders, every day, to confront the reality of what war is really like, indeed to confront the prospect of their own mortality, and that, for those who seek ways to avoid war, is no bad thing.

T H E R E C O N N A I S S A N C E R E V O L U T I O N

But although nuclear deterrence is the most im- portant behavioral mechanism that has sustained the post-World War II international system, it is by no means the only one. Indeed, the very tech- nology that has made it possible to deliver nuclear weapons anywhere on the face of the earth has functioned also to lower greatly the danger of surprise attack, thereby supplementing the self- regulating features of deterrence with the assur- ance that comes from knowing a great deal more than in the past about adversary capabilities. I refer here to what might be called the "reconnaissance revolution," a development that may well rival in importance the "nuclear revolution" that preceded

it, but one that rarely gets the attention it deserves. The point was made earlier that nations tend to

start wars on the basis of calculated assessments that they have the power to prevail. But it was sug- gested as well that they have often been wrong about this: they either have failed to anticipate the nature and the costs of war itself, or they have mis- judged the intentions and the capabilities of the adversary they have chosen to confront.23 * * *

* * * But both sides are able—and indeed have been able for at least two decades—to evalu- ate each other's capabilities to a degree that is to- tally unprecedented in the history of relations between great powers.

What has made this possible, of course, has been the development of the reconnaissance satel- lite, a device that if rumors are correct allows the reading of automobile license plates or newspaper headlines from a hundred or more miles out in space, together with the equally important custom that has evolved between the superpowers of al- lowing these objects to pass unhindered over their territories.24 The effect has been to give each side a far more accurate view of the other's military capa- bilities—and, to some degree, economic capabili- ties as well—than could have been provided by an entire phalanx of the best spies in the long history of espionage. The resulting intelligence does not rule out altogether the possibility of surprise at- tack, but it does render it far less likely, at least as far as the superpowers are concerned. * * *

* * *

I D E O L O G I C A L M O D E R A T I O N

The relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States has not been free from ideological ri- valries; it could be argued, in fact, that these are among the most ideological nations on the face of the earth. 2 5 Certainly their respective ideologies could hardly have been more antithetical, given the self-proclaimed intention of one to overthrow the other. 2 6 And yet, since their emergence as su-

perpowers, both nations have demonstrated an impressive capacity to subordinate antagonistic ideological interests to a common goal of preserv- ing international order. The reasons for this are worth examining.

If there were ever a moment at which the pri- orities of order overcame those of ideology, it would appear to be the point at which Soviet lead- ers decided that war would no longer advance the cause of revolution. That clearly had not been Lenin's position: international conflict, for h im, was good or evil according to whether it acceler- ated or retarded the demise of capitalism,2 7 Stalin's attitude on this issue was more ambivalent: he en- couraged talk of an "inevitable conflict" between the "two camps" of communism and capitalism in the years immediately following World War II, but he also appears shortly before his death to have an- ticipated the concept of "peaceful coexistence."28 It was left to Georgii Malenkov to admit publicly, shortly after Stalin's death, that a nuclear war would mean "the destruction of world civiliza- tion"; Nikita Khrushchev subsequently refined this idea (which he had initially condemned) into the proposition that the interests of world revolution, as well as those of the Soviet state, would be better served by working within the existing international order than by trying to overthrow it.29

* * *

The effect was to transform a state which, if ideol- ogy alone had governed, should have sought a complete restructuring of the existing interna- tional system, into one for whom that system now seemed to have definite benefits, within which it now sought to function, and for whom the goal of overthrowing capitalism had been postponed to some vague and indefinite point in the future. 3 0

Without this moderation of ideological objectives, it is difficult to see how the stability that has char- acterized great power relations since the end of World War II could have been possible.

* * *•

* * * American officials at no point during the his- tory of the Cold War seriously contemplated, as a

deliberate political objective, the elimination of the Soviet Union as a major force in world affairs. By the mid-1950s, it is true, war plans had been devised that, if executed, would have quite indiscriminately annihilated not only the Soviet Union but several of its communist and non-communist neighbors as well. 3 1 What is significant about those plans, though, is that they reflected the organizational convenience of the military services charged with implementing them, not any conscious policy decisions at the top. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy were appalled on learning of them; both considered them ecologically as well as strategically impossible; and during the Kennedy administration steps were initiated to devise strategies that would leave open the possibility of a surviving political entity in Rus- sia even in the extremity of nuclear war.3 2

All of this would appear to confirm, then, the proposition that systemic interests tend to take precedence over ideological interests.33 Both the Soviet ideological aversion to capitalism and the American ideological aversion to totalitarianism could have produced policies—and indeed had produced policies in the past—aimed at the com- plete overthrow of their respective adversaries. That such ideological impulses could be muted to the extent they have been during the past four decades testifies to the stake both Washington and Moscow have developed in preserving the existing international system: the moderation of ideologies must be considered, then, along with nuclear de- terrence and reconnaissance, as a major self- regulating mechanism of postwar politics.

" R U L E S " O F T H E S U P E R P O W E R " G A M E "

The question still arises, though: how can order emerge from a system that functions without any superior authority? Even self-regulating mecha- nisms like automatic pilots or engine governors cannot operate without someone to set them in motion; the prevention of anarchy, it has generally been assumed, requires hierarchy, both at the level of interpersonal and international relations. * * *

These "rules" are, of course, implicit rather than explicit: they grow out of a mixture of custom, precedent, and mutual interest that takes shape quite apart from the realm of public rhetoric, diplomacy, or international law. They require the passage of time to become effective; they depend, for that effectiveness, upon the extent to which successive generations of national leadership on each side find them useful. They certainly do not reflect any agreed-upon standard of international morality: indeed they often violate principles of "justice" adhered to by one side or the other. But these "rules" have played an important role in maintaining the international system that has been in place these past four decades: without them the correlation one would normally anticipate between hostility and instability would have became more exact than it has in fact been since 1945.

* * *

(1) Respect Spheres of Influence. Neither Rus- sians nor Americans officially admit to having such "spheres," but in fact much of the history of the Cold War can be written in terms of the efforts both have made to consolidate and extend them. * * * But what is important from the standpoint of superpower "rules" is the fact that, al- though neither side has ever publicly en- dorsed the other's right to a sphere of influence, neither has ever directly chal- lenged it either.34

* * *

(2) Avoid Direct Military Confrontation. It is remarkable, in retrospect, that at no point during the long history of the Cold War have Soviet and American military forces engaged each other directly in sustained hostilities. The superpowers have fought three major limited wars since 1945, but in no case with each other: the possibility of direct Soviet-American military involve- ment was greatest—although it never hap- pened—during the Korean War; it was

much more remote in Vietnam and has re- mained so in Afghanistan as well. In those few situations where Soviet and American military units have confronted one another directly—the 1948 Berlin blockade, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis the following year—great care was taken on both sides to avoid incidents that might have triggered hostilities.35

(3) Use Nuclear Weapons Only as an Ultimate Resort. One of the most significant— though least often commented upon—of the superpower "rules" has been the tra- dition that has evolved, since 1945, of maintaining a sharp distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons, and of reserving the military use of the latter only for the extremity of total war. * * *

It was precisely this sense that nuclear weapons were qualitatively different from other weapons36 that most effectively de- terred their employment by the United States during the first decade of the Cold War, a period in which the tradition of "non-use" had not yet taken hold, within which ample opportunities for their use existed, and during which the possibility of Soviet retaliation could not have been great. The idea of a discrete "threshold" be- tween nuclear and conventional weapons, therefore, may owe more to the moral— and public relations—sensibilities of Wash- ington officials than to any actual fear of escalation. By the time a credible Soviet re- taliatory capability was in place, at the end of the 1950s, the "threshold" concept was equally firmly fixed: one simply did not cross it short of all-out war.3 7 * * *

(4) Prefer predictable anomaly over unpre- dictable rationality. One of the most curi- ous features of the Cold War has been the

extent to which the superpowers—and their respective clients, who have had little choice in the matter—have tolerated a whole series of awkward, artificial, and, on the surface at least, unstable regional arrangements: the division of Germany is, of course, the most obvious example; oth- ers would include the Berlin Wall, the po- sition of West Berlin itself within East Germany, the arbitrary and ritualized par- tition of the Korean peninsula, the exis- tence of an avowed Soviet satellite some ninety miles off the coast of Florida, and, not least, the continued functioning of an important American naval base within it. There is to all of these arrangements an ap- pearance of wildly illogical improvisation: none of them could conceivably have re- sulted, it seems, from any rational and pre- meditated design.

And yet, at another level, they have had a kind of logic after all: the fact that these jerry-built but rigidly maintained arrange- ments have lasted for so long suggests an unwillingness on the part of the superpow- ers to trade familiarity for unpredictability. * * *

(5) Do not seek to undermine the other side's leadership. The death of Stalin, in March 1953, set off a flurry of proposals within the United States government for exploit- ing the vulnerability that was thought certain to result: * * * And yet, by the following month President Eisenhower was encouraging precisely that successor regime to join in a major new effort to control the arms race and reduce the dan- ger of war.38 The dilemma here was one that was to recur throughout the Cold War: if what one wanted was stability at the international level, did it make sense to try to destabilize the other side's leadership at the national level?

The answer, it appears, has been no. There have been repeated leadership crises in both the United States and the Soviet

42 C H A P T E R 2 HISTORY

Union since Stalin's death: one thinks espe- cially of the decline and ultimate deposition of Khrushchev following the Cuban missile crisis, of the Johnson administration's all- consuming fixation with Vietnam, of the collapse of Nixon's authority as a result of Watergate, and of the recent paralysis in the Kremlin brought about by the illness and death of three Soviet leaders within less than three years. And yet, in none of these instances can one discern a concerted effort by the unaffected side to exploit the other's vulnerability; indeed there appears to have existed in several of these situations a sense of frustration, even regret, over the difficul- ties its rival was undergoing.39 From the standpoint of game theory, a "rule" that ac- knowledges legitimacy of leadership on both sides is hardly surprising: there have to be players in order for the game to proceed. But when compared to other historical— and indeed other current—situations in which that reciprocal tolerance has not ex- isted,40 its importance as a stabilizing mech- anism becomes clear.

* * *

The Cold War, with all of its rivalries, anxieties, and unquestionable dangers, has produced the longest period of stability in relations among the great powers that the world has known in this cen- tury; it now compares favorably as well with some of the longest periods of great power stability in all of modern history. We may argue among ourselves as to whether or not we can legitimately call this "peace": it is not, I daresay, what most of us have in mind when we use that term. But I am not at all certain that the contemporaries of Metternich or Bismarck would have regarded their eras as "peaceful" either, even though historians looking back on those eras today clearly do.

Who is to say, therefore, how the historians of the year 2086 if there are any left by then—will look back on us? Is it not at least plausible that they will see our era, not as "the Cold War" at all, but rather, like those ages of Metternich and Bismarck,

as a rare and fondly remembered "Long Peace"? Wishful thinking? Speculation through a rose- tinted word processor? Perhaps. But would it not behoove us to give at least as much attention to the question of how this might happen—to the ele- ments in the contemporary international system that might make it happen—as we do to the fear that it may not?

CONTENDING PERSPECTIVES

Over the past century, the most prominent perspectives for understanding the bask nature of international politics have been realism, liberalism, and radicalism. These viewpoints have vied for influence both in public debates and in academic arguments. For that reason, Essentials of International Relations is organized around the dialogue among these contending perspectives.

The readings in this chapter constitute some of the most concise and impor- tant statements of each theoretical tradition. Hans Morgenthau, the leading figure in the field of international relations in the period after World War II and at that time a professor at the University of Chicago, presents a realist view of power poli- tics. His influential book Politics Among Nations (1948), excerpted below, played a central role in intellectually preparing Americans to exercise global power in the Cold War period and to reconcile power politics with the idealistic ethics that had previously dominated American discussions about foreign relations.

In a seminal book in the Norton Series in World Politics, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), John Mearsheimer offers a contemporary interpreta- tion of international politics that he calls "offensive realism." The chapter reprinted here clearly and concisely describes international anarchy and its implications. States operate in a self-help system; to insure their survival in that system, states must strive to become as powerful as possible. This competitive striving for security makes conflict the enduring and dominant feature of international relations, in Mearsheimer's view.

Michael Doyle, a professor at Columbia University, advances the liberal theory of the democratic peace. His 1986 article in the American Political Science Re- view points out that no two democracies had ever fought a war against each other. This sparked a huge and still ongoing debate among academics and public com- mentators on why this was the case, and whether it meant that the United States and other democracies should place efforts to promote the further spread of democ- racy at the head of their foreign policy agendas. Adding a complication to Doyle's insight, Jack Snyder's From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist

Conflict (2000) argues that while mature democracies may not fight wars against each other, countries undergoing the early stages of a transition to democracy are especially prone to war and ethnic conflict.

Andre Gunder Frank, a political economist who has written extensively on Latin America, draws on Marxist ideas in discussing the dependency of developing countries in the global capitalist system. His 1966 essay "The Development of Un- derdevelopment" argues that the more economic contact a late-developing country had with wealthier and more powerful advanced capitalist states, the more likely it was to become impoverished and dependent. Though this diagnosis would have fewer adherents today, the problem of how late-developing countries can adapt to the challenges of economic globalization remains a pressing one.

The final two selections illustrate new currents in the study of international politics that fundamentally challenge the realist, liberal, and radical perspectives. Arguing from a feminist perspective, J. Ann Tickner of the University of Southern California, in an excerpt from Gender in International Relations, suggests that much of the warlike behavior realists attribute to the situation of international an- archy is better understood as a consequence of the way male identity has been con- structed. George Washington University's Martha Finnemore takes a constructivist approach. Using the issue of humanitarian intervention, Finnemore shows why states choose to intervene in the affairs of other states, even when no national in- terests are at stake. She finds the explanation in international-system-level norms.

Books in the Norton Series in World Politics by John Mearsheimer and by Bruce Russett and John Oneal (Triangulating Peace) offer the most up-to-date statements of the realist and liberal perspectives, respectively.

A Realist Theory of International Politics

This book purports to present a theory of in-ternational politics. The test by which such a theory must be judged is not a priori and ab- stract but empirical and pragmatic. The theory, in other words, must be judged not by some precon- ceived abstract principle or concept unrelated to

From Hans Morganthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (1948; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1960), chaps. 1, 3. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

reality, but by its purpose: to bring order and meaning to a mass of phenomena which without it would remain disconnected and unintelligible. It must meet a dual test, an empirical and a logical one: Do the facts as they actually are lend them- selves to the interpretation the theory has put upon them, and do the conclusions at which the theory arrives follow with logical necessity from its premises? In short, is the theory consistent with the facts and within itself ?

The issue this theory raises concerns the nature of all politics. The history of modern political thought is the story of a contest between two schools that differ fundamentally in their concep- tions of the nature of man, society, and politics. One believes that a rational and moral political or- der, derived from universally valid abstract princi- ples, can be achieved here and now. It assumes the essential goodness and infinite malleability of hu- man nature, and blames the failure of the social or- der to measure up to the rational standards on lack of knowledge and understanding, obsolescent so- cial institutions, or the depravity of certain isolated individuals or groups. It trusts in education, re- form, and the sporadic use of force to remedy these defects.

The other school believes that the world, im- perfect 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. This being inherently a world of opposing interests and of conflict among them, moral principles can never be fully realized, but must at best be approximated through the ever temporary balancing of interests and the ever pre- carious setdement of conflicts. This school, then, sees in a system of checks and balances a universal principle for all pluralist societies. It appeals to his- toric precedent rather than to abstract principles, and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good.

* * *

* * * Principles of Political Realism

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society fives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure.

Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the pos- sibility of developing a rational theory that reflects,

however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objec- tive laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opin- ion—between what is true objectively and ratio- nally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, di- vorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking.

* * *

For realism, theory consists in ascertaining facts and giving them meaning through reason. It as- sumes that the character of a foreign policy can be ascertained only through the examination of the political acts performed and of the foreseeable con- sequences of these acts. Thus, we can find out what statesmen have actually done, and from the fore- seeable consequences of their acts we can surmise what their objectives might have been.

Yet examination of the facts is not enough. To give meaning to the factual raw material of foreign policy, we must approach political reality with a kind of rational outline, a map that suggests to us the possible meanings of foreign policy. In other words, we put ourselves in the position of a states- man who must meet a certain problem of foreign policy under certain circumstances, and we ask ourselves what the rational alternatives are from which a statesman may choose who must meet this problem under these circumstances (presuming al- ways that he acts in a rational manner), and which of these rational alternatives this particular states- man, acting under these circumstances, is likely to choose. It is the testing of this rational hypothesis against the actual facts and their consequences that gives meaning to the facts of international politics and makes a theory of politics possible.

The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of interna- tional politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power. This concept provides the link be- tween reason trying to understand international politics and the facts to be understood. * * *

We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evi- dence of history bears that assumption out. That

assumption allows us to retrace and anticipate, as it were, the steps a statesman—past, present, or future—has taken or will take on the political scene. We look over his shoulder when he writes his dispatches; we listen in on his conversation with other statesmen; we read and anticipate his very thoughts. Thinking in terms of interest de- fined as power, we think as he does, and as disin- terested observers we understand his thoughts and actions perhaps better than he, the actor on the po- litical scene, does himself.

Political realism is aware of the moral significance of political action. It is also aware of the ineluctable tension between the moral command and the re- quirements of successful political action. And it is unwilling to gloss over and obliterate that tension and thus to obfuscate both the moral and the polit- ical issue by making it appear as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is.

Realism maintains that universal moral princi- ples cannot be applied to the actions of states in

their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circum- stances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: "Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)," but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice him- self in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political conse- quences of seemingly moral action. Realism, then, considers prudence—the weighing of the conse- quences of alternative political actions—to be the supreme virtue in politics. Ethics in the ab- stract judges action by its conformity with the moral law; political ethics judges action by its po- litical consequences. * * *

Political Power

What Is Political Power?

International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim. States- men and peoples may ultimately seek freedom, secu- rity, prosperity, or power itself. They may define their goals in terms of a religious, philosophic, eco- nomic, or social ideal. They may hope that this ideal will materialize through its own inner force, through divine intervention, or through the natural develop- ment of human affairs. They may also try to further

its realization through nonpolitical means, such as technical co-operation with other nations or inter- national organizations. But whenever they strive to realize their goal by means of international politics, they do so by striving for power. The Crusaders wanted to free the holy places from domination by the Infidels; Woodrow Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy, the Nazis wanted to open Eastern Europe to German colonization, to domi- nate Europe, and to conquer the world. Since they all chose power to achieve these ends, they were actors on the scene of international politics.

* * *

* * * When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.

Political power, however, must be distin- guished from force in the sense of the actual exer- cise of physical violence. The threat of physical violence in the form of police action, imprison- ment, capital punishment, or war is an intrinsic el- ement of politics. When violence becomes an actuality, it signifies the abdication of political power in favor of military or pseudo-military power. In international politics in particular, armed strength as a threat or a potentiality is the most important material factor making for the po- litical power of a nation. If it becomes an actuality in war, it signifies the substitution of military for political power. The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relation between two minds, which is of the essence of po- litical power, the physical relation between two bodies, one of which is strong enough to dominate the other's movements. It is for this reason that in the exercise of physical violence the psychological element of the political relationship is lost, and that we must distinguish between military and po- litical power.

Political power is a psychological relation be- tween those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former control over cer- tain actions of the latter through the influence which the former exert over the latter's minds. That influence derives from three sources; the ex- pectation of benefits, the fear of disadvantages, the respect or love for men or institutions. It may be exerted through orders, threats, persuasion, the authority or charisma of a man or of an office, or a combination of any of these.

While it is generally recognized that the inter- play of these factors, in ever changing combina- tions, forms the basis of all domestic politics, the importance of these factors for international poli- tics is less obvious, but no less real. There has been a tendency to reduce political power to the actual application of force or at least to equate it with

successful threats of force and with persuasion, to the neglect of charisma. That neglect * * * ac- counts in good measure for the neglect of prestige as an independent element in international poli- tics. * * *

* * *

An economic, financial, territorial, or military pol- icy undertaken for its own sake is subject to evalu- ation in its own terms. Is it economically or financially advantageous? * * *

When, however, the objectives of these policies serve to increase the power of the nation pursuing them with regard to other nations, these policies and their objectives must be judged primarily from the point of view of their contribution to national power. An economic policy that cannot be justified in purely economic terms might nevertheless be undertaken in view of the political policy pursued. The insecure and unprofitable character of a loan to a foreign nation may be a valid argument against it on purely financial grounds. But the ar- gument is irrelevant if the loan, however unwise it may be from a banker's point of view, serves the political policies of the nation. It may of course be that the economic or financial losses involved in such policies will weaken the nation in its interna- tional position to such an extent as to outweigh the political advantages to be expected. On these grounds such policies might be rejected. In such a case, what decides the issue is not purely economic and financial considerations but a comparison of the political changes and risks involved; that is, the probable effect of these policies upon the power of the nation.

The Depreciation of Political Power

The aspiration for power being the distinguishing element of international politics, as of all politics, international politics is of necessity power politics. While this fact is generally recognized in the prac- tice of international affairs, it is frequently denied in the pronouncements of scholars, publicists, and even statesmen. Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, ever larger groups in the Western world

have been persuaded that the struggle for power on the international scene is a temporary phenome- non, a historical accident that is bound to disap- pear once the peculiar historic conditions that have given rise to it have been eliminated. * * * Dur- ing the nineteenth century, liberals everywhere shared the conviction that power politics and war were residues of an obsolete system of government, and that with the victory of democracy and consti- tutional government over absolutism and autoc- racy international harmony and permanent peace would win out over power politics and war. Of this liberal school of thought, Woodrow Wilson was the most eloquent and most influential spokes- man.

In recent times, the conviction that the struggle for power can be eliminated from the international scene has been connected with the great attempts at organizing the world, such as the League of Na- tions and the United Nations. * * *

* * * [In fact,] the struggle for power is uni- versal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic, and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power. Even though anthropologists have shown that certain primitive peoples seem to be free from the desire for power, nobody has yet shown how their state of mind and the conditions under which they live can be recreated on a world- wide scale so as to eliminate the struggle for power from the international scene.' It would be useless and even self-destructive to free one or the other of the peoples of the earth from the desire for power while leaving it extant in others. If the desire for power cannot be abolished everywhere in the world, those who might be cured would simply fall victims to the power of others.

The position taken here might be criticized on

the ground that conclusions drawn from the past are unconvincing, and that to draw such conclu- sions has always been the main stock in trade of the enemies of progress and reform. Though it is true that certain social arrangements and institu- tions have always existed in the past, it does not necessarily follow that they must always exist in the future. The situation is, however, different when we deal not with social arrangements and institu- tions created by man, but with those elemental biopsychological drives by which in turn society is created. The drives to live, to propagate, and to dominate are common to all men.2 Their relative strength is dependent upon social conditions that may favor one drive and tend to repress another, or that may withhold social approval from certain manifestations of these drives while they encour- age others. Thus, to take examples only from the sphere of power, most societies condemn killing as a means of attaining power within society, but all societies encourage the killing of enemies in that struggle for power which is called war. * * *

NOTES 1. For an illuminating discussion of this problem,

see Malcolm Sharp, "Aggression: A Study of Values and Law," Ethics, Vol. 57, No. 4, Part II

(July 1947). 2. Zoologists have tried to show that the drive to

dominate is found even in animals, such as chickens and monkeys, who create social hierar- chies on the basis of the will and the ability to dominate. See e.g., Warder Allee, Animal Life and Social Growth (Baltimore: The Williams and Wilkins Company, 1932), and The Social Life of Animals (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1938).

J O H N M E A R S H E I M E R

Anarchy and the Struggle for Power

G reat powers, I argue, are always searching for opportunities to gain power over their rivals, with hegemony as their final goal. This perspective does not allow for status quo powers, except for the unusual state that achieves preponderance. Instead, the system is populated with great powers that have revisionist intentions at their core.1 This chapter presents a theory that explains this competition for power. Specifically, I attempt to show that there is a compelling logic be- hind my claim that great powers seek to maximize their share of world power. I do not, however, test offensive realism against the historical record in this chapter. That important task is reserved for later chapters.

Why States Pursue Power

My explanation for why great powers vie with each other for power and strive for hegemony is derived from five assumptions about the international sys- tem. None of these assumptions alone mandates that states behave competitively. Taken together, however, they depict a world in which states have considerable reason to think and sometimes be- have aggressively. In particular, the system encour- ages states to look for opportunities to maximize their power vis-a-vis other states.

How important is it that these assumptions be realistic? Some social scientists argue that the assumptions that underpin a theory need not conform to reality. Indeed, the economist Milton Friedman maintains that the best theories "will be found to have assumptions that are wildly inaccu- rate descriptive representations of reality, and, in

From The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001): 29-54. Some of the author's notes have been edited.

general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions,"2 According to this view, the explanatory power of a theory is all that matters. If unrealistic assumptions lead to a theory that tells us a lot about how the world works, it is of no importance whether the underlying assump- tions are realistic or not.

I reject this view. Although I agree that ex- planatory power is the ultimate criterion for as- sessing theories, I also believe that a theory based on unrealistic or false assumptions will not explain much about how the world works.-1 Sound theories are based on sound assumptions. Accordingly, each of these five assumptions is a reasonably accu- rate representation of an important aspect of life in the international system.

Bedrock Assumptions

The first assumption is that the international sys- tem is anarchic, which does not mean that it is chaotic or riven by disorder. It is easy to draw that conclusion, since realism depicts a world charac- terized by security competition and war. By itself, however, the realist notion of anarchy has nothing to do with conflict; it is an ordering principle, which says that the system comprises independent states that have no central authority above them.'1

Sovereignly, in other words, inheres in states be- cause there is no higher ruling body in the interna- tional system.5 There is no "government over governments."6

The second assumption is that great powers in- herently possess some offensive military capability, which gives them the wherewithal to hurt and pos- sibly destroy each other. States are potentially dan- gerous to each other, although some states have more military might than others and are therefore more dangerous. A state's military power is usually identified with the particular weaponry at its dis-

posal, although even if there were no weapons, the individuals in those states could still use their feet and hands to attack the population of another state. After all, for every neck, there are two hands to choke it.

The third assumption is that states can never be certain about other states' intentions. Specifi- cally, no state can be sure that another state will not use its offensive military capability to attack the first state. This is not to say that states necessar- ily have hostile intentions. Indeed, all of the states in the system may be reliably benign, but it is im- possible to be sure of that judgment because inten- tions are impossible to divine with 100 percent certainty.7 There are many possible causes of ag- gression, and no state can be sure that another state is not motivated by one of them.8 Further- more, intentions can change quickly, so a state's intentions can be benign one day and hostile the next. Uncertainty about intentions is unavoidable, which means that states can never be sure that other states do not have offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities.

The fourth assumption is that survival is the primary goal of great powers. Specifically, states seek to maintain their territorial integrity and the autonomy of their domestic political order. Sur- vival dominates other motives because, once a state is conquered, it is unlikely to be in a position to pursue other aims. Soviet leader Josef Stalin put the point well during a war scare in 1927: "We can and must build socialism in the [Soviet Union]. But in order to do so we first of all have to exist."9

States can and do pursue other goals, of course, but security is their most important objective.

The fifth assumption is that great powers are rational actors. They are aware of their external en- vironment and they think strategically about how to survive in it. In particular, they consider the preferences of other states and how their own be- havior is likely to affect the behavior of those other states, and how the behavior of those other states is likely to affect their own strategy for survival. Moreover, states pay attention to the long term as well as the immediate consequences of their actions.

As emphasized, none of these assumptions alone dictates that great powers as a general rule should behave aggressively toward each other. There is surely the possibility that some state might have hostile intentions, but the only assumption dealing with a specific motive that is common to all states says that their principal objective is to survive, which by itself is a rather harmless goal. Nevertheless, when the five assumptions are mar- ried together, they create powerful incentives for great powers to think and act offensively with re- gard to each other. In particular, three general pat- terns of behavior result: fear, self-help, and power maximization.

State Behavior

Great powers fear each other. They regard each other with suspicion, and they worry that war might be in the offing. They anticipate danger. There is little room for trust among states. For sure, the level of fear varies across time and space, but it cannot be reduced to a trivial level. From the perspective of any one great power, all other great powers are potential enemies. This point is illus- trated by the reaction of the United Kingdom and France to German reunification at the end of the Gold War. Despite the fact that these three states had been close allies for almost forty-five years, both the United Kingdom and France immediately began worrying about the potential dangers of a united Germany. 1 0

The basis of this fear is that in a world where great powers have the capability to attack each other and might have the motive to do so, any state bent on survival must be at least suspicious of other states and reluctant to trust them. Add to this the "911" problem—the absence of a central authority to which a threatened state can turn for help—and states have even greater incentive to fear each other. Moreover, there is no mechanism, other than the possible self-interest of third parties, for punishing an aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult to deter potential aggressors, states have ample reason not to trust other states and to be prepared for war with them.

The possible consequences of falling victim to aggression further amplify the importance of fear as a motivating force in world politics. Great powers do not compete with each other as if inter- national politics were merely an economic market- place. Political competition among states is a much more dangerous business than mere economic in- tercourse; the former can lead to war, and war of- ten means mass killing on die battlefield as well as mass murder of civilians. In extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction of states. The horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to view each other not just as competitors, but as po- tentially deadly enemies. Political antagonism, in short, tends to be intense, because the stakes are great.

States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vul- nerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help themselves, This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming al liances.11 But alliances are only temporary mar- riages of convenience: today's alliance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For exam- ple, the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War II, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

States operating in a self-help world almost al- ways act according to their own self-interest and do not subordinate their interests to the interests of other states, or to the interests of the so-called international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short term as well as in the long term, be- cause if a state loses in the short run, it might not be around for the long haul.

Apprehensive about the ultimate intentions of

other states, and aware that they operate in a self- help system, states quickly understand that the best way to ensure their survival is to be the most pow- erful state in the system. The stronger a state is rel- ative to its potential rivals, the less likely it is that any of those rivals will attack it and threaten its survival. Weaker states will be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states because the weaker states are likely to suffer military defeat, In- deed, the bigger the gap in power between any two states, the less likely it is that the weaker will attack the stronger. Neither Canada nor Mexico, for ex- ample, would countenance attacking the United States, which is far more powerful than its neigh- bors. The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system, As Immanuel Kant said, "It is the de- sire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a con dition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if that were possible."12 Survival would then be almost guaranteed.13

Consequentiy, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential ri- vals, States employ a variety of means—economic, diplomatic, and military—to shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one state's gain in power is another state's loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other, The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have aggressive intentions.14

Even when a great power achieves a distinct military advantage over its rivals, it continues looking for chances to gain more power. The pursuit of power stops only when hegemony is achieved. The idea that a great power might feel se- cure without dominating the system, provided it

has an "appropriate amount" of power, is not per- suasive, for two reasons.15 First, it is difficult to as- sess how much relative power one state must have over its rivals before it is secure. Is twice as much power an appropriate threshold? Or is three times as much power the magic number? The root of the problem is that power calculations alone do not determine which side wins a war. Clever strategies, for example, sometimes allow less powerful states to defeat more powerful foes.

Second, determining how much power is enough becomes even more complicated when great powers contemplate how power will be dis- tributed among them ten or twenty years down the road. The capabilities of individual states vary over time, sometimes markedly, and it is often difficult to predict the direction and scope of change in the balance of power. Remember, few in the West an- ticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union before it happened. In fact, during the first half of the Cold War, many in the West feared that the Soviet econ- omy would eventually generate greater wealth than the American economy, which would cause a marked power shift against the United States and its allies. What the future holds for China and Rus- sia and what the balance of power will look like in 2020 is difficult to foresee.

Given the difficulty of determining how much power is enough for today and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminat- ing any possibility of a challenge by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to be the hegemon in the system be- cause it thought it already had sufficient power to survive.16 But even if a great power does not have the wherewithal to achieve hegemony (and that is usually the case), it will still act offensively to amass as much power as it can, because states are almost always better off with more rather than less power. In short, states do not become status quo powers until they completely dominate the system.

Al l states are influenced by this logic, which means that not only do they look for opportunities to take advantage of one another, they also work to ensure that other states do not take advantage of

them. After all, rival states are driven by the same logic, and most states are likely to recognize their own motives at play in the actions of other states. In short, states ultimately pay attention to defense as well as offense. They think about conquest them- selves, and they work to check aggressor states from gaining power at their expense. This inex- orably leads to a world of constant security compe- tition, where states are willing to lie, cheat, and use brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if one defines that concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is not likely to break out in this world.

The "security dilemma," which is one of the most well-known concepts in the international re- lations literature, reflects the basic logic of offen- sive realism. The essence of the dilemma is that the measures a state takes to increase its own security usually decrease the security of other states. Thus, it is difficult for a state to increase its own chances of survival without threatening the survival of other states. John Herz first introduced the security dilemma in a 1950 article in the journal World Pol- itics.17 After discussing the anarchic nature of in- ternational politics, he writes, "Striving to attain security from . . . attack, [states] are driven to ac- quire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, ren- ders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel en- tirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on." 1 8 The im- plication of Herz's analysis is clear: the best way for a state to survive in anarchy is to take advantage of other states and gain power at their expense. The best defense is a good offense. Since this message is widely understood, ceaseless security competition ensues. Unfortunately, little can be done to ame- liorate the security dilemma as long as states oper- ate in anarchy.

It should be apparent from this discussion that saying that states are power maximizers is tanta- mount to saying that they care about relative power, not absolute power. There is an important distinction here, because states concerned about

relative power behave differently than do states in- terested in absolute power.19 States that maximize relative power are concerned primarily with the distribution of material capabilities. In particular, they try to gain as large a power advantage as pos- sible over potential rivals, because power is the best means to survival in a dangerous world. Thus, states motivated by relative power concerns are likely to forgo large gains in their own power, if such gains give rival states even greater power, for smaller national gains that nevertheless provide them with a power advantage over their rivals.20

States that maximize absolute power, on the other hand, care only about the size of their own gains, not those of other states. They are not motivated by balance-of-power logic but instead are con- cerned with amassing power without regard to how much power other states control. They would jump at the opportunity for large gains, even if a rival gained more in the deal. Power, according to this logic, is not a means to an end (survival), but an end in itself.21

Calculated Aggression

There is obviously little room for status quo pow- ers in a world where states are inclined to look for opportunities to gain more power. Nevertheless, great powers cannot always act on their offensive intentions, because behavior is influenced not only by what states want, but also by their capacity to realize these desires. Every state might want to be king of the hill, but not every state has the where- withal to compete for that lofty position, much less achieve it. Much depends on how military might is distributed among the great powers. A great power that has a marked power advantage over its rivals is likely to behave more aggressively, because it has the capability as well as the incentive to do so.

By contrast, great powers facing powerful op- ponents will be less inclined to consider offensive action and more concerned with defending the ex- isting balance of power from threats by their more powerful opponents. Let there be an opportunity for those weaker states to revise the balance in their own favor, however, and they will take advantage

of it. Stalin put the point well at the end of World War II: "Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise."22

States might also have the capability to gain advan- tage over a rival power but nevertheless decide that the perceived costs of offense are too high and do not justify the expected benefits.

In short, great powers are not mindless aggres- sors so bent on gaining power that they charge headlong into losing wars or pursue Pyrrhic victo- ries. On the contrary, before great powers take of- fensive actions, they think carefully about the balance of power and about how other states will react to their moves. They weigh the costs and risks of offense against the likely benefits, If the benefits do not outweigh the risks, they sit tight and wait for a more propitious moment. Nor do states start arms races that are unlikely to improve their over- all position. As discussed at greater length in Chap- ter 3, states sometimes limit defense spending either because spending more would bring no strategic advantage or because spending more would weaken the economy and undermine the state's power in the long run,2 3 To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, a state has to know its limitations to survive in the international system.

Nevertheless, great powers miscalculate from time to time because they invariably make impor- tant decisions on the basis of imperfect informa- tion, States hardly ever have complete information about any situation they confront, There are two dimensions to this problem. Potential adversaries have incentives to misrepresent their own strength or weakness, and to conceal their true aims.24 For example, a weaker state trying to deter a stronger state is likely to exaggerate its own power to dis- courage the potential aggressor from attacking. On the other hand, a state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful goals while exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential victim does not build up its own arms and thus leaves it- self vulnerable to attack. Probably no national leader was better at practicing this kind of decep- tion than Adolf Hitler,

But even if disinformation was not a problem, great powers are often unsure about how their own

military forces, as well as the adversary's, will per- form on the battlefield. For example, it is some- times difficult to determine in advance how new weapons and untested combat units will perform in the face of enemy fire. Peacetime maneuvers and war games are helpful but imperfect indicators of what is likely to happen in actual combat. Fighting wars is a complicated business in which it is often difficult to predict outcomes. Remember that al- though the United States and its allies scored a stunning and remarkably easy victory against Iraq in early 1991, most experts at the time believed that Iraq's military would be a formidable foe and put up stubborn resistance before finally succumb- ing to American military might.25

Great powers are also sometimes unsure about the resolve of opposing states as well as allies. For example, Germany believed that if it went to war against France and Russia in the summer of 1914, the United Kingdom would probably stay out of the fight. Saddam Hussein expected the United States to stand aside when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Both aggressors guessed wrong, but each had good reason to think that its initial judg- ment was correct. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler be- lieved that his great-power rivals would be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone else to assume that burden. He guessed right. In short, great powers constantly find themselves confronting situations in which they have to make important decisions with in- complete information. Not surprisingly, they some- times make faulty judgments and end up doing themselves serious harm.

Some defensive realists go so far as to suggest that the constraints of the international system are so powerful that offense rarely succeeds, and that aggressive great powers invariably end up be- ing punished.26 As noted, they emphasize that 1) threatened states balance against aggressors and ultimately crush them, and 2) there is an offense- defense balance that is usually heavily tilted toward the defense, thus making conquest especially diffi- cult. Great powers, therefore, should be content with the existing, balance of power and not try to

change it by force. After all, it makes little sense for a state to initiate a war that it is likely to lose; that would be self-defeating behavior. It is better to concentrate instead on preserving the balance of power.27 Moreover, because aggressors seldom suc- ceed, states should understand that security is abundant, and thus there is no good strategic rea- son for wanting more power in the first place. In a world where conquest seldom pays, states should have relatively benign intentions toward each other. If they do not, these defensive realists argue, the reason is probably poisonous domestic politics, not smart calculations about how to guarantee one's security in an anarchic world.

There is no question that systemic factors con- strain aggression, especially balancing by threat- ened states. But defensive realists exaggerate those restraining forces.28 Indeed, the historical record provides little support for their claim that offense rarely succeeds. One study estimates that there were 63 wars between 1815 and 1980, and the ini- tiator won 39 times, which translates into about a 60 percent success rate.29 Turning to specific cases, Otto von Bismarck unified Germany by winning military victories against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870, and the United States as we know it today was created in good part by conquest in the nineteenth century. Conquest cer- tainly paid big dividends in these cases. Nazi Ger- many won wars against Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, but lost to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945. Conquest ultimately did not pay for the Third Reich, but if Hitler had restrained himself af- ter the full of France and had not invaded the So- viet Union, conquest probably would have paid handsomely for the Nazis. In short, the historical record shows that offense sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not. The trick for a sophisticated power maximizer is to figure out when to raise and when to fold. 3 0

Hegemony's Limits

Great powers, as I have emphasized, strive to gain power over their rivals and hopefully become

hegemons. Once a state achieves that exalted posi- tion, it becomes a status quo power, More needs to be said, however, about the meaning of hegemony.

A hegemon is a state that is so powerful that it dominates all the other states in the system.31 No other state has the military wherewithal to put up a serious fight against it. In essence, a hegemon is the only great power in the system. A state that is sub- stantially more powerful than the other great pow- ers in the system is not a hegemon, because it faces, by definition, other great powers. The United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century, for ex- ample, is sometimes called a hegemon. But it was not a hegemon, because there were four other great powers in Europe at the time—Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia—and the United Kingdom did not dominate them in any meaningful way. In fact, during that period, the United Kingdom consid- ered France to be a serious threat to the balance of power. Europe in the nineteenth century was mul- tipolar, not unipolar,

Hegemony means domination of the system, which is usually interpreted to mean the entire world. It is possible, however, to apply the concept of a system more narrowly and use it to describe particular regions, such as Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Thus, one can dis- tinguish between global hegemons, which dominate the world, and regional hegemons, which dominate distinct geographical areas, The United States has been a regional hegemon in the Western Hemi- sphere for at least the past one hundred years. No other state in the Americas has sufficient military might to challenge it, which is why the United States is widely recognized as the only great power in its region.

My argument, which I develop at length in subsequent chapters, is that except for the unlikely event wherein one state achieves clear-cut nuclear superiority, it is virtually impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony. The principal impedi- ment to world domination is the difficulty of pro- jecting power across the world's oceans onto the territory of a rival great power. The United States, for example, is the most powerful state on the planet today. But it does not dominate Europe and

Northeast Asia the way it does the Western Hemi- sphere, and it has no intention of trying to conquer and control those distant regions, mainly because of the stopping power of water. Indeed, there is reason to think that the American military com- mitment to Europe and Northeast Asia might wither away over the next decade. In short, there has never been a global hegemon, and there is not likely to be one anytime soon.

The best outcome a great power can hope for is to be a regional hegemon and possibly control an- other region that is nearby and accessible over land. The United States is the only regional hege- mon in modern history, although other states have fought major wars in pursuit of regional hege- mony: imperial Japan in Northeast Asia, and Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, and Nazi Germany in Europe. But none succeeded. The Soviet Union, which is located in Europe and Northeast Asia, threatened to dominate both of those regions during the Cold War. The Soviet Union might also have attempted to conquer the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, with which it shared a border. But even if Moscow had been able to dom- inate Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf, which it never came close to doing, it still would have been unable to conquer the Western Hemi- sphere and become a true global hegemon.

States that achieve regional hegemony seek to prevent great powers in other regions from dupli- cating their feat. Regional hegemons, in other words, do not want peers. Thus the United States, for example, played a key role in preventing impe- rial Japan, Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union from gaining regional su- premacy. Regional hegemons attempt to check as- piring hegemons in other regions because they fear that a rival great power that dominates its own re- gion will be an especially powerful foe that is es- sentially free to cause trouble in the fearful great power's backyard. Regional hegemons prefer that there be at least two great powers located together in other regions, because their proximity will force them to concentrate their attention on each other rather than on the distant hegemon.

Furthermore, if a potential hegemon emerges

among them, the other great powers in that region might be able to contain it by themselves, allowing the distant hegemon to remain safely on the side- lines. Of course, if the local great powers were un- able to do the job, the distant hegemon would take the appropriate measures to deal with the threat- ening state. The United States, as noted, has as- sumed that burden on four separate occasions in the twentieth century, which is why it is commonly referred to as an "offshore balancer."

In sum, the ideal situation for any great power is to be the only regional hegemon in the world. That state would be a status quo power, and it would go to considerable lengths to preserve the existing distribution of power. The United States is in that enviable position today, it dominates the Western Hemisphere and there is no hegemon in any other area of the world. But if a regional hege- mon is confronted with a peer competitor, it would no longer be a status quo power. Indeed, it would go to considerable lengths to weaken and maybe even destroy its distant rival. Of course, both regional hegemons would be motivated by that logic, which would make for a fierce security competition between them.

Power and Fear

That great powers fear each other is a central as- pect of life in the international system. But as noted, the level of fear varies from case to case. For example, the Soviet Union worried much less about Germany in 1930 than it did in 1939. How much states fear each other matters greatly, be- cause the amount of fear between them largely de- termines the severity of their security competition, as well as the probability that they will fight a war. The more profound the fear is, the more intense is the security competition, and the more likely is war. The logic is straightforward: a scared state will look especially hard for ways to enhance its secu- rity, and it will be disposed to pursue risky policies to achieve that end. Therefore, it is important to understand what causes states to fear each other more or less intensely.

Fear among great powers derives from the fact that they invariably have some offensive military capability that they can use against each other, and the fact that one can never be certain that other states do not intend to use that power against one- self. Moreover, because states operate in an anar- chic system, there is no night watchman to whom they can turn for help if another great power at- tacks them. Although anarchy and uncertainty about other states' intentions create an irreducible level of fear among states that leads to power- maximizing behavior, they cannot account for why sometimes that level of fear is greater than at other times. The reason is that anarchy and the difficulty of discerning state intentions are constant facts of life, and constants cannot explain variation. The capability that states have to threaten each other, however, varies from case to case, and it is the key factor that drives fear levels up and down. Specifi- cally, the more power a state possesses, the more fear it generates among its rivals. Germany, for ex- ample, was much more powerful at the end of the 1930s than it was at the decade's beginning, which is why the Soviets became increasingly fearful of Germany over the course of that decade.

This discussion of how power affects fear prompts the question, What is power? It is impor- tant to distinguish between potential and actual power. A state's potential power is based on the size of its population and the level of its wealth. These two assets are the main building blocks of military power. Wealthy rivals with large popula- tions can usually build formidable military forces. A state's actual power is embedded mainly in its army and the air and naval forces that directly support it. Armies are the central ingredient of military power, because they are the principal instrument for conquering and controlling terri- tory—the paramount political objective in a world of territorial states. In short, the key component of military might, even in the nuclear age, is land power.

Power considerations affect the intensity of fear among states in three main ways. First, rival states that possess nuclear forces that can survive a nuclear attack and retaliate against it are likely to

fear each other less than if these same states had no nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, for exam- ple, the level of fear between the superpowers probably would have been substantially greater if nuclear weapons had not been invented. The logic here is simple: because nuclear weapons can inflict devastating destruction on a rival state in a short period of time, nuclear-armed rivals are going to be reluctant to fight with each other, which means that each side will have less reason to fear the other than would otherwise be the case. But as the Cold War demonstrates, this does not mean that war be- tween nuclear powers is no longer thinkable; they still have reason to fear each other.

Second, when great powers are separated by large bodies of water, they usually do not have much offensive capability against each other, re- gardless of the relative size of their armies. Large bodies of water are formidable obstacles that cause significant power-projection problems for attack- ing armies. For example, the stopping power of water explains in good part why the United King- dom and the United States (since becoming a great power in 1898) have never been invaded by an- other great power. It also explains why the United States has never tried to conquer territory in Europe or Northeast Asia, and why the United Kingdom has never attempted to dominate the European continent. Great powers located on the same landmass are in a much better position to at- tack and conquer each other. That is especially true of states that share a common border. Therefore, great powers separated by water are likely to fear each other less than great powers that can get at each other over land.

Third, the distribution of power among the states in the system also markedly affects the levels of fear.32 The key issue is whether power is distrib- uted more or less evenly among the great powers or whether there are sharp power asymmetries. The configuration of power that generates the most fear is a multipolar system that contains a po- tential hegemon—what I call "unbalanced multi- polarity."

A potential hegemon is more than just the most powerful state in the system. It is a great

power with so much actual military capability and so much potential power that it stands a good chance of dominating and controlling all of the other great powers in its region of the world. A po- tential hegemon need not have the wherewithal to fight all of its rivals at once, but it must have excel- lent prospects of defeating each opponent alone, and good prospects of defeating some of them in tandem. The key relationship, however, is the power gap between the potential hegemon and the second most powerful state in the system: there must be a marked gap between them. To qualify as a potential hegemon, a state must have—by some reasonably large margin—the most formidable army as well as the most latent power among all the states located in its region.

Bipolarity is the power configuration that pro- duces the least amount of fear among the great powers, although not a negligible amount by any means. Fear tends to be less acute in bipolarity, be- cause there is usually a rough balance of power between the two major states in the system. Multipolar systems without a potential hegemon, what I call "balanced multipolarity," are still likely to have power asymmetries among their members, although these asymmetries will not be as pro- nounced as the gaps created by the presence of an aspiring hegemon. Therefore, balanced multipo- larity is likely to generate less fear than unbalanced multipolarity, but more fear than bipolarity.

This discussion of how the level of fear between great powers varies with changes in the distribu- tion of power, not with assessments about each other's intentions, raises a related point. When a state surveys its environment to determine which states pose a threat to its survival, it focuses mainly on the offensive capabilities of potential rivals, not their intentions. As emphasized earlier, intentions are ultimately unknowable, so states worried about their survival must make worst-case assumptions about their rivals' intentions. Capabilities, how- ever, not only can be measured but also determine whether or not a rival state is a serious threat, In short, great powers balance against capabilities, not intentions.33

Great powers obviously balance against states

with formidable military forces, because that of- fensive military capability is the tangible threat to their survival. But great powers also pay careful at- tention to how much latent power rival states con- trol, because rich and populous states usually can and do build powerful armies. Thus, great powers tend to fear states with large populations and rapidly expanding economies, even if these states have not yet translated their wealth into military might.

The Hierarchy of State Goals

Survival is the number one goal of great powers, according to my theory. In practice, however, states pursue non-security goals as well. For exam- ple, great powers invariably seek greater economic prosperity to enhance the welfare of their citizenry. They sometimes seek to promote a particular ide- ology abroad, as happened during the Cold War when the United States tried to spread democracy around the world and the Soviet Union tried to sell communism. National unification is another goal that sometimes motivates states, as it did with Prussia and Italy in the nineteenth century and Germany after the Cold War. Great powers also occasionally try to foster human rights around the globe. States might pursue any of these, as well as a number of other non-security goals.

Offensive realism certainly recognizes that great powers might pursue these non-security goals, but it has little to say about them, save for one important point: states can pursue them as long as the requisite behavior does not conflict with balance-of-power logic, which is often the case.34 Indeed, the pursuit of these non-security goals sometimes complements the hunt for relative power. For example, Nazi Germany expanded into eastern Europe for both ideological and realist rea- sons, and the superpowers competed with each other during the Cold War for similar reasons. Furthermore, greater economic prosperity invari- ably means greater wealth, which has significant implications for security, because wealth is the foundation of military power. Wealthy states can

afford powerful military forces, which enhance a state's prospects for survival. As the political econ- omist Jacob Viner noted more than fifty years ago, "there is a long-run harmony" between wealth and power.35 National unification is another goal that usually complements the pursuit of power. For ex ample, the unified German state that emerged in 1871 was more powerful than the Prussian state it replaced.

Sometimes the pursuit of non-security goals has hardly any effect on the balance of power, one way or the other. Human rights interventions usu- ally fit this description, because they tend to be small-scale operations that cost little and do not detract from a great power's prospects for survival. For better or for worse, states are rarely willing to expend blood and treasure to protect foreign pop- ulations from gross abuses, including genocide. For instance, despite claims that American for- eign policy is infused with moralism, Somalia (1992-93) is the only instance during the past one hundred years in which U.S. soldiers were killed in action on a humanitarian mission. And in that case, the loss of a mere eighteen soldiers in an infa- mous firelight in October 1993 so traumatized American policymakers that they immediately pulled all U.S. troops out of Somalia and then re- fused to intervene in Rwanda in the spring of 1994, when ethnic Hutu went on a genocidal rampage against their Tutsi neighbors.36 Stopping that genocide would have been relatively easy and it would have had virtually no effect on the position of the United States in the balance of power.37 Yet nothing was done. In short, although realism does not prescribe human rights interventions, it does not necessarily proscribe them.

But sometimes the pursuit of non-security goals conflicts with balance-of-power logic, in which case states usually act according to the dic- tates of realism. For example, despite the U.S. commitment to spreading democracy across the globe, it helped overthrow democratically elected governments and embraced a number of authori- tarian regimes during the Cold War, when Ameri- can policymakers felt that these actions would help contain the Soviet Union. 3 8 In World War II, the

liberal democracies put aside their antipathy for communism and formed an alliance with the So- viet Union against Nazi Germany. "I can't take communism," Franklin Roosevelt emphasized, but to defeat Hitler "I would hold hands with the Devil." 3 9 In the same way, Stalin repeatedly demonstrated that when his ideological prefer- ences clashed with power considerations, the latter won out. To take the most blatant example of his realism, the Soviet Union formed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939—the infa- mous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—in hopes that the agreement would at least temporarily satisfy Hider's territorial ambitions in eastern Europe and turn the Wehrmacht toward France and the United Kingdom.40 When great powers confront a serious threat, in short, they pay little attention to ideology as they search for alliance partners.41

Security also trumps wealth when those two goals conflict, because "defence," as Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, "is of much more importance than opulence."42 Smith provides a good illustration of how states behave when forced to choose between wealth and relative power. In 1651, England put into effect the famous Naviga- tion Act, protectionist legislation designed to dam- age Holland's commerce and ultimately cripple the Dutch economy. The legislation mandated that all goods imported into England be carried either in English ships or ships owned by the country that originally produced the goods. Since the Dutch produced few goods themselves, this measure would badly damage their shipping, the central in- gredient in their economic success. Of course, the Navigation Act would hurt England's economy as well, mainly because it would rob England of the benefits of free trade. "The act of navigation," Smith wrote, "is not favorable to foreign com- merce, or to the growth of that opulence that can arise from it." Nevertheless, Smith considered the legislation "the wisest of all the commercial regula- tions of England" because it did more damage to the Dutch economy than to the English economy, and in the mid-seventeenth century Holland was "the only naval power which could endanger the security of England."43

Creating World Order

The claim is sometimes made that great powers can transcend realist logic by working together to build an international order that fosters peace and justice. World peace, it would appear, can only en- hance a state's prosperity and security, America's political leaders paid considerable lip service to this line of argument over the course of the twentieth century. President Clinton, for example, told an audience at the United Nations in September 1993 that "at the birth of this organization 48 years ago . . . a generation of gifted leaders from many na- tions stepped forward to organize the world's ef- forts on behalf of security and prosperity.... Now history has granted to us a moment of even greater opportunity. . . . Let us resolve that we will dream larger. . . . Let us ensure that the world we pass to our children is healthier, safer and more abundant than the one we inhabit today."44

This rhetoric notwithstanding, great powers do not work together to promote world order for its own sake, Instead, each seeks to maximize its own share of world power, which is likely to clash with the goal of creating and sustaining stable interna- tional orders,45 This is not to say that great powers never aim to prevent wars and keep the peace. On the contrary, they work hard to deter wars in which they would be the likely victim. In such cases, however, state behavior is driven largely by narrow calculations about relative power, not by a commitment to build a world order independent of a state's own interests. The United States, for ex- ample, devoted enormous resources to deterring the Soviet Union from starting a war in Europe during the Cold War, not because of some deep- seated commitment to promoting peace around the world, but because American leaders feared that a Soviet victory would lead to a dangerous shift in the balance of power.46

The particular international order that obtains at any time is mainly a by-product of the self- interested behavior of the system's great powers. The configuration of the system, in other words, is the unintended consequence of great-power seat-

rity competition, not the result of states acting to- gether to organize peace. The establishment of the Cold War order in Europe illustrates this point. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States in- tended to establish it, nor did they work together to create it. In fact, each superpower worked hard in the early years of the Cold War to gain power at the expense of the other, while preventing the other from doing likewise,47 The system that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of World War II was the unplanned consequence of intense security competition between the superpowers.

Although that intense superpower rivalry ended along with the Cold War in 1990, Russia and the United States have not worked together to create the present order in Europe, The United States, for example, has rejected out of hand vari- ous Russian proposals to make the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe the central organizing pillar of European security (replacing the U.S.-dominated NATO). Furthermore, Russia was deeply opposed to NATO expansion, which it viewed as a serious threat to Russian security, Rec- ognizing that Russia's weakness would preclude any retaliation, however, the United States ignored Russia's concerns and pushed NATO to accept the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as new members. Russia has also opposed U.S. policy in the Balkans over the past decade, especially NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Again, the United States has paid little attention to Russia's concerns and has taken the steps it deems neces- sary to bring peace to that volatile region, Finally, it is worth noting that although Russia is dead set against allowing the United States to deploy ballis- tic missile defenses, it is highly likely that Washing- ton will deploy such a system if it is judged to be technologically feasible.

For sure, great-power rivalry will sometimes produce a stable international order, as happened during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the great pow- ers will continue looking for opportunities to increase their share of world power, and if a favorable situation arises, they will move to under- mine that stable order. Consider how hard the United States worked during the late 1980s to

weaken the Soviet Union and bring down the sta- ble order that had emerged in Europe during the latter part of the Cold War. 4 8 Of course, the states that stand to lose power will work to deter aggres- sion and preserve the existing order. But their motives will be selfish, revolving around balance- of-power logic, not some commitment to world peace.

Great powers cannot commit themselves to the pursuit of a peaceful world order for two reasons, First, states are unlikely to agree on a general for- mula for bolstering peace. Certainly, international relations scholars have never reached a consensus on what the blueprint should look like. In fact, it seems there are about as many theories on the causes of war and peace as there are scholars study- ing the subject. But more important, policymakers are unable to agree on how to create a stable world. For example, at the Paris Peace Conference af- ter World War I, important differences over how to create stability in Europe divided Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson. 4 9 In particular, Clemenceau was deter- mined to impose harsher terms on Germany over the Rhineland than was either Lloyd George or Wilson, while Lloyd George stood out as the hard- liner on German reparations. The Treaty of Versailles, not surprisingly, did little to promote European stability.

Furthermore, consider American thinking on how to achieve stability in Europe in the early days of the Cold War. 5 0 The key elements for a stable and durable system were in place by the early 1950s. They included the division of Germany, the positioning of American ground forces in Western Europe to deter a Soviet attack, and ensuring that West Germany would not seek to develop nuclear weapons. Officials in the Truman administration, however, disagreed about whether a divided Ger- many would be a source of peace of war. For ex- ample, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, who held important positions in the State Department, be- lieved that a divided Germany would be a source of instability, whereas Secretary of State Dean Ache- son disagreed with them. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower sought to end the American commit-

ment to defend Western Europe and to provide West Germany with its own nuclear deterrent. This policy, which was never fully adopted, never- theless caused significant instability in Europe, as it led directly to the Berlin crises of 1958-59 and 1961.51

Second, great powers cannot put aside power considerations and work to promote international peace because they cannot be sure that their efforts will succeed. If their attempt fails, they are likely to pay a steep price for having neglected the balance of power, because if an aggressor appears at the door there will be no answer when they dial 911. That is a risk few states are willing to run. There fore, prudence dictates that they behave according- to realist logic. This line of reasoning accounts for why collective security schemes, which call for states to put aside narrow concerns about the bal- ance of power and instead act in accordance with the broader interests of the international commu- nity, invariably die at birth. 5 2

Cooperation Among States

One might conclude from the preceding discus- sion that my theory does not allow for any cooper- ation among the great powers. But this conclusion would be wrong. States can cooperate, although cooperation is sometimes difficult to achieve and always difficult to sustain. Two factors inhibit co- operation: considerations about relative gains and concern about cheating.53 Ultimately, great powers live in a fundamentally competitive world where they view each other as real, or at least potential, enemies, and they therefore look to gain power at each other's expense.

Any two states contemplating cooperation must consider how profits or gains will be distrib- uted between them. They can think about the divi- sion in terms of either absolute or relative gains (recall the distinction made earlier between pursu- ing either absolute power or relative power; the concept here is the same). With absolute gains, each side is concerned with maximizing its own profits and cares little about how much the other

side gains or loses in the deal. Each side cares about the other only to the extent that the other side's be- havior affects its own prospects for achieving max- imum profits. With relative gains, on the other hand, each side considers not only its own individ- ual gain, but also how well it fares compared to the other side.

Because great powers care deeply about the balance of power, their thinking focuses on relative gains when they consider cooperating with other states. For sure, each state tries to maximize its ab- solute gains; still, it is more important for a state to make sure that it does no worse, and perhaps bet- ter, than the other state in any agreement. Cooper- ation is more difficult to achieve, however, when states are attuned to relative gains rather than ab- solute gains.54 This is because states concerned about absolute gains have to make sure that if the pie is expanding, they are getting at least some por- tion of the increase, whereas states that worry about relative gains must pay careful attention to how the pie is divided, which complicates coopera- tive efforts.

Concerns about cheating also hinder coopera- tion. Great powers are often reluctant to enter into cooperative agreements for fear that the other side will cheat on the agreement and gain a significant advantage. This concern is especially acute in the military realm, causing a "special peril of defec- tion," because the nature of military weaponry al- lows for rapid shifts in the balance of power.55

Such a development could create a window of op- portunity for the state that cheats to inflict a deci- sive defeat on its victim.

These barriers to cooperation notwithstand- ing, great powers do cooperate in a realist world. Balance-of-power logic often causes great powers to form alliances and cooperate against common enemies. The United Kingdom, France, and Rus- sia, for example, were allies against Germany be- fore and during World War I. States sometimes cooperate to gang up on a third state, as Germany and the Soviet Union did against Poland in 1939.56

More recendy, Serbia and Croatia agreed to con- quer and divide Bosnia between them, although the United States and its European allies prevented

them from executing their agreement.57 Rivals as well as allies cooperate. After all, deals can be struck that roughly reflect the distribution of power and satisfy concerns about cheating. The various arms control agreements signed by the su- perpowers during the Cold War illustrate this point.

The bottom line, however, is that cooperation takes place in a world that is competitive at its core—one where states have powerful incentives to take advantage of other states. This point is graph- ically highlighted by the state of European politics in the forty years before World War I. The great powers cooperated frequently during this period, but that did not stop them from going to war on August 1, 19l4.5 8 The United States and the Soviet Union also cooperated considerably during World War II, but that cooperation did not prevent the outbreak of the Cold War shortly after Germany and Japan were defeated. Perhaps most amazingly, there was significant economic and military coop- eration between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the two years before the Wehrmacht attacked the Red Army. 5 9 No amount of coopera- tion can eliminate the dominating logic of security competition. Genuine peace, or a world in which states do not compete for power, is not likely as long as the state system remains anarchic.

Conclus ion

In sum, my argument is that the structure of the international system, not the particular character- istics of individual great powers, causes them to think and act offensively and to seek hegemony.6 0 I do not adopt Morgenthau's claim that states in- variably behave aggressively because they have a will to power hardwired into them. Instead, I as- sume that the principal motive behind great-power behavior is survival. In anarchy, however, the de- sire to survive encourages states to behave aggres- sively. Nor does my theory classify states as more or less aggressive on the basis of their economic or political systems. Offensive realism makes only a handful of assumptions about great powers, and

these assumptions apply equally to all great pow- ers. Except for differences in how much power each state controls, the theory treats all states alike.

I have now laid out the logic explaining why states seek to gain as much power as possible over their rivals. * * *

68 C H A P T E R 3 C O N T E N D I N G PERSPECTIVES

Liberalism and World Politics

romoting freedom will produce peace, we have often been told. In a speech before the British Parliament in June of 1982, President

Reagan proclaimed that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise "restraint" and "peaceful intentions" in their foreign policy. He then announced a "crusade for freedom" and a "campaign for democratic development" (Reagan, June 9, 1982).

In making these claims the president joined a long list of liberal theorists (and propagandists) and echoed an old argument: the aggressive in- stincts of authoritarian leaders and totalitarian rul- ing parties make for war. Liberal states, founded on such individual rights as equality before the law, free speech and other civil liberties, private prop- erty, and elected representation are fundamentally against war this argument asserts. When the citi- zens who bear the burdens of war elect their gov- ernments, wars become impossible. Furthermore, citizens appreciate that the benefits of trade can be enjoyed only under conditions of peace. Thus the very existence of liberal states, such as the U.S., Japan, and our European allies, makes for peace.

Building on a growing literature in interna- tional political science, I reexamine the liberal claim President Reagan reiterated for us. I look at three distinct theoretical traditions of liberalism, attributable to three theorists: Schumpeter, a bril- liant explicator of the liberal pacifism the president invoked; Machiavelli, a classical republican whose glory is an imperialism we often practice; and Kant.

Despite the contradictions of liberal pacifism and liberal imperialism, I find, with Kant and other liberal republicans, that liberalism does leave a co-

From American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (De- cember 1986): 1151-69. The author's notes have been omitted.

herent legacy on foreign affairs. Liberal states are different. They are indeed peaceful, yet they are also prone to make war, as the U.S. and our "free- dom fighters" are now doing, not so covertly, against Nicaragua. Liberal states have created a separate peace, as Kant argued they would, and have also discovered liberal reasons for aggression, as he feared they might. I conclude by arguing that the differences among liberal pacifism, liberal im- perialism, and Kant's liberal internationalism are not arbitrary but rooted in differing conceptions of the citizen and the state.

Liberal Pacifism

There is no canonical description of liberalism. What we tend to call liberal resembles a family por- trait of principles and institutions, recognizable by certain characteristics—for example, individual freedom, political participation, private property, and equality of opportunity—that most liberal states share, although none has perfected them all. Joseph Schumpeter clearly fits within this family when he considers the international effects of capi- talism and democracy.

Schumpeter's "Sociology of Imperialisms," pub- lished in 1919, made a coherent and sustained ar- gument concerning the pacifying (in the sense of nonaggressive) effects of liberal institutions and principles (Schumpeter, 1955; see also Doyle, 1986, pp. 155-59). Unlike some of the earlier liberal theorists who focused on a single feature such as trade (Montesquieu, 1949, vol. 1, bk. 20, chap. 1) or failed to examine critically the arguments they were advancing, Schumpeter saw the interaction of capitalism and democracy as the foundation of lib- eral pacifism, and he tested his arguments in a sociology of historical imperialisms.

He defines imperialism as "an objectless dispo- sition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible

expansion" (Schumpeter, 1955, p. 6). Excluding imperialisms that were mere "catchwords" and those that were "object-ful" (e.g., defensive imperi- alism), he traces the roots of objectless imperialism to three sources, each an atavism. Modern imperi- alism, according to Schumpeter, resulted from the combined impact of a "war machine," warlike in- stincts, and export monopolism.

Once necessary, the war machine later devel- oped a life of its own and took control of a state's foreign policy: "Created by the wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required" (Schumpeter, 1955, p. 25). Thus, Schumpeter tells us that the army of ancient Egypt, created to drive the Hyksos out of Egypt, took over the state and pursued militaristic imperialism. Like the later armies of the courts of absolutist Europe, it fought wars for the sake of glory and booty, for the sake of warriors and monarchs—wars gratia warriors.

A warlike disposition, elsewhere called "in- stinctual elements of bloody primitivism," is the natural ideology of a war machine. It also exists in- dependently; the Persians, says Schumpeter (1955, pp. 25-32), were a warrior nation from the outset.

Under modern capitalism, export monopolists, the third source of modern imperialism, push for imperialist expansion as a way to expand their closed markets. The absolute monarchies were the last clear-cut imperialisms. Nineteenth-century im- perialisms merely represent the vestiges of the im- perialisms created by Louis XIV and Catherine the Great. Thus, the export monopolists are an atavism of the absolute monarchies, for they depend com- pletely on the tariffs imposed by the monarchs and their militaristic successors for revenue (Schum- peter, 1955, p. 82-83). Without tariffs, monopolies would be eliminated by foreign competition.

Modern (nineteenth century) imperialism, therefore, rests on an atavistic war machine, mili- taristic attitudes left over from the days of mo- narchical wars, and export monopolism, which is nothing more than the economic residue of mo- narchical finance. In the modern era, imperialists gratify their private interests. From the national perspective, their imperialistic wars are objectless.

Schumpeter's theme now emerges. Capitalism

and democracy are forces for peace. Indeed, they are antithetical to imperialism. For Schumpeter, the further development of capitalism and democ- racy means that imperialism will inevitably disap- pear. He maintains that capitalism produces an unwarlike disposition; its populace is "democra- tized, individualized, rationalized" (Schumpeter, 1955, p. 68). The people's energies are daily ab- sorbed in production. The disciplines of industry and the market train people in "economic rational- ism"; the instability of industrial life necessitates calculation. Capitalism also "individualizes"; "sub- jective opportunities" replace the "immutable fac- tors" of traditional, hierarchical society. Rational individuals demand democratic governance.

Democratic capitalism leads to peace. As evi- dence, Schumpeter claims that throughout the capitalist world an opposition has arisen to "war, expansion, cabinet diplomacy"; that contemporary capitalism is associated with peace parties; and that the industrial worker of capitalism is "vigorously anti-imperialist." In addition, he points out that the capitalist world has developed means of pre- venting war, such as the Hague Court and that the least feudal, most capitalist society—the United States—has demonstrated the least imperialistic tendencies (Schumpeter, 1955, pp. 95-96). An ex- ample of the lack of imperialistic tendencies in the U.S., Schumpeter thought, was our leaving over half of Mexico unconquered in the war of 1846-48.

Schumpeter's explanation for liberal pacifism is quite simple: Only war profiteers and military aristocrats gain from wars. No democracy would pursue a minority interest and tolerate the high costs of imperialism. When free trade prevails, "no class" gains from forcible expansion because

foreign raw materials and food stuffs are as accessi- ble to each nation as though they were in its own territory. Where the cultural backwardness of a re- gion makes normal economic intercourse depen- dent on colonization it does not matter, assuming free trade, which of the "civilized" nations under- takes the task of colonization. (Schumpeter, 1955, pp. 75-76)

Schumpeter's arguments are difficult to evaluate. In partial tests of quasi-Schumpeterian proposi-

tions, Michael Haas (1974, pp. 464-65) discovered a cluster that associates democracy, development, and sustained modernization with peaceful condi- tions. However, M. Small and J. D. Singer (1976) have discovered that there is no clearly negative correlation between democracy and war in the period 1816-1965—the period that would be cen- tral to Schumpeter's argument (see also Wilken- feld, 1968, Wright, 1942, p. 841).

* * * A recent study by R. J. Rummel (1983) of "libertarianism" and international violence is the closest test Schumpeterian pacifism has re- ceived. "Free" states (those enjoying political and economic freedom) were shown to have consider- ably less conflict at or above the level of economic sanctions than "nonfree" states. The free states, the pardy free states (including the democratic social- ist countries such as Sweden), and the nonfree states accounted for 24%, 26%, and 61%, respec- tively, of the international violence during the pe- riod examined.

These effects are impressive but not conclusive for the Schumpeterian thesis. The data are limited, in this test, to the period 1976 to 1980. It includes, for example, the Russo-Afghan War, the Viet- namese invasion of Cambodia, China's invasion of Vietnam, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda but just misses the U.S., quasi-covert intervention in Angola (1975) and our not so covert war against Nicaragua (1981—). More importantly, it excludes the cold war period, with its numerous interven- tions, and the long history of colonial wars (the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Mexi- can Intervention, etc.) that marked the history of liberal, including democratic capitalist, states (Doyle, 1983b; Chan, 1984; Weede, 1984).

The discrepancy between the warlike history of liberal states and Schumpeter's pacifistic expecta- tions highlights three extreme assumptions, First, his "materialistic monism" leaves little room for noneconomic objectives, whether espoused by states or individuals. Neither glory, nor prestige, nor ideological justification, nor the pure power of ruling shapes policy. These nonmaterial goals leave litde room for positive-sum gains, such as the comparative advantages of trade, Second, and re-

latedly, the same is true for his states. The political life of individuals seems to have been homoge- nized at the same time as the individuals were "rationalized, individualized, and democratized." Citizens—capitalists and workers, rural and ur- ban—seek material welfare. Schumpeter seems to presume that ruling makes no difference. He also presumes that no one is prepared to take those measures (such as stirring up foreign quarrels to preserve a domestic ruling coalition) that enhance one's political power, despite deterimental effects on mass welfare. Third, like domestic politics, world politics are homogenized. Materially monis- tic and democratically capitalist, all states evolve toward free trade and liberty together. Countries differently constituted seem to disappear from Schumpeter's analysis. "Civilized" nations govern "culturally backward" regions. These assump- tions are not shared by Machiavelli's theory of liberalism.

Liberal Imperialism

Machiavelli argues, not only that republics are not pacifistic, but that they are the best form of state for imperial expansion. Establishing a republic fit for imperial expansion is, moreover, the best way to guarantee the survival of a state.

Machiavelli's republic is a classical mixed re- public. It is not a democracy—which he thought would quickly degenerate into a tyranny—but is characterized by social equality, popular liberty, and political participation (Machiavelli, 1950, bk. 1, chap. 2, p. 112; see also Hulking, 1983, chap, 2; Mansfield, 1970; Pocock, 1975, pp. 198-99; Skin- ner, 1981, chap. 3). The consuls serve as "kings," the senate as an aristocracy managing the state, and the people in the assembly as the source of strength.

Liberty results from "disunion"—the competi- tion and necessity for compromise required by the division of powers among senate, consuls, and tri- bunes (the last representing the common people). Liberty also results from the popular veto. The powerful few threaten the rest with tyranny, Machiavelli says, because they seek to dominate.

The mass demands not to be dominated, and their veto thus preserves the liberties of the state (Machiavelli, 1950, bk. 1, chap. 5, p. 122). How- ever, since the people and the rulers have different social characters, the people need to be "managed" by the few to avoid having their recklessness over- turn or their fecklessness undermine the ability of the state to expand (Machiavelli, 1950, bk, 1, chap. 53, pp. 249-50). Thus the senate and the consuls plan expansion, consult oracles, and employ reli- gion to manage the resources that the energy of the people supplies.

Strength, and then imperial expansion, results from the way liberty encourages increased popula- tion and property, which grow when the citizens know their lives and goods are secure from arbi- trary seizure. Free citizens equip large armies and provide soldiers who fight for public glory and the common good because these are, in fact, their own (Machiavelli, 1950, bk. 2, chap. 2, pp. 287-90). If you seek the honor of having your state expand, Machiavelli advises, you should organize it as a free and popular republic like Rome, rather than as an aristocratic republic like Sparta or Venice. Expan- sion thus calls for a free republic.

"Necessity"—political survival—calls for ex- pansion. If a stable aristocratic republic is forced by foreign conflict "to extend her territory, in such a case we shall see her foundations give way and herself quickly brought to ruin"; if, on the other hand, domestic security prevails, "the continued tranquility would enervate her, or provoke internal disensions, which together, or either of them sepa- rately, will apt to prove her rum" (Machiavelli, 1950, bk. 1, chap. 6, p. 129). Machiavelli therefore believes it is necessary to take the constitution of Rome, rather than that of Sparta or Venice, as our model.

Hence, this belief leads to liberal imperialism. We are lovers of glory, Machiavelli announces. We seek to rule or, at least, to avoid being oppressed. In either case, we want more for ourselves and our states than just material welfare (materialistic monism). Because other states with similar aims thereby threaten us, we prepare ourselves for ex- pansion, Because our fellow citizens threaten us if

we do not allow them either to satisfy their ambi- tion or to release their political energies through imperial expansion, we expand.

There is considerable historical evidence for liberal imperialism. Machiavelli's (Polybius's) Rome and Thucydides' Athens both were imperial republics in the Machiavellian sense (Thucydides, 1954, bk. 6). The historical record of numer- ous U.S. interventions in the postwar period sup- ports Machiavelli's argument (* * * Barnet, 1968, chap. 11), but the current record of liberal pacifism, weak as it is, calls some of his insights into question. To the extent that the modern pop- ulace actually controls (and thus unbalances) the mixed republic, its diffidence may outweigh elite ("senatorial") aggressiveness.

We can conclude either that (1) liberal paci- fism has at least taken over with the further devel- opment of capitalist democracy, as Schumpeter predicted it would or that (2) the mixed record of liberalism—pacifism and imperialism—indicates that some liberal states are Schumpeterian democ- racies while others are Machiavellian republics. Before we accept either conclusion, however, we must consider a third apparent regularity of mod- ern world politics.

Liberal Internationalism

Modern liberalism carries with it two legacies. They do not affect liberal states separately, accord- ing to whether they are pacifistic or imperialistic, but simultaneously.

The first of these legacies is the pacification of foreign relations among liberal states. * * *

Beginning in the eighteenth century and slowly growing since then, a zone of peace, which Kant called the "pacific federation" or "pacific union," has begun to be established among liberal societies. More than 40 liberal states currently make up the union. Most are in Europe and North America, but they can be found on every continent, as Ap- pendix 1 indicates.

Here the predictions of liberal pacifists (and President Reagan) are borne out: liberal states do exercise peaceful restraint, and a separate peace ex-

ists among them. This separate peace provides a solid foundation for the United States' crucial alliances with the liberal powers, e.g., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our Japanese al- liance. This foundation appears to be impervious to the quarrels with our allies that bedeviled the Carter and Reagan administrations. It also offers the promise of a continuing peace among liberal states, and as the number of Liberal states increases, it announces the possibility of global peace this side of the grave or world conquest.

Of course, the probability of the outbreak of war in any given year between any two given states is low. The occurrence of a war between any two adjacent states, considered over a long period of time, would be more probable. The apparent ab- sence of war between liberal states, whether adja- cent or not, for almost 200 years thus may have significance. Similar claims cannot be made for feudal, fascist, communist, authoritarian, or totali- tarian forms of rule (Doyle, 1983a, pp. 222), nor for pluralistic or merely similar societies. More sig- nificant perhaps is that when states are forced to decide on which side of an impending world war they will fight, liberal states all wind up on the same side despite the complexity of the paths that take them there. These characteristics do not prove that the peace among liberals is statistically signifi- cant nor that liberalism is the sole valid explana- tion for the peace. They do suggest that we consider the possibility that liberals have indeed established a separate peace—but only among themselves.

Liberalism also carries with it a second legacy: international "imprudence" (Hume, 1963, pp. 346-47), Peaceful restraint only seems to work in liberals' relations with other liberals. Liberal states have fought numerous wars with nonliberal states. (For a list of international wars since 1816 see Ap- pendix 2,)

Many of these wars have been defensive and thus prudent by necessity. Liberal states have been attacked and threatened by nonliberal states that do not exercise any special restraint in their deal- ings with the liberal states. Authoritarian rulers both stimulate and respond to an international po-

litical environment in which conflicts of prestige, interest, and pure fear of what other states might do all lead states toward war. War and conquest have thus characterized the careers of many au- thoritarian rulers and ruling parties, from Louis XIV and Napoleon to Mussolini's fascists, Hider's Nazis, and Stalin's communists.

Yet we cannot simply blame warfare on the au- thoritarians or totalitarians, as many of our more enthusiastic politicians would have us do. Most wars arise out of calculations and miscalculations of interest, misunderstandings, and mutual suspi- cions, such as those that characterized the origins of World War I. However, aggression by the liberal state has also characterized a large number of wars. Both France and Britain fought expansionist colonial wars throughout the nineteenth century. The United States fought a similar war with Mex- ico from 1846 to 1848, waged a war of annihilation against the American Indians, and intervened mili- tarily against sovereign states many times before and after World War II. Liberal states invade weak nonliberal states and display striking distrust in dealings with powerful nonliberal states (Doyle, 1983b).

Neither realist (statist) nor Marxist theory ac- counts well for these two legacies. While they can account for aspects of certain periods of interna- tional stability ( * * * Russett, 1985), neither the logic of the balance of power nor the logic of inter- national hegemony explains the separate peace maintained for more than 150 years among states sharing one particular form of governance—liberal principles and institutions. Balance-of-power the- ory expects—indeed is premised upon—flexible arrangements of geostrategic rivalry that include preventive war, Hegemonies wax and wane, but the liberal peace holds. Marxist "ultra-imperialists" expect a form of peaceful rivalry among capitalists, but only liberal capitalists maintain peace. Lenin- ists expect liberal capitalists to be aggressive toward nonliberal states, but they also (and especially) ex- pect them to be imperialistic toward fellow liberal capitalists.

Kant's theory of liberal internationalism helps us understand these two legacies. * * * Perpetual

Peace, written in 1795 (Kant, 1970, pp. 93-130), helps us understand the interactive nature of inter- national relations. Kant tries to teach us method- ologically that we can study neither the systemic relations of states nor the varieties of state behavior in isolation from each other. Substantively, he an- ticipates for us the ever-widening pacification of a liberal pacific union, explains this pacification, and at the same time suggests why liberal states are not pacific in their relations with nonliberal states. Kant argues that perpetual peace will be guaran- teed by the ever-widening acceptance of three "de- finitive articles" of peace. When all nations have accepted the definitive articles in a metaphorical "treaty" of perpetual peace he asks them to sign, perpetual peace will have been established.

The First Definitive Article requires the civil constitution of the state to be republican. By re- publican Kant means a political society that has solved the problem of combining moral auton- omy, individualism, and social order. A private property and market-oriented economy partially addressed that dilemma in the private sphere. The public, or political, sphere was more troubling. His answer was a republic that preserved juridical free- dom—the legal equality of citizens as subjects—on the basis of a representative government with a separation of powers. Juridical freedom is pre- served because the morally autonomous individual is by means of representation a self-legislator making laws that apply to all citizens equally, in- cluding himself or herself. Tyranny is avoided be- cause the individual is subject to laws he or she does not also administer (Kant, PP [Perpetual Peace], pp. 99-102 * * *).

Liberal republics will progressively establish peace among themselves by means of the pacific federation, or union (foedus pacificum), described in Kant's Second Definitive Article. The pacific union will establish peace within a federation of free states and securely maintain the rights of each state. The world will not have achieved the "per- petual peace" that provides the ultimate guarantor of republican freedom until "a late stage and after many unsuccessful attempts" (Kant, UH [The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Pur-

pose], p. 47). At that time, all nations will have learned the lessons of peace through right concep- tions of the appropriate constitution, great and sad experience, and good will. Only then will individu- als enjoy perfect republican rights or the full guarantee of a global and just peace. In the mean- time, the "pacific federation" of liberal republics— "an enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war"—brings within it more and more republics—despite republican collapses, backsliding, and disastrous wars—creating an ever-expanding separate peace (Kant, PP, p. 105). Kant emphasizes that

it can be shown that this idea of federalism, extend- ing gradually to encompass all states and thus lead- ing to perpetual peace, is practicable and has objective reality. For if by good fortune one power- ful and enlightened nation can form a republic (which is by nature inclined to seek peace), this will provide a focal point for federal association among other states. These will join up with the first one, thus securing the freedom of each state in accor- dance with the idea of international right, and the whole will gradually spread further and further by a series of alliances of this kind. (Kant, PP, p. 104)

The pacific union is not a single peace treaty ending one war, a world state, nor a state of na- tions. Kant finds the first insufficient. The second and third are impossible or potentially tyrannical. National sovereignty precludes reliable subser- vience to a state of nations; a world state destroys the civic freedom on which the development of human capacities rests (Kant, UH, p. 50). Al- though Kant obliquely refers to various classical interstate confederations and modern diplomatic congresses, he develops no systematic organiza- tional embodiment of this treaty and presumably does not find institutionalization necessary (Riley, 1983, chap. 5; Schwarz, 1962, p. 77). He appears to have in mind a mutual nonaggression pact, per- haps a collective security agreement, and the cos- mopolitan law set forth in the Third Definitive Article.

The Third Definitive Article establishes a cos- mopolitan law to operate in conjunction with the pacific union. The cosmopolitan law "shall be lim-

ited to conditions of universal hospitality." In this Kant calls for the recognition of the "right of a for- eigner not to be treated with hostility when he ar- rives on someone else's territory." This "does not extend beyond those conditions which make it possible for them [foreigners] to attempt to enter into relations [commerce] with the native inhabi- tants" (Kant, PP, p. 106). Hospitality does not re- quire extending to foreigners either the right to citizenship or the right to settlement, unless the foreign visitors would perish if they were expelled. Foreign conquest and plunder also find no justifi- cation under this right. Hospitality does appear to include the right of access and the obligation of maintaining the opportunity for citizens to ex- change goods and ideas without imposing the obligation to trade (a voluntary act in all cases un- der liberal constitutions).

Perpetual peace, for Kant, is an epistemology, a condition for ethical action, and, most impor- tantly, an explanation of how the "mechanical process of nature visibly exhibits the purposive plan of producing concord among men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord" (Kant, PP, p. 108; UH, pp. 44-45). Un- derstanding history requires an epistemological foundation, for without a teleology, such as the promise of perpetual peace, the complexity of history would overwhelm human understanding (Kant, UH, pp. 51-53). Perpetual peace, however, is not merely a heuristic device with which to in- terpret history. It is guaranteed, Kant explains in the "First Addition" to Perpetual Peace ("On the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace"), to result from men fulfilling their ethical duty or, failing that, from a hidden plan. Peace is an ethical duty be- cause it is only under conditions of peace that all men can treat each other as ends, rather than means to an end (Kant, UH, p. 50; Murphy, 1970, chap. 3). * * *

In the end, however, our guarantee of perpet- ual peace does not rest on ethical conduct. * * * The guarantee thus rests, Kant argues, not on the probable behavior of moral angels, but on that of "devils, so long as they possess understanding" (PP, p. 112). In explaining the sources of each of

the three definitive articles of the perpetual peace, Kant then tells us how we (as free and intelligent devils) could be motivated by fear, force, and cal- culated advantage to undertake a course of action whose outcome we could reasonably anticipate to be perpetual peace. Yet while it is possible to con- ceive of the Kantian road to peace in these terms, Kant himself recognizes and argues that social evo- lution also makes the conditions of moral behavior less onerous and hence more likely (CF [The Contest of Faculties], pp. 187-89; Kelly, 1969, pp. 106-13). In tracing the effects of both political and moral development, he builds an account of why liberal states do maintain peace among them- selves and of how it will (by implication, has) come about that the pacific union will expand. He also explains how these republics would engage in wars with nonrepublics and therefore suffer the "sad ex- perience" of wars that an ethical policy might have avoided.

* * *

Kant shows how republics, once established, lead to peaceful relations. He argues that once the ag- gressive interests of absolutist monarchies are tamed and the habit of respect for individual rights engrained by republican government, wars would appear as the disaster to the people's welfare that he and the other liberals thought them to be. The fundamental reason is this:

If, as is inevitability the case under this constitution, the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war should be declared, it is very nat- ural that they will have a great hesitation in embark- ing on so dangerous an enterprise. For this would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing the fighting themselves, supply- ing the costs of the war from their own resources, painfully making good the ensuing devastation, and, as the crowning evil, having to take upon themselves a burden of debts which will embitter peace itself and which can never be paid off on account of the constant threat of new wars. But under a constitu- tion where the subject is not a citizen, and which is therefore not republican, it is the simplest thing in the world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow citizen, but the owner of the state, and war

will not force him to make the slightest sacrifice so far as his banquets, hunts, pleasure palaces and court festivals are concerned. He can thus decide on war, without any significant reason, as a kind of amusement, and unconcernedly leave it to the diplomatic corps (who are always ready for such proposes) to justify the war for the sake of propriety. (Kant, PP, p. 100)

Yet these domestic republican restraints do not end war. If they did, liberal states would not be warlike, which is far from the case. They do intro- duce republican caution—Kant's "hesitation"—in place of monarchical caprice. Liberal wars are only fought for popular, liberal purposes. The historical liberal legacy is laden with popular wars fought to promote freedom, to protect private property, or to support liberal allies against nonliberal enemies. Kant's position is ambiguous. He regards these wars as unjust and warns liberals of their suscepti- bility to them (Kant, PP, p. 106). At the same time, Kant argues that each nation "can and ought to" demand that its neighboring nations enter into the pacific union of liberal states (PP, p. 102). * * *

* * *

* * * As republics emerge (the first source) and as culture progresses, an understanding of the legiti- mate rights of all citizens and of all republics comes into play; and this, now that caution charac- terizes policy, sets up the moral foundations for the liberal peace. Correspondingly, international law highlights the importance of Kantian publicity. Domestically, publicity helps ensure that the offi- cials of republics act according to the principles they profess to hold just and according to the interests of the electors they claim to represent. Internationally, free speech and the effective com- munication of accurate conceptions of the political life of foreign peoples is essential to establishing and preserving the understanding on which the guarantee of respect depends. Domestically just re- publics, which rest on consent, then presume for- eign republics also to be consensual, just, and therefore deserving of accommodation. * * * Be- cause nonliberal governments are in a state of aggression with their own people, their foreign

relations become for liberal governments deeply suspect. In short, fellow liberals benefit from a presumption of amity; nonliberals suffer from a presumption of enmity. Both presumptions may be accurate; each, however, may also be self- confirming.

Lastly, cosmopolitan law adds material incen- tives to moral commitments. The cosmopolitan right to hospitality permits the "spirit of com- merce" sooner or later to take hold of every nation, thus impelling states to promote peace and to try to avert war. Liberal economic theory holds that these cosmopolitan ties derive from a cooperative international division of labor and free trade ac- cording to comparative advantage. Each economy is said to be better off than it would have been un- der autarky; each thus acquires an incentive to avoid policies that would lead the other to break these economic ties. Because keeping open markets rests upon the assumption that the next set of transactions will also be determined by prices rather than coercion, a sense of mutual security is vital to avoid security-motivated searches for eco- nomic autarky. Thus, avoiding a challenge to an- other liberal state's security or even enhancing each other's security by means of alliance naturally follows economic interdependence.

A further cosmopolitan source of liberal peace is the international market's removal of difficult decisions of production and distribution from the direct sphere of state policy. A foreign state thus does not appear directly responsible for these out- comes, and states can stand aside from, and to some degree above, these contentious market rival- ries and be ready to step in to resolve crises. The interdependence of commerce and the interna- tional contacts of state officials help create cross- cutting transnational ties that serve as lobbies for mutual accommodation. According to modern lib- eral scholars, international financiers and transna- tional and transgovernmental organizations create interests in favor of accommodation. Moreover, their variety has ensured that no single conflict sours an entire relationship by setting off a spiral of reciprocated retaliation * * *. Conversely, a sense of suspicion, such as that characterizing rela-

tions between liberal and nonliberal governments, can lead to restrictions on the range of contacts be- tween societies, and this can increase the prospect that a single conflict will determine an entire relationship.

No single constitutional, international, or cos- mopolitan source is alone sufficient, but together (and only together) they plausibly connect the characteristics of liberal polities and economies with sustained liberal peace. Alliances founded on mutual strategic interest among liberal and nonlib- eral states have been broken; economic ties be- tween liberal and nonliberal states have proven fragile; but the political bonds of liberal rights and interests have proven a remarkably firm founda- tion for mutual nonaggression. A separate peace exists among liberal states.

In their relations with nonliberal states, how- ever, liberal states have not escaped from the inse- curity caused by anarchy in the world political system considered as a whole. Moreover, the very constitutional restraint, international respect for individual rights, and shared commercial inter- ests that establish grounds for peace among lib- eral states establish grounds for additional conflict in relations between liberal and nonliberal soci- eties.

Conclusion

Kant's liberal internationalism, Machiavelli's lib- eral imperialism, and Schumpeter's liberal paci- fism rest on fundamentally different views of the nature of the human being, the state, and interna- tional relations. Schumpeter's humans are ratio- nalized, individualized, and democratized. They are also homogenized, pursuing material interests "monistically." Because their material interests lie in peaceful trade, they and the democratic state that these fellow citizens control are pacifistic. Machiavelli's citizens are splendidly diverse in their goals but fundamentally unequal in them as well, seeking to rule or fearing being dominated. Ex- tending the rule of the dominant elite or avoiding the political collapse of their state, each calls for imperial expansion.

Kant's citizens, too, are diverse in their goals and individualized and rationalized, but most im- portantly, they are capable of appreciating the moral equality of all individuals and of treating other individuals as ends rather than as means. The Kantian state thus is governed publicly accord- ing to law, as a republic. Kant's is the state that solves the problem of governing individualized equals, whether they are the "rational devils" he says we often find ourselves to be or the ethical agents we can and should become. Republics tell us that

in order to organize a group of rational beings who together require universal laws for their survival, but of whom each separate individual is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, the constitution must be so designed so that, although the citizens are op- posed to one another in their private attitudes, these opposing views may inhibit one another in such a way that the public conduct of the citizens will be the same as if they did not have such evil attitudes. (Kant, PP.p. 113)

Unlike Machiavelli's republics, Kant's republics are capable of achieving peace among themselves be- cause they exercise democratic caution and are capable of appreciating the international rights of foreign republics. These international rights of republics derive from the representation of foreign individuals, who are our moral equals. Unlike Schumpeter's capitalist democracies, Kant's re- publics—including our own—remain in a state of war with nonrepublics. Liberal republics see them- selves as threatened by aggression from nonre- publics that are not constrained by representation. Even though wars often cost more than the eco- nomic return they generate, liberal republics also are prepared to protect and promote—sometimes forcibly—democracy, private property, and the rights of individuals overseas against nonrepublics, which, because they do not authentically represent the rights of individuals, have no rights to nonin- terference. These wars may liberate oppressed indi- viduals overseas; they also can generate enormous suffering.

* * *

Perpetual peace, Kant says, is the end point of the hard journey his republics will take. The promise of perpetual peace, the violent lessons of war, and the experience of a partial peace are proof

of the need for and the possibility of world peace. They are also the grounds for moral citizens and statesmen to assume the duty of striving for peace.

Period

Appendix 1. Liberal Regimes and the Pacific Union, 1700-1982

Period Period

18th Century Swiss Cantonsa

French Republic, 1790-1795 United States,a 1776-

Total = 3

1800-1850 Swiss Confederation United States France, 1830-1849 Belgium, 1830- Great Britain, 1832— Netherlands, 1848- Piedmont, 1848- Denmark, 1849-

Total = 8

1850-1900 Switzerland United States Belgium Great Britain Netherlands Piedmont, -1861 Italy, 1861- Denmark, -1866 Sweden,1864- Greece, 1864- Canada, 1867- France, 1871- Argentina, 1880— Chile, 1891-

Total = 13

1900-1945 Switzerland United States Great Britain Sweden Canada Greece, -1911; 1928-1936

1900-1945 (cont.) Italy, -1922 Belgium, -1940 Netherlands, -1940 Argentina, -1943 France,-1940 Chile, -1924; 1932- Australia, 1901 Norway, 1905-1940 New Zealand, 1907- Colombia, 1910-1949 Denmark, 1914-1940 Poland, 1917-1935 Latvia, 1922-1934 Germany, 1918-1932 Austria, 1918-1934 Estonia, 1919-1934 Finland, 1919- Uruguay, 1919- Costa Rica, 1919- Czechosovakia, 1920-1939 Ireland, 1920- Mexico, 1928- Lebanon, 1944-

Total = 29

1945-b

Switzerland United States Great Britain Sweden Canada Australia New Zealand Finland Ireland Mexico Uruguay, -1973 Chile, -1973 Lebanon, -1975 Costa Rica, -1948; 1953-

1945 (cont.) Iceland, 1944- France, 1945- Denmark, 1945 Norway, 1945 Austria, 1945- Brazil, 1945-1954; 1955-

1964 Belgium, 1946- Luxembourg, 1946- Netherlands, 1946- Italy, 1946- Philippines, 1946-1972 India, 1947-1975; 1977- Sri Lanka, 1948-1961; 1963-1971;

1978- Ecuador, 1948-1963; 1979- Israel, 1949- West Germany, 1949— Greece, 1950-1967; 1975- Peru, 1950-1962; 1963-1968;

1980- El Salvador, 1950-1961 Turkey, 1950-1960; 1966-1971 Japan, 1951- Bolivia, 1956-1969; 1982- Colombia, 1958- Venezuela, 1959- Nigeria, 1961-1964; 1979-1984 Jamaica, 1962- Trinidad and Tobago, 1962- Senegal, 1963- Malaysia, 1963- Botswana, 1966— Singapore, 1965- Portugal, 1976- Spain, 1978- Dominican Republic, 1978— Honduras, 1981- Papua New Guinea, 1982-

Total = 50

Note: I have drawn up this approximate list of "Liberal Regimes" according to the four institutions Kant described as essen- tial: market and private property economies; politics that are externally sovereign; citizens who possess juridical rights; and "republican" (whether republican or parliamentary monarchy), representative government. This latter includes the require- ment that the legislative branch have an effective role in public policy and be formally and competitively (either inter- or intra-party) elected. Furthermore, I have taken into account whether male suffrage is wide (i.e., 30%) or, as Kant ( M M [The Metaphysics of Morals), p. 139) would have had it, open by "achievement" to inhabitants of the national or metropolitan ter- ritory (e.g., to poll-tax payers or householders). This list of liberal regimes is thus more inclusive than a list of democratic regimes, or polyarchies (Powell, 1982, p. 5). Other conditions taken into account here are that female suffrage is granted within a generation of its being demanded by an extensive female suffrage movement and that representative government is internally sovereign (e.g., including, and especially over military and foreign affairs) as well as stable (in existence for at least three years). Sources for these data are Banks and Overstreet (1983), Gastil (1985), The Europa Yearbook, 1985 (1985), Langer (1968), U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1980), and U.S. Department of State (1981). Finally, these lists exclude an- cient and medieval "republics," since none appears to tit Kant's commitment to liberal individualism (Holmes, 1979).

There are domestic variations within these liberal regimes: Switzerland was liberal only in certain cantons; the United States was liberal only north of the Mason-Dixon line until 1865, when it became liberal throughout. ''Selected list, excludes liberal regimes with populations less than one million. These include all states categorized as "free" by Gastil and those "partly free" (four-fifths or more free) states with a more pronounced capitalist orientation.

Appendix 2. International Wars Listed Chronologically

British-Maharattan (1817-1818) Greek (1821-1828) Franco-Spanish (1823) First Anglo-Burmese (1823-1826) Javanese (1825-1830) Russo-Persian (1826-1828) Russo-Turkish (1828-1829) First Polish (1831) First Syrian (1831-1832) Texas (1835-1836) First British-Afghan (1838-1842) Second Syrian (1839-1940) Franco-Algerian (1839-1847) Peruvian-Bolivian (1841) First British-Sikh (1845-1846) Mexican-American (1846-1848) Austro-Sardinian (1848-1849) First Schleswig-Holstein (1848-1849) Hungarian (1848-1849) Second British-Sikh (1848-1849) Roman Republic (1849) La Plata (1851-1852) First Turco-Montenegran (1852-1853) Crimean (1853-1856) Anglo-Persian (1856-1857) Sepoy (1857-1859) Second Turco-Montenegran (1858-1859) Italian Unification (1859) Spanish-Moroccan (1859-1860) Italo-Rornan (1860) Italo-Sicilian (1860-1861)

Franco-Mexican (1862-1867) Ecuadorian-Colombian (1863) Second Polish (1863-1864) Spanish-Santo Dominican (1863-1865) Second Schleswig-Holstein (1864) Lopez (1864-1870) Spanish-Chilean (1865-1866) Seven Weeks (1866) Ten Years (1868-1878) Franco-Prussian (1870-1871) Dutch-Achinese (1873-1878) Balkan (1875-1877) Russo-Turkish (1877-1878) Bosnian (1878) Second British-Afghan (1878-1880) Pacific (1879-1883) British-Zulu (1879) Franco-Indochinese (1882-1884) Mahdist (1882-1885) Sino-French (1884-1885) Central American (1885) Serbo-Bulgarian (1885) Sino-Japanese (1894-1895) Franco-Madagascan (1894-1895) Cuban (1895-1898) Italo-Ethiopian (1895-1896) First Philippine (1896-1898) Greco-Turkish (1897) Spanish-American (1898) Second Philippine (1899-1902) Boer(1899-1902)

Boxer Rebellion (1900) Ilinden (1903) Russo-Japanese (1904-1905) Central American (1906) Central American (1907) Spanish-Moroccan (1909-1910) Italo-Turkish (1911-1912) First Balkan (1912-1913) Second Balkan (1913) W o r l d War I (1914-1918) Russian Nationalities (1917-1921) Russo-Polish (1919-1920) Hungarian-Allies (1919) Greco-Turkish (1919-1922) Riffian (1921-1926) Druze (1925-1927) Sino-Soviet (1929) Manchurian (1931-1933) Chaco (1932-1935) Italo-Ethiopian (1935-1936) Sino-Japanese (1937-1941) Changkufeng(1938) Nomohan (1939) Wor ld War II (1939-1945) Russo-Finnish (1939-1940) Franco-Thai (1940-1941) Indonesian (1945-1946) Indochinese (1945-1954)

Madagascan (1947-1948) First Kashmir (1947-1949) Palestine (1948-1949) Hyderabad (1948) Korean (1950-1953) Algerian (1954-1962) Russo-Hungarian (1956) Sinai (1956) Tibetan (1956-1959) Sino-Indian (1962) Vietnamese (1965-1975) Second Kashmir (1965) Six Day (1967) Israeli-Egyptian (1969-1970) Football (1969) Bangladesh (1971) Philippine-MNLF (1972-) Yom Kippur (1973) Turco-Cypriot (1974) Ethiopian-Eritrean (1974-) Vietnamese-Cambodian (1975-) Timor (1975-) Saharan (1975-) Ogaden(1976-) Ugandan-Tanzanian (1978-1979) Sino-Vietnamese (1979) Russo-Afghan(1979-) Iran-Iraqi (1980-)

Note: This table is taken from Melvin Small and J. David Singer (1982, pp. 79-80). This is a partial list of international wars fought between 1816 and 1980. In Appendices A and B, Small and Singer identify a total of 575 wars during this period, but approximately 159 of them appear to be largely domestic, or civil wars.

This list excludes covert interventions, some of which have been directed by liberal regimes against other liberal regimes— for example, the United States' effort to destabilize the Chilean election and Allende's government. Nonetheless, it is signifi- cant that such interventions are not pursued publicly as acknowledged policy. The covert destabilization campaign against Chile is recounted by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-73).

Following the argument of this article, this list also excludes civil wars. Civil wars differ from international wars, not in the ferocity of combat, but in the issues that engender them. Two nations that could abide one another as independent neighbors separated by a border might well be the fiercest of enemies if forced to live together in one state, joindy deciding how to raise and spend taxes, choose leaders, and legislate fundamental questions of value. Notwithstanding these differences, no civil wars that I recall upset the argument of liberal pacification.

85

A N D R E G U N D E R F R A N K

The Development of Underdevelopment

e cannot hope to formulate adequate development theory and policy for the majority of the world's population who

suffer from underdevelopment without first learn- ing how their past economic and social history gave rise to their present underdevelopment. Yet most historians study only the developed metro- politan countries and pay scant attention to the colonial and underdeveloped lands. For this reason most of our theoretical categories and guides to development policy have been distilled exclusively from the historical experience of the European and North American advanced capitalist nations.

Since the historical experience of the colonial and underdeveloped countries has demonstrably been quite different, available theory therefore fails to reflect the past of the underdeveloped part of the world entirely, and reflects the past of the world as a whole only in part. More important, our ignorance of the underdeveloped countries' history leads us to assume that their past and indeed their present resembles earlier stages of the history of the now developed countries. This ignorance and this assumption lead us into serious misconcep- tions about contemporary underdevelopment and development. Further, most studies of develop- ment and underdevelopment fail to take account of the economic and other relations between the metropolis and its economic colonies throughout

From Monthly Review (September 1966): 17-31.

the history of the world-wide expansion and devel- opment of the mercantilist and capitalist system. Consequently, most of our theory fails to explain the structure and development of the capitalist sys- tem as a whole and to account for its simultaneous generation of underdevelopment in some of its parts and of economic development in others.

It is generally held that economic development occurs in a succession of capitalist stages and that today's underdeveloped countries are still in a stage, sometimes depicted as an original stage of history, through which the now developed coun- tries passed long ago. Yet even a modest acquain- tance with history shows that underdevelopment is not original or traditional and that neither the past nor the present of the underdeveloped countries resembles in any important respect the past of the now developed countries. The now developed countries were never underdeveloped, though they may have been undeveloped. It is also widely be- lieved that the contemporary underdevelopment of a country can be understood as the product of reflection solely of its own economic, political, so- cial, and cultural characteristics or structure. Yet historical research demonstrates that contempo- rary underdevelopment is in large part the histori- cal product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdevel- oped and the now developed metropolitan coun- tries. Furthermore, these relations are an essential part of the structure and development of the capi-

talist system on a world scale as a whole. A related and also largely erroneous view is that the develop- ment of these underdeveloped countries and, within them of their most underdeveloped domes- tic areas, must and will be generated or stimulated by diffusing capital, institutions, values, etc., to them from the international and national capitalist metropoles. Historical perspective based on the underdeveloped countries' past experience sug gests that on the contrary in the underdeveloped countries economic development can now occur only independently of most of these relations of diffusion.

Evident inequalities of income and differences in culture have led many observers to see "dual" societies and economies in the underdeveloped countries. Each of the two parts is supposed to have a history of its own, a structure, and a con- temporary dynamic largely independent of the other. Supposedly, ordy one part of the economy and society has been importantly affected by inti- mate economic relations with the "outside" capi- talist world; and that part, it is held, became modern, capitalist, and relatively developed pre- cisely because of this contact. The other part is widely regarded as variously isolated, subsistence- based, feudal, or precapitalist, and therefore more underdeveloped.

I believe on die contrary that the entire "dual society" thesis is false and that the policy recom- mendations to which it leads will, if acted upon, serve only to intensify and perpetuate the very con- ditions of underdevelopment they are supposedly designed to remedy.

A mounting body of evidence suggests, and I am confident that future historical research will confirm, that the expansion of the capitalist system over the past centuries effectively and entirely pen- etrated even the apparently most isolated sectors of the underdeveloped world. Therefore, the eco- nomic, political, social, and cultural institutions and relations we now observe there are the prod- ucts of the historical development of the capitalist system no less than are the seemingly more mod- ern or capitalist features of the national metropoles of these underdeveloped countries. Analogously to

the relations between development and under- development on the international level, the con- temporary underdeveloped institutions of the so-called backward or feudal domestic areas of an underdeveloped country are no less the product of the single historical process of capitalist develop- ment than are the so-called capitalist institutions of the supposedly more progressive areas. In this paper I should like to sketch the kinds of evidence which support this thesis and at the same time in- dicate lines along which further study and research could fruitfully proceed.

II

The Secretary General of the Latin American Cen- ter for Research in the Social Sciences writes in that Center's journal: "The privileged position of the city has its origin in the colonial period. It was founded by the Conqueror to serve the same ends that it still serves today; to incorporate the indige- nous population into die economy brought and developed by that Conqueror and his descendants. The regional city was an instrument of conquest and is still today an instrument of domination."1

The Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National In- dian Institute) of Mexico confirms this observation when it notes that "the mestizo population, in fact, always lives in a city, a center of an intercultural re- gion, which acts as the metropolis of a zone of in- digenous population and which maintains with the underdeveloped communities an intimate relation which links the center with the satellite communi- ties."2 The Institute goes on to point out that "be- tween the mestizos who live in the nuclear city of the region and the Indians who live in the peasant hinterland there is in reality a closer economic and social interdependence than might at first glance appear" and that the provincial metropoles "by be- ing centers of intercourse are also centers of ex- ploitation,"3

Thus these metropolis-satellite relations are not limited to the imperial or international level but penetrate and structure the very economic, political, and social life of the Latin American colonies and countries. Just as the colonial and

national capital and its export sector become the satellite of the Iberian (and later of other) metropoles of the world economic system, this satellite immediately becomes a colonial and then a national metropolis with respect to the pro- ductive sectors and population of the interior. Furthermore, the provincial capitals, which thus are themselves satellites of the national metropo- lis—and through the latter of the world metropo- lis—are in turn provincial centers around which their own local satellites orbit. Thus, a whole chain of constellations of metropoles and satellites relates all parts of the whole system from its metro- politan center in Europe or the United States to the farthest outpost in the Latin American country- side.

When we examine this metropolis-satellite structure, we find that each of the satellites, in- cluding now-underdeveloped Spain and Portugal, serves as an instrument to suck capital or eco- nomic surplus out of its own satellites and to chan- nel part of this surplus to the world metropolis of which all are satellites. Moreover, each national and local metropolis serves to impose and main- tain the monopolistic structure and exploitative re- lationship of this system (as the Instituto Nacional Indigenista of Mexico calls it) as long as it serves the interests of the metropoles which take advan- tage of this global, national, and local structure to promote their own development and the enrich- ment of their ruling classes.

These are the principal and still surviving structural characteristics which were implanted in Latin America by the Conquest. Beyond examining the establishment of this colonial structure in its historical context, the proposed approach calls for study of the development—and underdevelop- ment—of these metropoles and satellites of Latin America throughout the following and still contin- uing historical process. In this way we can under- stand why there were and still are tendencies in the Latin American and world capitalist structure which seem to lead to the development of the me- tropolis and the underdevelopment of the satellite and why, particularly, the satellized national, re- gional, and local metropoles in Latin America find

that their economic development is at best a lim- ited or underdeveloped development.

III

That present [1966] underdevelopment of Latin America is the result of its centuries-long partici- pation in the process of world capitalist develop- ment, I believe I have shown in my case studies of the economic and social histories of Chile and Brazil.4 My study of Chilean history suggests that die Conquest not only incorporated this country fully into the expansion and development of the world mercantile and later industrial capitalist sys- tem but that it also introduced the monopolistic metropolis-satellite structure and development of capitalism into the Chilean domestic economy and society itself. This structure then penetrated and permeated all of Chile very quickly. Since that time and in the course of world and Chilean history during the epochs of colonialism, free trade, impe- rialism, and the present, Chile has become increas- ingly marked by the economic, social, and political structure of satellite underdevelopment. This de- velopment of underdevelopment continues today, both in Chile's still increasing satellization by the world metropolis and through the ever more acute polarization of Chile's domestic economy.

The history of Brazil is perhaps the clearest case of both national and regional development of underdevelopment. The expansion of the world economy since the beginning of the sixteenth century successively converted the Northeast, the Minas Gerais interior, the North, and the Center- South (Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Parana) into export economies and incorporated them into the structure and development of the world capitalist system. Each of these regions experienced what may have appeared as economic development dur- ing the period of its respective golden age. But it was a satellite development which was neither self- generating nor self-perpetuating. As the market or the productivity of the first three regions declined, foreign and domestic economic interest in them waned; and they were left to develop the underde- velopment they live today. In the fourth region, the

coffee economy experienced a similar though not yet quite as serious fate (though the development of a synthetic coffee substitute promises to deal it a mortal blow in the not too distant future). Al l of this historical evidence contradicts the generally accepted theses that Latin America suffers from a dual society or from the survival of feudal institu- tions and that these are important obstacles to its economic development.

IV

During the First World War, however, and even more during the Great Depression and the Second World War, Sao Paulo began to build up an indus- trial establishment which is the largest in Latin America today. The question arises whether this industrial development did or can break Brazil out of the cycle of satellite development and underde- velopment which has characterized its other re- gions and national history within the capitalist system so far. I believe that the answer is no. Do- mestically the evidence so far is fairly clear. The de- velopment of industry in Sao Paulo has not brought greater riches to the other regions of Brazil. Instead, it converted them into internal colonial satellites, de-capitalized them further, and consolidated or even deepened their underdevel- opment. There is little evidence to suggest that this process is likely to be reversed in the foreseeable future except insofar as the provincial poor mi- grate and become the poor of the metropolitan cities. Externally, the evidence is that although the initial development of Sao Paulo's industry was relatively autonomous it is being increasingly satel- lized by the world capitalist metropolis and its fu- ture development possibilities are increasingly restricted.5 This development, my studies lead me to believe, also appears destined to limited or un- derdeveloped development as long as it takes place in the present economic, political, and social framework.

We must conclude, in short, that underdevel- opment is not due to the survival of archaic insti- tutions and the existence of capital shortage in regions that have remained isolated from the

stream of world history. On the contrary, underde- velopment was and still is generated by the very same historical process which also generated eco- nomic development: the development of capital- ism itself. This view, I am glad to say, is gaining adherents among students of Latin America and is proving its worth in shedding new light on the problems of the area and in affording a better per- spective for the formulation of theory and policy.6

V

The same historical and structural approach can also lead to better development theory and policy by generating a series of hypotheses about develop- ment and underdevelopment such as those I am testing in my current research. The hypotheses are derived from the empirical observation and theoretical assumption that within this world- embracing metropolis-satellite structure the me- tropoles tend to develop and the satellites to underdevelop. The first hypothesis has already been mentioned above: that in contrast to the de- velopment of the world metropolis which is no one's satellite, the development of the national and other subordinate metropoles is limited by their satellite status. It is perhaps more difficult to test this hypothesis than the following ones because part of its confirmation depends on the test of the other hypotheses. Nonetheless, this hypothesis appears to be generally confirmed by the non- autonomous and unsatisfactory economic and espe- cially industrial development of Latin America's national metropoles, as documented in the studies already cited. The most important and at the same time most confirmatory examples are the metropol- itan regions of Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo whose growth only began in the nineteenth century, was therefore largely untrammelled by any colonial heritage, but was and remains a satellite develop- ment largely dependent on the outside metropolis, first of Britain and then of the United States.

A second hypothesis is that the satellites experi- ence their greatest economic development and es- pecially their most classically capitalist industrial development if and when their ties to their

metropolis are weakest. This hypothesis is almost diametrically opposed to the generally accepted thesis that development in the underdeveloped countries follows from the greatest degree of con- tact with and diffusion from the metropolitan de- veloped countries. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by two kinds of relative isolation that Latin America has experienced in the course of its history. One is the temporary isolation caused by the crises of war or depression in the world me- tropolis. Apart from minor ones, five periods of such major crises stand out and seem to confirm the hypothesis. These are: the European (and espe- cially Spanish) Depression of the seventeenth cen- tury, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, the Depression of the 1930's, and the Second World War. It is clearly established and generally recognized that the most important recent indus- trial development—especially of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, but also of other countries such as Chile—has taken place precisely during the peri- ods of the two World Wars and the intervening Depression. Thanks to the consequent loosening of trade and investment ties during these periods, the satellites initiated marked autonomous industrial- ization and growth. Historical research demon- strates that the same thing happened in Latin America during Europe's seventeenth-century de- pression. Manufacturing grew in the Latin Ameri- can countries, and several of them such as Chile became exporters of manufactured goods. The Napoleonic Wars gave rise to independence move- ments in Latin America, and these should perhaps also be interpreted as confirming the development hypothesis in part.

The other kind of isolation which tends to con- firm the second hypothesis is the geographic and economic isolation of regions which at one time were relatively weakly tied to and poorly integrated into the mercantilist and capitalist system. My pre- liminary research suggests that in Latin America it was these regions which initiated and experienced the most promising self-generating economic de- velopment of the classical industrial capitalist type. The most important regional cases probably are Tucuman and Asuncion, as well as other cities

such as Mendoza and Rosario, in the interior of Argentina and Paraguay during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Seventeenth and eighteenth century Sao Paulo, long before coffee was grown there, is an- other example. Perhaps Antioquia in Colombia and Puebla and Queretaro in Mexico are other ex- amples. In its own way, Chile was also an example since, before the sea route around the Horn was opened, this country was relatively isolated at the end of the long voyage from Europe via Panama. Al l of these regions became manufacturing centers and even exporters, usually of textiles, during the periods preceding their effective incorporation as satellites into the colonial, national, and world cap- italist system.

Internationally, of course, the classic case of in- dustrialization through non-participation as a satellite in the capitalist world system is obviously that of Japan after the Meiji Restoration. Why, one may ask, was resource-poor but unsatellized Japan able to industrialize so quickly at the end of the century while resource-rich Latin American coun- tries and Russia were not able to do so and the lat- ter was easily beaten by Japan in the War of 1904 after the same forty years of development efforts? The second hypothesis suggests that the funda- mental reason is that Japan was not satellized ei- ther during the Tokugawa or the Meiji period and therefore did not have its development struc- turally limited as did the countries which were so satellized.

VI

A corollary of the second hypothesis is that when the metropolis recovers from its crisis and re- establishes the trade and investment ties which fully re-incorporate the satellites into the system, or when the metropolis expands to incorporate previously isolated regions into the world-wide system, the previous development and industrial- ization of these regions is choked off or channelled into directions which are not self-perpetuating and promising. This happened after each of the five crises cited above. The renewed expansion of trade

and the spread of economic liberalism in the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries choked off and re- versed the manufacturing development which Latin America had experienced during the seven- teenth century, and in some places at the begin- ning of the nineteenth. After the First World War, the new national industry of Brazil suffered serious consequences from American economic invasion. The increase in the growth rate of Gross National Product and particularly of industrialization throughout Latin America was again reversed and industry became increasingly satellized after the Second World War and especially after the post- Korean War recovery and expansion of the me- tropolis. Far from having become more developed since then, industrial sectors of Brazil and most conspicuously of Argentina have become struc- turally more and more underdeveloped and less and less able to generate continued industrializa- tion and/or sustain development of the economy. This process, from which India also suffers, is re- flected in a whole gamut of balance-of-payments, inflationary, and other economic and political dif- ficulties, and promises to yield to no solution short of far-reaching structural change.

Our hypothesis suggests that fundamentally the same process occurred even more dramati- cally with the incorporation into the system of previously unsatellized regions. The expansion of Buenos Aires as a satellite of Great Britain and the introduction of free trade in the interest of the rid- ing groups of both metropoles destroyed the man- ufacturing and much of the remainder of the economic base of the previously relatively prosper- ous interior almost entirely. Manufacturing was destroyed by foreign competition, lands were taken and concentrated into latifundia by the rapaciously growing export economy, intra-regional distribu- tion of income became much more unequal, and the previously developing regions became sim- ple satellites of Buenos Aires and through it of London. The provincial centers did not yield to satellization without a struggle. This metropolis- satellite conflict was much of the cause of the long political and armed struggle between the Uni - tarists in Buenos Aires and the Federalists in the

provinces, and it may be said to have been the sole important cause of the War of the Triple Alliance in which Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro, encouraged and helped by London, de- stroyed not only the autonomously developing economy of Paraguay but killed off nearly all of its population which was unwilling to give in. Though this is no doubt the most spectacular example which tends to confirm the hypothesis, I believe that historical research on the satellization of pre- viously relatively independent yeoman-farming and incipient manufacturing regions such as the Caribbean islands will confirm it further.7 These regions did not have a chance against the forces of expanding and developing capitalism, and their own development had to be sacrificed to that of others. The economy and industry of Argentina, Brazil, and other countries which have experienced the effects of metropolitan recovery since the Sec- ond World War are today suffering much the same fate, if fortunately still in lesser degree.

VII

A third major hypothesis derived from the me- tropolis-satellite structure is that the regions which are the most underdeveloped and feudal-seeming today are the ones which had the closest ties to the metropolis in the past. They are the regions which were the greatest exporters of primary products to and the biggest sources of capital for the world me- tropolis and which were abandoned by the me- tropolis when for one reason or another business fell off. This hypothesis also contradicts the gener- ally held thesis that the source of a region's under- development is its isolation and its pre-capitalist institutions.

This hypothesis seems to be amply confirmed by the former super-satellite development and present ultra-underdevelopment of the once sugar-exporting West Indies, Northeastern Brazil, the ex-mining districts of Minas Gerais in Brazil, highland Peru, and Bolivia, and the central Mexi- can states of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and others whose names were made world famous centuries ago by their silver. There surely are no major

regions in Latin America which are today more cursed by underdevelopment and poverty; yet all of these regions, like Bengal in India, once pro- vided the life blood of mercantile and industrial capitalist development—in the metropolis. These regions' participation in the development of the world capitalist system gave them, already in their golden age, the typical structure of underdevelop- ment of a capitalist export economy. When the market for their sugar or the wealth of their mines disappeared and the metropolis abandoned them to their own devices, the already existing eco- nomic, political, and social structure of these re- gions prohibited autonomous generation of economic development and left them no alterna- tive but to turn in upon themselves and to degen- erate into the ultra-underdevelopment we find there today,

VIII

These considerations suggest two further and re- lated hypotheses. One is that the latifundium, irre- spective of whether it appears as a plantation or a hacienda today, was typically born as a commercial enterprise which created for itself the institutions which permitted it to respond to increased de- mand in the world or national market by expand- ing the amount of its land, capital, and labor and to increase the supply of its products. The fifth hy- pothesis is that the latifundia which appear iso- lated, subsistence-based, and semi-feudal today saw the demand for their products or their pro- ductive capacity decline and that they are to be found principally in the above-named former agri- cultural and mining export regions whose eco- nomic activity declined in general. These two hypotheses run counter to the notions of most people, and even to the opinions of some histori- ans and other students of the subject, according to whom the historical roots and socio-economic causes of Latin American latifundia and agrarian institutions are to be found in the transfer of feu- dal institutions from Europe and/or in economic depression.

The evidence to test these hypotheses is not

open to easy general inspection and requires de- tailed analyses of many cases. Nonetheless, some important confirmatory evidence is available. The growth of the latifundium in nineteenth-century Argentina and Cuba is a clear case in support of the fourth hypothesis and can in no way be attrib- uted to the transfer of feudal institutions during colonial times. The same is evidently the case of the post-revolutionary and contemporary resur- gence of latifundia particularly in the North of Mexico, which produce for the American market, and of similar ones on the coast of Peru and the new coffee regions of Brazil. The conversion of previously yeoman-farming Caribbean islands, such as Barbados, into sugar-exporting economies at various times between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and the resulting rise of the lat- ifundia in these islands would seem to confirm the fourth hypothesis as well. In Chile, the rise of the latifundium and the creation of the institutions of servitude which later came to be called feudal oc- curred in the eighteenth century and have been conclusively shown to be the result of and response to the opening of a market for Chilean wheat in Lima. 8 Even the growth and consolidation of the latifundium in seventeenth-century Mexico— which most expert students have attributed to a depression of the economy caused by the decline of mining and a shortage of Indian labor and to a consequent turning in upon itself and ruralization of the economy—occurred at a time when urban population and demand were growing, food short- ages became acute, food prices skyrocketed, and the profitability of other economic activities such as mining and foreign trade declined.9 A l l of these and other factors rendered hacienda agriculture more profitable. Thus, even this case would seem to confirm the hypothesis that the growth of the latifundium and its feudal-seeming conditions of servitude in Latin America has always been and still is the commercial response to increased de- mand and that it does not represent the transfer or survival of alien institutions that have remained beyond the reach of capitalist development. The emergence of latifundia, which today really are more or less (though not entirely) isolated, might

then be attributed to the causes advanced in the fifth hypothesis—i.e., the decline of previously profitable agricultural enterprises whose capital was, and whose currently produced economic sur- plus still is, transferred elsewhere by owners and merchants who frequently are the same persons or families. Testing this hypothesis requires still more detailed analysis, some of which I have undertaken in a study on Brazilian agriculture.1 0

IX

Al l of these hypotheses and studies suggest that the global extension and unity of the capitalist system, its monopoly structure and uneven development throughout its history, and the resulting persistence of commercial rather than industrial capitalism in the underdeveloped world (including its most in- dustrially advanced countries) deserve much more attention in the study of economic development and cultural change than they have hitherto re- ceived. Though science and truth know no national boundaries, it is probably new generations of scien- tists from the underdeveloped countries themselves who most need to, and best can, devote the neces- sary attention to these problems and clarify the process of underdevelopment and development. It is their people who in the last analysis face the task of changing this no longer acceptable process and eliminating this miserable reality.

They will not be able to accomplish these goals by importing sterile stereotypes from the metropo- lis which do not correspond to their satellite eco- nomic reality and do not respond to their liberating political needs. To change their reality they must understand it. For this reason, I hope that better confirmation of these hypotheses and further pursuit of the proposed historical, holistic, and structural approach may help the peoples of the underdeveloped countries to understand the causes and eliminate the reality of their develop- ment of underdevelopment and their underdevel- opment of development.

NOTES 1. America Latino, Ano 6, N o . 4, October-

December 1963, p. 8. 2. Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Los centres co-

ordinadores indigenistas, Mexico, 1962, p. 34. 3. Ibid., pp. 33-34, 88. 4. "Capitalist Development and Underdevelop-

ment in Chile" and "Capitalist Development and Underdevelopment in Brazil" in Capital- ism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, to be published soon by Monthly Review Press.

5. Also see, "The Growth and Decline of Im- port Substitution," Economic Bulletin for Latin America, New York, IX, No. 1, March 1964 * * *.

6. Others who use a similar approach, though their ideologies do not permit them to derive the logically following conclusions, are Anibal Pinto S.C., Chile: Un caso de desarrollo frustrado, Santiago, Editorial Universitaria, 1957; Celso Furtado, Aformacao econdmica do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Fundo de Cultura, 1959 (recently translated into English and pub- lished under the title The Economic Growth of Brazil by the University of California Press) * * *.

7. See for instance Ram6n Guerra y Sanchez, * * * Sugar and Society in the Caribbean, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1964.

8. Mario Gongora, Origen de los "inquilinos" de Chile central, Santiago, Editorial Universitaria, 1960 * * *.

9. Woodrow Borah makes depression the cen- terpiece of his explanation in "New Spain's Century of Depression," Ibero-Americana, Berkeley, No. 35, 1951.

10. "Capitalism and the Myth of Feudalism in Brazilian Agriculture," in Capitalism and Un- derdevelopment in Latin America, cited in foot- note 4 above.

J . A N N T I C K N E R

Man, the State, and War: Gendered

Perspectives on National Security

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal: that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

—Simone de Beauvoir

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable. —Paul Fussell

In the face of what is generally perceived as a dan- gerous international environment, states have ranked national security high in terms of their pol- icy priorities, According to international relations scholar Kenneth Waltz, the state conducts its af- fairs in the "brooding shadow of violence," and therefore war could break out at any time.1 In the name of national security, states have justified large defense budgets, which take priority over do- mestic spending, military conscription of their young adult male population, foreign invasions, and the curtailment of civil liberties. The security of the state is perceived as a core value that is gen- erally supported unquestioningly by most citizens, particularly in time of war. While the role of the state in the twentieth century has expanded to in- clude the provision of domestic social programs, national security often takes precedence over the social security of individuals.

When we think about the provision of national security we enter into what has been, and contin- ues to be, an almost exclusively male domain. While most women support what they take to be legitimate calls for state action in the interests of international security, the task of defining, defend-

From J, Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 27-66.

ing, and advancing the security interests of the state is a man's affair, a task that, through its asso- ciation with war, has been especially valorized and rewarded in many cultures throughout history. As Simone de Beauvoir's explanation for male superi- ority suggests, giving one's life for one's country has been considered the highest form of patrio- tism, but it is an act from which women have been virtually excluded. While men have been associ- ated with defending the state and advancing its in- ternational interests as soldiers and diplomats, women have typically been engaged in the "order- ing" and "comforting" roles both in the domestic sphere, as mothers and basic needs providers, and in the caring professions, as teachers, nurses, and social workers.2 The role of women with respect to national security has been ambiguous: defined as those whom the state and its men are protecting, women have had little control over the conditions of their protection.

* * *

A Gendered Perspective on National Security

Morgenthau, Waltz, and other realists claim that it is possible to develop a rational, objective theory of international politics based on universal laws that operate across time and space. In her feminist cri- tique of the natural sciences, Evelyn Fox Keller points out that most scientific communities share the "assumption that the universe they study is di- rectly accessible, represented by concepts shaped not by language but only by the demands of logic and experiment." The laws of nature, according to this view of science, are beyond the relativity of

language.3 Like most contemporary feminists, Keller rejects this positivist view of science that, she asserts, imposes a coercive, hierarchical, and con- formist pattern on scientific inquiry. Since most contemporary feminist scholars believe that knowl- edge is socially constructed, they are skeptical of finding an unmediated foundation for knowledge that realists claim is possible. Since they believe that it is language that transmits knowledge, many feminists suggest that the scholarly claims about the neutral uses of language and about objectivity must continually be questioned.4

I shall now investigate the individual, the state, and the international system—the three levels of analysis that realists use in their analysis of war and national security—and examine how they have been constructed in realist discourse. I shall argue that the language used to describe these concepts comes out of a Western-centered historical world- view that draws almost exclusively on the experi- ences of men. Underneath its claim to universality this worldview privileges a view of security that is constructed out of values associated with hege- monic masculinity,

"POLITICAL M A N "

In his Politics Among Nations, a text rich in histori- cal detail, Morgenthau has constructed a world al- most entirely without women. Morgenthau claims that individuals are engaged in a struggle for power whenever they come into contact with one an- other, for the tendency to dominate exists at all levels of human life: the family, the polity, and the international system; it is modified only by the conditions under which the struggle takes place.5

Since women rarely occupy positions of power in any of these arenas, we can assume that, when Morgenthau talks about domination, he is talking primarily about men, although not all men.6 His "political man" is a social construct based on a partial representation of human nature abstracted from the behavior of men in positions of public power.7 Morgenthau goes on to suggest that, while society condemns the violent behavior that can re- sult from this struggle for power within the polity,

it encourages it in the international system in the form of war.

While Morgenthau's "political man" has been criticized by other international relations scholars for its essentializing view of human nature, the so- cial construction of hegemonic masculinity and its opposition to a devalued femininity have been cen- tral to the way in which the discourse of inter- national politics has been constructed more gener- ally. In Western political theory from the Greeks to Machiavelli, traditions upon which contemporary realism relies heavily for its analysis, this socially constructed type of masculinity has been projected onto the international behavior of states. The vio- lence with which it is associated has been legiti- mated through the glorification of war.

* *

T H E INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM: THE WAR OF EVERYMAN

AGAINST EVERYMAN

According to Richard Ashley, realists have privileged a higher reality called "the sovereign state" against which they have posited anarchy understood in a negative way as difference, ambiguity, and contin- gency—as a space that is external and dangerous.8

All these characteristics have also been attributed to women. Anarchy is an actual or potential site of war. The most common metaphor that realists employ to describe the anarchical international system is that of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature. Although Hobbes did not write much about international pol- itics, realists have applied his description of individu- als' behavior in a hypothetical precontractual state of nature, which Hobbes termed the war of everyman against everyman, to the behavior of states in the in- ternational system.9

Carole Pateman argues that, in all contemporary discussions of the state of nature, the differentiation between the sexes is generally ignored, even though it was an important consideration for contract theo- rists themselves.10 Although Hobbes did suggest that women as well as men could be free and equal indi- viduals in the state of nature, his description of

human behavior in this environment refers to that of adult males whose behavior is taken as constitu- tive of human nature as a whole by contemporary realist analysis. According to Jane Flax, the individu- als that Hobbes described in the state of nature appeared to come to full maturity without any engagement with one another; they were solitary creatures lacking any socialization in interactive be- havior. Any interactions they did have led to power struggles that resulted in domination or submission. Suspicion of others' motives led to behavior charac- terized by aggression, self-interest, and the drive for autonomy.11 In a similar vein, Christine Di Stephano uses feminist psychoanalytic theory to support her claim that the masculine dimension of atomistic egoism is powerfully underscored in Hobbes's state of nature, which, she asserts, is built on the foundation of denied maternity. "Hobbes' abstract man is a creature who is self-possessed and radically solitary in a crowded and inhospitable world, whose relations with others are unavoidably contractual and whose freedom consists in the ab- sence of impediments to the attainment of privately generated and understood desires."12

As a model of human behavior, Hobbes's de- piction of individuals in the state of nature is par- tial at best; certain feminists have argued that such behavior could be applicable only to adult males, for if life was to go on for more than one genera- tion in the state of nature, women must have been involved in activities such as reproduction and child rearing rather than in warfare. Reproductive activities require an environment that can provide for the survival of infants and behavior that is in- teractive and nurturing.

* * *

* * * [W]ar is central to the way we learn about international relations. * * * War is a time when male and female characteristics become polarized; it is a gendering activity at a time when the dis- course of militarism and masculinity permeates the whole fabric of society.13

As Jean Elshtain points out, war is an experi- ence to which women are exterior; men have in- habited the world of war in a way that women have

not.14 The history of international politics is there- fore a history from which women are, for the most part, absent. Little material can be found on women's roles in wars; generally they are seen as victims, rarely as agents. While war can be a time of advancement for women as they step in to do men's jobs, the battiefront takes precedence, so the hierarchy remains and women are urged to step aside once peace is restored. When women them- selves engage in violence, it is often portrayed as a mob or a food riot that is out of control. 1 5 Move- ments for peace, which are also part of our history, have not been central to the conventional way in which the evolution of the Western state system has been presented to us. International relations scholars of the early twentieth century, who wrote positively about the possibilities of international law and the collective security system of the League of Nations, were labeled "idealists" and not taken seriously by the more powerful realist tradition.

Metaphors, such as Hobbes's state of nature, are primarily concerned with representing conflictual relations between great powers. The images used to describe nineteenth-century imperialist projects and contemporary great power relations with former colonial states are somewhat different. Historically, colonial people were often described in terms that drew on characteristics associated with women in order to place them lower in a hierarchy that put their white male colonizers on top. As the European state system expanded outward to conquer much of the world in the nineteenth century, its "civilizing" mission was frequently described in stereotypically gendered terms. Colonized peoples were often de- scribed as being effeminate, masculinity was an attribute of the white man, and colonial order de- pended on Victorian standards of manliness. Cyn- thia Enloe suggests that the concept of "ladylike behavior" was one of the mainstays of imperialist civilization. Like sanitation and Christianity, femi- nine respectability was meant to convince colonizers and colonized alike that foreign conquest was right and necessary. Masculinity denoted protection of the respectable lady; she stood for the civilizing mis- sion that justified the colonization of benighted peoples.16 Whereas the feminine stood for danger

and disorder for Machiavelli, the European female, in contrast to her colonial counterpart, came to rep- resent a stable, civilized order in nineteenth-century representations of British imperialism.

An example of the way in which these gender identities were manipulated to justify Western pol- icy with respect to the rest of the world can also be seen in attitudes toward Latin America prevalent in the United States in the nineteenth century. Ac- cording to Michael Hunt, nineteenth-century American images of Latin society depicted a (usu- ally black) male who was lazy, dishonest, and cor- rupt. A contrary image that was more positive—a Latin as redeemable—took the form of a fair- skinned senorita living in a marginalized society, yet escaping its degrading effects. Hunt suggests that Americans entered the twentieth century with three images of Latin America fostered through legends brought back by American merchants and diplomats. These legends, perpetuated through school texts, cartoons, and political rhetoric, were even incorporated into the views of policymakers. The three images pictured the Latin as a half-breed brute, feminized, or infantile. In each case, Ameri- cans stood superior; the first image permitted a predatory aggressiveness, the second allowed the United States to assume the role of ardent suitor, and the third justified America's need to provide tutelage and discipline. A l l these images are pro- foundly gendered: the United States as a civilizing warrior, a suitor, or a father, and Latin America as a lesser male, a female, or a child. 1 7

Such images, although somewhat muted, re- main today and are particularly prevalent in the thinking of Western states when they are dealing with the Third World. * * *

* * *

Feminist Perspectives on National Security

WOMEN DEFINE SECURITY

It is difficult to find definitions by women of na- tional security. While it is not necessarily the case

that women have not had ideas on this subject, they are not readily accessible in the literature of international relations. When women speak or write about national security, they are often dis- missed as being naive or unrealistic. An example of this is the women in the United States and Europe who spoke out in the early years of the century for a more secure world order. Addressing the Inter- national Congress of Women at the Hague during World War I, Jane Addams spoke of the need for a new internationalism to replace the self-destructive nationalism that contributed so centrally to the outbreak and mass destruction of that war. Resolu- tions adopted at the close of the congress ques- tioned the assumption that women, and civilians more generally, could be protected during modern war. The conference concluded that assuring secu- rity through military means was no longer possible owing to the indiscriminate nature of modern war- fare, and it called for disarmament as a more ap- propriate course for ensuring future security.18

At the Women's International Peace Confer- ence in Halifax, Canada, in 1985, a meeting of women from all over the world, participants de- fined security in various ways depending on the most immediate threats to their survival; security meant safe working conditions and freedom from the threat of war or unemployment or the eco- nomic squeeze of foreign debt. Discussions of the meaning of security revealed divisions between Western middle-class women's concerns with nu- clear war, concerns that were similar to those of Jane Addams and her colleagues, and Third World women who defined insecurity more broadly in terms of the structural violence associated with im- perialism, militarism, racism, and sexism. Yet all agreed that security meant nothing if it was built on others' insecurity.19

The final document of the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women, held in Nairobi in 1985, offered a similarly multidimen- sional definition of security. The introductory chapter of the document defined peace as "not only the absence of war, violence and hostilities at the national and international levels but also the

enjoyment of economic and social justice."20 Al l these definitions of security take issue with realists' assumptions that security is zero-sum and must therefore be built on the insecurity of others,

* *• *

CITIZENSHIP REDEFINED

Building on the notion of hegemonic masculinity, the notion of the citizen-warrior depends on a de- valued femininity for its construction. In interna- tional relations, this devalued femininity is bound up with myths about women as victims in need of protection; the protector/protected myth con- tributes to the legitimation of a militarized version of citizenship that results in unequal gender rela- tions that can precipitate violence against women. Certain feminists have called for the construction of an enriched version of citizenship that would depend less on military values and more on an equal recognition of women's contributions to so- ciety. Such a notion of citizenship cannot come about, however, until myths that perpetuate views of women as victims rather than agents are elimi- nated.

One such myth is the association of women with peace, an association that has been invali- dated through considerable evidence of women's support for men's wars in many societies.21 In spite of a gender gap, a plurality of women generally support war and national security policies; Bernice Carroll suggests that the association of women and peace is one that has been imposed on women by their disarmed condition. 2 2 In the West, this asso- ciation grew out of the Victorian ideology of women's moral superiority and the glorification of motherhood. This ideal was expressed by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman whose book Herland was first serialized in The Forerunner in 1915, Gilman glorified women as caring and nurturing mothers whose private sphere skills could benefit the world at large.23 Most turn-of-the-century feminists shared Gilman's ideas. But if the implication of this view was that women were disqualified from participating in the corrupt world of political and

economic power by virtue of their moral superior- ity, the result could only be the perpetuation of male dominance. Many contemporary feminists see dangers in the continuation of these essentializ- ing myths that can only result in the perpetuation of women's subordination and reinforce dualisms that serve to make men more powerful. The associ- ation of femininity with peace lends support to an idealized masculinity that depends on constructing women as passive victims in need of protection. It also contributes to the claim that women are naive in matters relating to international politics. An en- riched, less militarized notion of citizenship can- not be built on such a weak foundation.

While women have often been willing to sup- port men's wars, many women are ambivalent about fighting in them, often preferring to leave that task to men. Feminists have also been divided on this issue; some argue, on the grounds of equal- ity, that women must be given equal access to the military, while others suggest that women must re- sist the draft in order to promote a politics of peace. * * *

* * *

In spite of many women's support for men's wars, a consistent gender gap in voting on defense- related issues in many countries suggests that women are less supportive of policies that rest on the use of direct violence. Before the outbreak of the Persian Gulf war in 1990, women in the United States were overwhelmingly against the use of force and, for the first time, women alone turned the public opinion polls against opting for war,2 4 Dur- ing the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was increasing defense budgets, women were less likely to support defense at the expense of social pro- grams, a pattern that, in the United States, holds true for women's behavior more generally.

Explanations for this gender gap, which in the United States appears to be increasing as time goes on, range from suggestions that women have not been socialized into the practice of violence to claims that women are increasingly voting their own interests, While holding down jobs, millions of women also care for children, the aged, and the

sick—activities that usually take place outside the economy. When more resources go to the military, additional burdens are placed on such women as public sector resources for social services shrink. While certain women are able, through access to the military, to give service to their country, many more are serving in these traditional care-giving roles. A feminist challenge to the traditional defi- nition of patriotism should therefore question the meaning of service to one's country.25 In contrast to a citizenship that rests on the assumption that it is more glorious to die than to live for one's state, Wendy Brown suggests that a more constructive view of citizenship could center on the courage to sustain life.26 In similar terms, Jean Elshtain asserts the need to move toward a politics that shifts the focus of political loyalty and identity from sacrifice to responsibility.27 Only when women's contribu- tions to society are seen as equal to men's can these reconstructed visions of citizenship come about.

FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON STATES' SECURITY-SEEKING

BEHAVIOR

Realists have offered us an instrumental version of states' security-seeking behavior, which, I have argued, depends on a partial representation of human behavior associated with a stereotypical hegemonic masculinity. Feminist redefinitions of citizenship allow us to envisage a less militarized version of states' identities, and feminist theories can also propose alternative models for states' in- ternational security-seeking behavior, extrapolated from a more comprehensive view of human be- havior.

Realists use state-of-nature stories as meta- phors to describe the insecurity of states in an an- archical international system. I shall suggest an alternative story, which could equally be applied to the behavior of individuals in the state of nature. Although frequently unreported in standard his- torical accounts, it is a true story, not a myth, about a state of nature in early nineteenth-century America. Among those present in the first winter encampment of the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition into the Northwest territories was Saca-

jawea, a member of the Shoshone tribe. Sacajawea had joined the expedition as the wife of a French interpreter; her presence was proving invaluable to the security of the expedition's members, whose task it was to explore uncharted territory and es- tablish contact with the native inhabitants to in- form them of claims to these territories by the United States. Although unanticipated by its lead- ers, the presence of a woman served to assure the native inhabitants that the expedition was peaceful since the Native Americans assumed that war par- ties would not include women: the expedition was therefore safer because it was not armed.2 8

This story demonstrates that the introduction of women can change the way humans are as- sumed to behave in the state of nature. Just as Sacajawea's presence changed the Native Ameri- can's expectations about the behavior of intruders into their territory, the introduction of women into our state-of-nature myths could change the way we think about the behavior of states in the in- ternational system. The use of the Hobbesian anal- ogy in international relations theory is based on a partial view of human nature that is slereotypically masculine; a more inclusive perspective would see human nature as both conflictual and cooperative, containing elements of social reproduction and in- terdependence as well as domination and separa- tion. Generalizing from this more comprehensive view of human nature, a feminist perspective would assume that the potential for international community also exists and that an atomistic, con- flictual view of the international system is only a partial representation of reality. Liberal individual- ism, the instrumental rationality of the market- place, and the defector's self-help approach in Rousseau's stag hunt [see p. 309] are all, in analagous ways, based on a partial masculine model of hu- man behavior. 2 9

100 C H A P T E R 3 C O N T E N D I N G P E R S P E C T I V E S

6. Morgenthau does talk about dominating mothers-in-law, but as feminist research has suggested, it is generally men, legally desig- nated as heads of households in most societies, who hold the real power even in the family and certainly with respect to the family's inter- action with the public sphere.

7. For an extended discussion of Morgenthau's "political man," see [J. Ann] Tickner, "Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism" [Millennium 17(3):429-440], In neorealism's depersonalized structural analysis, Morgen- thau's depiction of human nature slips out of sight.

8. [Richard K.] Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State" [Millennium 17(2) (1988)1, p. 230.

9. Hobbes, Leviathan, part 1, ch. 13, quoted in Vasquez, ed., Classics of International Rela- tions, pp. 213-215.

10. [Carole] Pateman, The Sexual Contract [Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, 1988], p. 41.

11. [Jane] Flax, "Political Philosophy and the Pa- triarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Per- spective on Epistemology and Metaphysics," in Harding and Hintikka, eds., Discovering Re- ality [Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 245-281.

12. [Christine] Di Stephano, "Masculinity as Ide- ology in Political Theory" [Women's Studies International Forum 6(6) (1983):633-644]. Carole Pateman has disputed some of Di Stephano's assumptions about Hobbes's char- acterizations of women and the family in the state of nature. But this does not deny the fact that Di Stephano's characterization of men is the one used by realists in their depiction of the international system. See Pateman, " 'God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper': Hobbes, Pa- triarchy, and Conjugal Right."

13. [Margaret Randolph] Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], introduction.

14. [Jean Bethke] Elshtain, Women and War [New York: Basic Books, 1987], p. 194.

15. Ibid., p. 168. 16. [Cynthia] Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases

taken as universal. Women's definitions of security are multilevel and multidimensional. Women have defined security as the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual. Not until the hierarchical social relations, including gender rela- tions, that have been hidden by realism's fre- quently depersonalized discourse are brought to light can we begin to construct a language of na- tional security that speaks out of the multiple expe- riences of both women and men. * * *

NOTES I owe the title of this chapter to Kenneth Waltz's book Man, the State, and War.

De Beauvoir epigraph from The Second Sex [New York: Knopf, 1972], p. 72. De Beauvoir's analysis suggests that she herself endorsed this explanation for male superiority; * * * Fussell epigraph quoted by Anna Quindlen in The New York Times, February 7, 1991, p. A25.

1. [Kenneth N.] Waltz, Theory of International Politics [Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1979], p. 102.

2. While heads of state, all men, discussed the "important" issues in world politics at the Group of Seven meeting in London in July 1991, Barbara Bush and Princess Diana were pictured on the "CBS Evening News" (July 17, 1991) meeting with British AIDS patients.

3. [Evelyn Fox] Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science [New Haven: Yale University Press 1985], p. 130.

M A R T H A F I N N E M O R E

Constructing Norms of Humanitarian

Intervention

Since the end of the Cold War, states have in-creasingly come under pressure to intervene militarily and, in fact, have intervened mili- tarily to protect citizens other than their own from humanitarian disasters. Recent efforts to enforce protected areas for Kurds and no-fly zones over Shiites in Iraq, efforts to alleviate starvation and es- tablish some kind of political order in Somalia, the huge UN military effort to disarm parties and re- build a state in Cambodia, and to some extent even the military actions to bring humanitarian relief in Bosnia are all instances of military action whose primary goal is not territorial or strategic but hu- manitarian.

Realist and liberal theories do not provide good explanations for this behavior. The interests that these theories impute to states are geostrategic and/or economic, yet many or most of these inter- ventions occur in states of negligible geostrategic or economic importance to the interveners. Thus, no obvious national interest is at stake for the states bearing the burden of the military inter- vention in most if not all of these cases. Somalia is perhaps the clearest example of military action undertaken in a state of little or no strategic or eco- nomic importance to the principal intervener. Similarly, the states that played central roles in the UN military action in Cambodia were, with the ex- ception of China, not states that had any obvious geostrategic interests there by 1989; China, which did have a geostragetic interest, bore little of the burden of intervening. Realism and liberalism of-

From The Culture of National Security: Norms and Iden- tity in World Politics, Peter J. Katzenstein, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 153-185. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

fer powerful explanations for the Persian Gulf war but have little to say about the extension of that war to Kurdish and Shiite protection through the enforcement of UN Resolution 688. The United States, France, and Britain have been allowing abuse of the Kurds for centuries. Why they should start caring about them now is not clear.

The recent pattern of humanitarian interven- tions raises the issue of what interests intervening states could possibly be pursuing. In most of these cases, the intervention targets are insignificant by any usual measure of geostrategic or economic in- terest. Why, then, do states intervene?

This essay argues that the pattern of inter- vention cannot be understood apart from the changing normative context in which it occurs. Normative context is important because it shapes conceptions of interests. Standard analytic as- sumptions about states and other actors pursuing their interests tend to leave the sources of interests vague or unspecified. The contention here is that international normative context shapes the inter- ests of international actors and does so in both sys- tematic and systemic ways. Unlike psychological variables that operate at the individual level, norms can be systemic-level variables in both origin and effects.1 Because they are inter-subjective, rather than merely subjective, widely held norms are not idiosyncratic in their effects. Instead, they leave broad patterns of the sort that social science strives to explain.

In this essay I examine the role of humanitar- ian norms in shaping patterns of humanitarian military intervention over the past 150 years.2 I show that shifts in intervention behavior corre- spond with changes in normative standards articu- lated by states concerning appropriate ends and

means of military intervention. Specifically, nor- mative understandings about which human beings merit military protection and about the way in which such protection must be implemented have changed, and state behavior has changed accord- ingly. This broad correlation establishes the norms explanation as plausible. The failure of alternative explanations to account for changing patterns of intervention behavior increases the credibility of the norms approach. I conclude with a discussion of ways to move beyond this plausibility probe.

The analysis proceeds in five parts. The first shows that realist and liberal approaches to inter- national politics do not explain humanitarian in- tervention as a practice, much less change in that practice over time, because of their exogenous and static treatment of interests. A constructivist ap- proach that attends to the role of international norms can remedy this by allowing us to prob- lematize interests and their change over time. The next section examines humanitarian action in the nineteenth century. It shows that humanitarian ac- tion and even intervention on behalf of Christians being threatened or mistreated by the Ottoman Turks were carried out occasionally throughout the nineteenth century. However, only Christians appear to be deserving targets of humanitarian in- tervention; mistreatment of other groups does not evoke similar concern.

The third section investigates the expansion of this definition of "humanity" by examining efforts to abolish slavery, the slave trade, and coloniza- tion. Protection of nonwhite non-Christians did become a motivation for military action by states, especially Great Britain, in the early nineteenth century, when efforts to stop the slave trade began in earnest. But the scope of this humanitarian ac- tion was limited. Britain acted to stop commerce in slaves on the high seas; she did not intervene mili- tarily to protect them inside other states or to abol- ish slavery as a domestic institution of property rights. It was not until decolonization that this re- definition of "humanity" in more universal terms (not just Christians, not just whites) was consoli- dated.

The fourth section briefly reviews humanitar-

ian intervention as a state practice since 1945, paying particular attention to the multilateral and institutional requirements that have evolved for humanitarian intervention. Contemporary multi- lateralism differs qualitatively from previous modes of joint state action and has important im- plications for the planning and execution of hu- manitarian interventions. The essay concludes by outlining questions about the role and origins of norms that are not treated here but could be ad- dressed in future research.

Using Norms to Understand International Politics

Humanitarian intervention looks odd from con- ventional perspectives on international political behavior because it does not conform to the con- ceptions of interest that they specify. Realists would expect to see some geostrategic or political advantage to be gained by intervening states. Neo- liberals might emphasize economic or trade advan- tages for interveners.

As I discussed in the introduction, it is difficult to identify the advantage for the intervener in most post-1989 cases. The 1989 U.S. action in Somalia is a clear case of intervention without obvious inter- ests. Economically Somalia was insignificant to the United States. Security interests are also hard to find. The U.S. had voluntarily given up its base at Berbera in Somalia because advances in communi- cations and aircraft technology made it obsolete for the communications and refueling purposes it once served. Further, the U.S. intervention in that country was not carried out in a way that would have furthered strategic interests. * * *

Intervention to reconstruct Cambodia presents similar anomalies. The country is economically in- significant to the interveners and, with the end of the Cold War, was strategically significant to none of the five on the UN Security Council except China, which bore very little of the intervention burden. Indeed, U.S. involvement appears to have been motivated by domestic opposition to the re- turn of the Khmers Rouges on moral grounds—

another anomaly for these approaches—rather than by geopolitical or economic interests.

Liberals of a more classical and Kantian type might argue that these interventions have been motivated by an interest in promoting democracy and liberal values. After all, the UN's political blue- print for reconstructing these states is a liberal one. But such arguments also run afoul of the evidence. The U.S. consistendy refused to take on the state- building and democratization mission in Somalia that liberal arguments would have expected to be at the heart of U.S. efforts. * * *

None of these realist or liberal approaches pro- vides an answer to the question, What interests are intervening states pursuing? In part this is a prob- lem of theoretical focus. Realism and most liberals do not investigate interests; they assume them. In- terests are givens in these approaches and need to be specified before analysis can begin. In this case, however, the problem is also substantive. The geostrategic and economic interests specified by these approaches appear to be wrong.

Investigating interests requires a different kind of theoretical approach. Attention to international norms and the way they structure interests in coordinated ways across the international system provides such an approach. Further, a norms ap- proach addresses an issue obscured by approaches that treat interests exogenously: it focuses attention on the ways in which interests change. Since norms are socially constructed, they evolve with changes in social interaction. Understanding this norma- tive evolution and the changing interests it creates is a major focus of a constructivist research pro- gram and of this analysis.

A constructivist approach does not deny that power and interest are important. They are. Rather, it asks a different and prior set of ques- tions: it asks what interests are, and it investigates the ends to which and the means by which power will be used. The answers to these questions are not simply idiosyncratic and unique to each actor. The social nature of international politics creates normative understandings among actors that, in turn, coordinate values, expectations, and behav-

ior. Because norms make similar behavioral claims on dissimilar actors, they create coordinated pat- terns of behavior that we can study and about which we can theorize.3

Before beginning the analysis, let me clarify the relationship postulated here among norms, inter- ests, and actions. In this essay I understand norms to shape interests and interests to shape action. Neither connection is determinative. Factors other than norms may shape interests, and certainly no single norm or norm set is likely to shape a state's interests on any given issue. In turn, factors other than state interests, most obviously power con- straints, shape behavior and outcomes. Thus, the connection assumed here between norms and ac- tion is one in which norms create permissive con- ditions for action but do not determine action. Changing norms may change state interests and create new interests (in this case, interests in pro- tecting non-European non-Christians and in doing so multilaterally through an international organi- zation). But the fact that states are now interested in these issues does not guarantee pursuit of these interests over all others on all occasions. New or changed norms enable new or different behaviors; they do not ensure such behaviors.

I should also offer a rationale for examining justifications for intervention as an indicator of norms and norm change. The conventional wis- dom is that justifications are mere fig leaves behind which states hide their less savory and more self- interested reasons for actions. Motivation is what matters; justification is not important.

* * *

The focus here is justification, and for the purposes of this study justification is important because it speaks directly to normative context. When states justify their interventions, they are drawing on and articulating shared values and expectations held by other decision makers and other publics in other states. It is literally an attempt to connect one's actions to standards of justice or, perhaps more generically, to standards of appropriate and ac- ceptable behavior. Thus through an examination

of justifications we can begin to piece together what those internationally held standards are and how they may change over time.

My aim here is to establish the plausibility and utility of norms as an explanation for international behavior. States may violate international norms and standards of right conduct that they them- selves articulate. But they do not always—or even often—do so. Aggregate behavior over long peri- ods shows patterns that correspond to notions of right conduct over time. As shared understandings about who is "human" and about how interven- tion to protect those people must be carried out change, behavior shifts accordingly in ways not correlated with standard conceptions of interests.

We can investigate these changes by comparing humanitarian intervention practice in the nine- teenth century with that of the twentieth century. The analysis is instructive in a number of ways. First, the analysis shows that humanitarian justifi- cations for state action and state use of force are not new.

Second, the analysis shows that while humani- tarian justifications for action have been important for centuries, the content and application of those justifications have changed over time. Specifically, states' perceptions of which human beings merit intervention has changed. I treat this not as a change of identity, as other essays in the volume use that term, but as a change of identification. Nonwhite non-Christians always knew they were human. What changed was perceptions of Euro- peans about them. People in Western states began to identify with non-Western populations during the twentieth century, with profound political con- sequences, for humanitarian intervention, among other things. * * * What has changed is not the fact of the humanitarian behavior but its focus. Identi- fication emphasizes the affective relationships be- tween actors rather than the characteristics of a single actor.4 Further, identification is an ordinal concept, allowing for degrees of affect as well as changes in the focus of affect. Identification—of Western Europeans with Greeks and of Russians with their fellow Slavs—existed in the nineteenth

century. The task is to explain how and why this identification expanded to other groups.

Third, the analysis highlights contestation over these normative justifications and links it to change. Ironically, while norms are inherently con- sensual (they exist only as convergent expectations or intersubjective understandings), they evolve in part through challenges to that consensus. * * * Humanitarian norms have risen in prominence, but their acceptance is still limited and contested; certainly there are many forms of intervention, particularly unilateral intervention, that apparently cannot be justified even by humanitarian norms.

Fourth, the analysis relates evolving humani- tarian intervention norms to other normative changes over the past century. When humanitarian intervention is viewed in a broader normative con- text, it becomes clear that changes in this particular norm are only one manifestation of the changes in a larger set of humanitarian norms that have be- come more visible and more powerful in the past fifty or one hundred years. Particularly prominent among these changing norms are the norms of decolonization and self-determination, which in- volved a redefinition and universalization of "hu- manity" for Europeans that changed the evolution of sovereignty and of humanitarian discourse (both of which are essential components of hu- manitarian intervention). Thus mutually reinforc- ing and consistent norms appear to strengthen each other; success in one area (such as decolo- nization) strengthens and legitimates claims in log- ically and morally related norms (such as human rights and humanitarian intervention). The rela- tionship identified between decolonization and humanitarian intervention suggests the impor- tance of viewing norms not as individual "things" floating atomistically in some international social space but rather as part of a highly structured so- cial context. It may make more sense to think of a fabric of interlocking and interwoven norms rather than individual norms of this or that—as current scholarship, my own included, has been inclined to do. 5

Finally, the analysis emphasizes the structuring

and organization of the international normative context. Examination of humanitarian norms and intervention suggests that norm institutionaliza- tion, by which I mean the way norms become embedded in international organizations and insti- tutions, is critical to patterns of norm evolution. Institutionalization of these norms or norm- bundles in international organizations (such as the UN) further increases the power and elaboration of the normative claims.

Humanitarian Intervention in the Nineteenth Century

Before the twentieth century virtually all instances of military intervention to protect people other than the intervener's own nationals involved pro- tection of Christians from the Ottoman Turks.6 In at least [three] instances during the nineteenth century. * * *

Greek War for Independence (1821-1827)

Russia took an immediate interest in the Greek in- surrection and threatened to use force against the Turks as early as the first year of the war. Part of her motivation was geostrategic: Russia had been pursuing a general strategy of weakening the Ot- tomans and consolidating control in the Balkans for years. But the justifications that Russia offered were largely humanitarian. Russia had long seen herself as the defender of Orthodox Christians un- der Turkish rule. Atrocities such as the wholesale massacres of Christians and the sale of women into slavery, coupled with the sultan's order to seize the Venerable Patriarch of the Orthodox Church after mass on Easter morning and hang him and three archbishops, then have the bodies thrown into the Bosporus, formed the centerpiece of Russia's com- plaints against the Turks and the justification of her threats of force.7

Other European powers, with the exception of France, opposed intervention largely because they were concerned that weakening Turkey would

strengthen Russia.8 Although the governments of Europe seemed little affected by these atrocities, significant segments of their publics were. A phil- hellenic movement spread throughout Europe, es- pecially in the more democratic societies of Britain, France, and parts of Germany. The movement drew on two popular sentiments: the European identification with the classical Hellenic tradition and the appeal of Christians oppressed by the infi- del. Philhellenic aid societies in Western Europe sent large sums of money and even volunteers to Greece during the war.9

Russian threats of unilateral action against the sultan eventually forced the British to become in- volved, and in 1827 the two powers, together with Charles X of France in his capacity as "Most Chris- tian King," sent an armada that roundly defeated Ibrahim at Navarino in October 1827.

It would be hard to argue that humanitarian considerations were decisive in this intervention; geostrategic factors were far too important. How- ever, the episode does bear on the evolution of hu- manitarian norms is several ways.

First, it illustrates the circumscribed definition of who was "human" in the nineteenth-century conception of that term. The massacre of Chris- tians was a humanitarian disaster; the massacre of Muslims was not. This was true regardless of the fact that the initial atrocities of the war were com- mitted by the Christian insurgents (admittedly af- ter years of harsh Ottoman rule). * * *

Second, intervening states, particularly Russia and France, placed humanitarian but also religious reasons at the center of their continued calls for intervention and application of force. As will be seen in other cases from the nineteenth century, religion seems to be important in both motivat- ing humanitarian action and defining who is human. * * *

Third, the intervention was multilateral. The reasons in this case were largely geostrategic (re- straining Russia from temptation to use this inter- vention for other purposes), but, as subsequent discussion will show, multilateralism as a charac- teristic of legitimate intervention becomes increas- ingly important.

Fourth, mass publics were involved. It is not clear that they influenced policy making as strongly as they would in the second half of the century, but foreign civilians did become involved both financially and militarily on behalf of the Greeks. * * *

The Bulgarian Agitation (1876-1878)

In May 1876 Ottoman troops massacred unarmed and poorly organized agitators in Bulgaria. A British government investigation put the number killed at twelve thousand, with fifty-nine villages destroyed and an entire church full of people set ablaze after they had already surrendered to Turk= ish soldiers. The investigation confirmed that Turkish soldiers and officers were promoted and decorated rather than punished for these actions."1

Accounts of the atrocities, gathered by Ameri- can missionaries and sent to British reporters, be- gan appearing in British newspapers in mid-June. The reports inflamed public opinion, and protest meetings were organized around the country, par- ticularly in the north, where W. T. Stead and his paper, the Northern Echo, were a focus of agita- tion."

The result was a split in British politics. Prime Minister Disraeli publicly refused to change British policy of support for Turkey over the matter, stat- ing that British material interests outweighed the lives of Bulgarians.'" However, Lord Derby, the Conservative foreign secretary, telegraphed Con- stantinople that "any renewal of the outrages would be more fatal to the Porte than the loss of a battle."13 More important, former prime minister Gladstone came out of retirement to oppose Dis- raeli on the issue, making the Bulgarian atrocities the centerpiece of his anti-Disraeli campaign.1'1

While Gladstone found a great deal of support in various public circles, he did not have similar success in government, The issue barely affected British policy. Disraeli was forced to carry out the investigation mentioned above, and he did offer proposals for internal Turkish reforms to protect

minorities—proposals that were rejected by Russia as being too t imid. 1 5

Russia was the only state to intervene in the wake of the Bulgarian massacres. The 1856 treaty that ended the Crimean War was supposed to pro- tect Christians under Ottoman rule. Russia justi- fied her threats of force on the basis of Turkey's violation of these humanitarian guarantees. In March 1877 the great powers issued a protocol re- iterating demands for the protection of Christians in the Ottoman Empire that had been guaranteed in the 1856 treaty. After Constantinople rejected the protocol, Russia declared war in April 1877. She easily defeated the Ottoman troops and signed the Treaty of San Stefano, which created a large, independent Bulgarian state—an arrangement that was drastically revised by the Congress of Berlin.

As in the previous cases, saving Christians was an essential feature of this incident, and Gladstone and Russia's justifications for action were framed in that way. But military action in this case was not multilateral.1 6 Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this episode is its demonstration of the strength of public opinion and the media. While they were not able to change British policy they were able to make adherence to that policy much more difficult for Disraeli in domestic terms.

Armenia (1894-1917)

The Armenian case offers some interesting insights into the scope of Christianity requiring defense by European powers in the last century. Unlike the Orthodox Christians in Greece and Bulgaria and the Maronites in Syria, the Armenian Christians had no European champion. * * *

The fact that the Armenians were Christians, albeit of a different kind, does seem to have had some influence on policy. The Treaty of Berlin explicitly bound the sultan to carry out internal political reforms to protect Armenians, but the nature, timing, and monitoring of these provisions were left vague and were never enforced. The Con- gress of Berlin ignored an Armenian petition for an arrangement similar to that set up in Lebanon fol- lowing the Maronite massacres (a Christian gover-

nor under Ottoman rule). Gladstone took up the matter in 1880 when he came back to power but dropped it when Bismarck voiced opposition.1 7

The wave of massacres against Armenians begin- ning in 1894 was far worse than any of the other atrocities examined here, in terms of both the number killed and the brutality of their executions. Nine hundred people were killed, and twenty-four villages burned in the Sassum massacres in August 1894. After this, the intensity increased. Between fifty thousand and seventy thousand people were killed in 1895. In 1896 the massacres moved into the capital, Constantinople, where on Au- gust 28-29, six thousand Armenians were killed. 1 8

These events were well known and highly pub- licized in Europe. 1 9 Gladstone came out of retire- ment yet again to denounce the Turks and called Abd-ul-Hamid the "Great Assassin." French writ- ers denounced him as "the Red Sultan." The Euro- pean powers demanded an inquiry assisted by Europeans, which submitted to European govern- ments and the press extensive documentation of "horrors unutterable, unspeakable, unimaginable by the mind of man." 2 0 Public opinion pressed for intervention, and both Britain and France used hu- manitarian justifications to threaten force. But nei- ther acted. Germany by this time was a force to be reckoned with, and the kaiser was courting Turkey. Russia was nervous about nationalist aspirations in the Balkans in general and had no special affection for the Armenians, as noted above. The combined opposition of Germany and Russia made the price of intervention higher than either the British or the French were willing to pay.21

These [three] episodes are suggestive in several ways. First, humanitarian justifications for uses of force and threats of force are not new in the twen- tieth century.

Second, humanitarian action was rarely taken when it jeopardized other stated goals or interests of a state. Humanitarians were sometimes able to mount considerable pressure on policy makers to act contrary to stated geostrategic interests, as in the case of Disraeli and the Bulgarian agitation, but they never succeeded. Humanitarian claims did,

however, provide states with new or intensified in- terests in an area and new reasons to act where none had existed previously. * * *

Third, humanitarian action could be taken in a variety of forms. Action could be multilateral. It could be unilateral, as when Russia intervened in Bulgaria. Action might also be some mixture of the two, as in Lebanon/Syria, where several states planned the intervention but execution was essen- tially unilateral. As will be shown below, this vari- ety of forms for intervention shrinks over time. Specifically, the unilateral option for either plan- ning or executing humanitarian intervention ap- pears to have disappeared in the twentieth century.

Fourth, interveners identified with the victims of humanitarian disasters in some important and exclusive way. At a minimum, the victims to be protected by intervention were Christians; there were no instances of European powers' con- sidering intervention to protect non-Christians. Pogroms against Jews did not provoke interven- tion. Neither did Russian massacres of Turks in Central Asia in the 1860s.22 Neither did mass killings in China during the Taipings rebellion against the Manchus.2 3 Neither did mass killings by colonial rulers in their colonies.24 * * *

The Expansion of "Humanity" and Sovereignty

This last feature of nineteendi-century interven- tion, the ways in which interveners identify with victims to determine who is an appropriate or compelling candidate for intervention, changed dramatically over the twentieth century as the "hu- manity" deserving of protection by military inter- vention became universalized.25 The seeds of this change lie in the nineteenth century, however, with efforts to end slavery and the slave trade. With the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century and decolonization in the twentieth, a new set of norms was consolidated that universalized "humanity" and endowed it with rights, among them self- determination, which came to be equated with sovereign statehood. * * *

Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade

The abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth century was an essential part of the uni- versalization of "humanity." European states gener- ally accepted and legalized these practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but by the nineteenth century the same states proclaimed them "repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality."26 Human beings previously viewed as beyond the edge of humanity—as, in fact, property—came to be viewed as human, and with that status came certain, albeit minimal, privileges and protections.27 Further, military force was used by states, especially Britain, to suppress the slave trade. Britain succeeded in having the slave trade labeled as piracy, thus enabling her to seize and board ships sailing under non-British flags that were suspected of carrying contraband slaves.28

While this is in some ways an important case of a state using force to promote humanitarian ends, the way the British framed and justified their ac- tions also says something about the limits of hu- manitarian claims in the early to mid-nineteenth century. First, the British limited their military ac- tion to abolishing the trade in slaves, not slavery it- self. There was no military intervention on behalf of Africans as there was on behalf of Christians. While the British public and many political figures contributed to a climate of international opinion that viewed slavery with increasing distaste, the abolition of slavery as a domestic institution of property rights was accomplished in each state where it had previously been legal without military intervention by other states.29 Further, the British government's strategy for ending the slave trade was to have such trafficking labeled as piracy, thus making the slaves "contraband," i.e., still property. The government justified its actions on the basis of maritime rights governing commerce. Slavery and slaveholding themselves did not provoke the same reaction as Ottoman abuse of Christians did.

This may be because the perpetrators of the humanitarian violations were "civilized" Christian nations (as opposed to the infidel Turks). 3 0 An-

other reason was probably that the targets of these humanitarian violations were black Africans, not "fellow Christians" or "brother Slavs." It thus ap- pears that by the 1830s black Africans had become sufficiently "human" that enslaving them was ille- gal inside Europe, but enslaving them outside Eu- rope was only distasteful. * * *

Colonization, Decolonization, and Self-determination

Justifications for both colonization and decolo- nization also offer interesting lenses through which to examine changing humanitarian norms and changing understandings of who is "human." Both processes—colonization and its undoing—were justified, at least in part, in humanitarian terms, but the understanding of what constituted human- ity was different in the two episodes in ways that bear on the current investigation of humanitarian intervention norms.

The vast economic literature on colonization often overlooks the strong moral dimension per- ceived and articulated by many of the colonizers. Colonization was a crusade. It would bring the benefits of civilization to the "dark" reaches of the earth. It was a sacred trust, it was the white man's burden, it was mandated by God that these Euro- peans go out into unknown (to them) parts of the globe, bringing what they understood to be a better way of life to the inhabitants. Colonization for the missionaries and those driven by social conscience was a humanitarian mission of huge proportions and consequently of huge importance.

Colonialism's humanitarian mission was of a particular kind, however: it was to "civilize" the non- European parts of the world—to bring the "benefits" of European social, political, economic, and cultural arrangements to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Un- til these peoples were "civilized," they were savages, barbarians, something less than human. Thus in an important sense the core of the colonial humanitar- ian mission was to create humanity where none had previously existed. Non-Europeans became human in European eyes by becoming Christian, by adopt-

ing European-style structures of property rights, by adopting European-style territorial political arrange- ments, by entering the growing European-based in- ternational economy.31

Decolonization also had strong humanitarian justifications.32 By the mid-twentieth century, however, normative understandings about hu- manity had shifted. Humanity was no longer something one could create by bringing savages to civilization. Rather, humanity was inherent in in- dividual human beings. It had become universal- ized and was not culturally dependent, as it has been in earlier centuries. Asians and Africans were now viewed as having human "rights," and among those rights was the right to determine their own political future—the right to self-determination.

There is not space here to investigate in detail the origins of decolonization and accompanying human rights norms. I would, however, like to highlight three features of the decolonization process that bear on the evolution of humanitarian intervention.33 First, as international legal scholars have long noted, logical coherence among norms greatly enhances their legitimacy and power.34 De- colonization norms benefited greatly from their logical kinship with core European norms about human equality. As liberal norms about the "nat- ural" rights of man spread and gained power within Europe, they influenced Europe's relation- ship with non-European peoples in important ways. The egalitarian social movements sweeping the European West in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries were justified with universal truths about the nature and equality of human be- ings. These notions were then exported to the non- European world as part of the civilizing mission of colonialism. Once people begin to believe, at least in principle, in human equality, there is no logical limit to the expansion of human rights and self- determination.3 5

* * *

Second, as Neta Crawford and others have noted, formal international organizations, particularly the United Nations, played a significant role in the de- colonization process and the consolidation of anti-

colonialism norms. The self-determination norms laid out in the charter, the trusteeship system it set up, and the one-state-one-vote voting structure that gave majority power to weak, often formerly colonized states, all contributed to an international legal, organizational, and normative environment that made colonial practices increasingly illegiti- mate and difficult to carry out.36

Third, decolonization enshrined the notion of political self-determination as a basic human right associated with a now universal humanity. Political self-determination, in turn, meant sovereign state- hood. Once sovereign statehood became associated with human rights, intervention, particularly uni- lateral intervention, became more difficult to jus- tify. Unilateral intervention certainly still occurs, but, as will be seen below, it cannot now be justi- fied even by high-minded humanitarian claims.

Humanitarian Intervention Since 1945

Unlike humanitarian intervention practices in the nineteenth century, virtually all of the instances in which claims of humanitarian intervention have been made in the post-1945 period concern mili- tary action on behalf of non-Christians and/or non-Europeans. In that sense, the universalizing of the "humanity" that might be worth protecting seems to have widened in accordance with the nor- mative changes described above.

What is interesting in these cases is that states that might legitimately have claimed humanitarian justifications for their intervention did not do so. India's intervention in East Pakistan in the wake of Muslim massacres of Hindus, Tanzania's interven- tion in Uganda toppling the Idi Amin regime, Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia ousting the Khmers Rouges—in every case intervening states could have justified their actions with strong hu- manitarian claims. None did. In fact, India initially claimed humanitarian justifications but quickly re- tracted them, Why?

The argument here is that this reluctance stems not from norms about what is "humanitarian" but

from norms about legitimate intervention. While the scope of who qualifies as human has widened enormously and the range of humanitarian activi- ties that states routinely undertake has expanded,37

norms about intervention have also changed, albeit less drastically. Humanitarian military interven- tion now must be multilateral to be legitimate.

* * *

Multilateralism had (and has) important advan- tages for states. It increases the transparency of each state's actions to others and so reassures states that opportunities for adventurism and expansion will not be used. Unilateral military intervention, even for humanitarian objectives, is viewed with suspicion; it is too easily subverted to serve less dis- interested ends of the intervener. Further, multilat- eralism can be a way of sharing costs, and thus it can be cheaper for states than unilateral action.

Multilateralism carries with it significant costs of its own, however, Cooperation and coordina- tion problems involved in such action have been examined in detail by political scientists and can make it difficult to sustain.18 Perhaps more impor- tant, multilateral action requires sacrifice of power and control over the intervention. Further, it may seriously compromise the military effectiveness of those operations, as recent debates over command and control in UN military operations suggest.

There are no obvious efficiency reasons for states to prefer either multilateral or unilateral in- tervention to achieve humanitarian ends. Each has advantages and disadvantages. The choice depends in large part on perceptions about the political ac- ceptability and political costs of each, which, in turn, depend on normative context. As will be dis- cussed below, multilateralism in the twentieth cen- tury has become institutionalized in ways that make unilateral intervention, particularly inter- vention not justified as self-defense, unacceptably cosdy.

The next two sections of the paper compare post-World War II interventions in situations of humanitarian disaster with nineteenth-century practice to illustrate these points. * * *

Unilateral Intervention in Humanitarian Disasters

INDIA IN EAST PAKISTAN ( 1971)

Pakistan had been under military rule by West Pakistani officials since partition. When the first free elections were held in November 1970, the Awami League won 167 out of 169 parliamentary seats reserved for East Pakistan in the National As- sembly. The Awami League had not urged political independence for the East during the elections, but it did run on a list of demands concerning one- person-one-vote political representation and in- creased economic autonomy for the east. The government in West Pakistan viewed the Awami electoral victory as a threat. In the wake of these electoral results, the government in Islamabad de- cided to postpone the convening of the new Na- tional Assembly indefinitely, and in March 1971 the West Pakistani army started indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians, raping women, burning homes, and looting or destroying property. At least one million people were killed, and millions more fled across the border into India.39 Following months of tension, border incidents, and increased pressure from the influx of refugees, India sent troops into East Pakistan. After twelve days the Pakistani army surrendered at Dacca, and the new state of Bangladesh was established.

As in many of the nineteenth-century cases, the intervener here had an array of geopolitical inter- ests, Humanitarian concerns were not the only rea- son or even, perhaps, the most important reason to intervene. It is, however, a case in which interven- tion could have been justified in humanitarian terms, and initially the Indian representatives in both the General Assembly and the Security Council did articulate such a justification.40 These arguments were widely rejected by other states, in- cluding many with no particular interest in politics on the subcontinent. States as diverse as Argentina, Tunisia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. all re- sponded to India's claims by arguing that princi- ples of sovereignty and noninterference should

take precedence and that India had no right to meddle in what they all viewed as an "internal matter." In response to this rejection of her claims, India retracted her humanitarian justifications, choosing instead to rely on self-defense to justify her actions.41

VIETNAM IN CAMBODIA (1979)

In 1975 the Chinese-backed Khmers Rouges took power in Cambodia and launched a policy of inter- nal "purification" entailing the atrocities and geno- cide now made famous by the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. This regime, under the leadership of Pol Pot, was also aggressively anti-Vietnamese and engaged in a number of border incursions during the late 1970s. Determined to end this border ac- tivity, the Vietnamese and an anti-Pol Pot army of exiled Cambodians invaded the country in De- cember 1978 and by January 1979 had routed the Khmers Rouges and installed a sympathetic gov- ernment under the name People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK).

Again, humanitarian considerations may not have been central to Vietnam's decision to inter- vene, but humanitarian justifications would seem to have offered some political cover to the inter- nationally unpopular Vietnamese regime. Like Tanzania, however, Vietnam made no appeal to humanitarian justifications. Instead, its leaders ar- gued that they were only helping the Cambodian people achieve self-determination against the neo- colonial regime of Pol Pot, which had been "the product of the hegemonistic and expansionist pol- icy of the Peking authorities."42 Even if Vietnam had offered humanitarian justifications for inter- vention, indications are that these would have been rejected by other states. In their condemnations of Vietnam's action, a number of states mentioned Pol Pot's appalling human rights violations but said nonetheless that these violations did not enti- de Vietnam to intervene. During the UN debate, no state spoke in favor of the existence of a right to unilateral humanitarian intervention, and several

states—Greece, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, and India—that had previously supported humanitar- ian intervention arguments in the UN voted for the resolution condemning Vietnam. 4 3

Multilateral Intervention in Humanitarian Disasters

To be legitimate, humanitarian intervention must be multilateral. The Cold War made such multilat- eral efforts politically difficult to orchestrate, but since 1989 several large-scale interventions have been carried out claiming humanitarian justifica- tions as their primary raison d'etre. All have been multilateral. Most visible among these have been:

• the U.S., British, and French efforts to protect Kurdish and Shiite populations inside Iraq following the Gulf War;

• the U N T A C mission to end civil war and reestablish a democratic political order in Cambodia;

• the large-scale UN effort to end starvation and construct a democratic state in Somalia; and

• current, albeit limited, efforts by UN and NATO troops to protect civilian, especially Muslim, populations from primarily Serbian forces in Bosnia.

While these efforts have attracted varying amounts of criticism concerning their effectiveness, they have received little or no criticism of their legitimacy. Further, and unlike their nineteenth- century counterparts, all have been organized through standing international organizations— most often the United Nations. Indeed, the UN charter has provided the framework in which much of the normative contestation over intervention practices has occurred since 1945. Specifically, the charter enshrines two principles that at times, and perhaps increasingly, conflict. On the one hand, article 2 enshrines states' sovereign rights as the or- ganizing principle of the international system. The corollary for intervention is a near absolute rule of nonintervention. On the other hand, article 1 of the charter emphasizes promoting respect for hu-

man rights and justice as a fundamental mission of the organization, and subsequent UN actions (adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among them) have strengthened these claims. Gross humanitarian abuses by states against their own citizens of the kinds discussed in this es- say bring these two central principles into conflict.

The humanitarian intervention norms that have evolved within these conflicting principles ap- pear to allow intervention in cases of humanitarian disaster and abuse, but with at least two caveats. First, they are permissive norms only. They do not require intervention, as the cases of Burundi, Su- dan, and other states make clear. Second, they place strict requirements on the ways in which in- tervention, if employed, may be carried out: Hu- manitarian intervention must be multilateral if states are to accept it as legitimate and genuinely humanitarian. Further, it must be organized under UN auspices or with explicit UN consent. If at all possible, the intervention force should be com- posed according to UN procedures, meaning that intervening forces must include some number of troops from "disinterested" states, usually midlevel powers outside the region of conflict—another dimension of multilateralism not found in nineteenth-century practice.

Contemporary multilateralism thus differs from the multilateral action of the nineteenth cen- tury. The latter was what John Ruggie might call "quantitative" multilateralism and only thinly so . 4 4

Nineteenth-century multilateralism was strategic. States intervened together to keep an eye on each other and discourage adventurism or exploitation of the situation for nonhumanitarian gains. Mult i - lateralism was driven by shared fears and perceived threats, not by shared norms and principles. States did not even coordinate and collaborate exten- sively to achieve their goals. Military deployments in the nineteenth century may have been contem- poraneous, but they were largely separate; there was virtually no joint planning or coordination of operations. This follows logically from the nature of multilateralism, since strategic surveillance of one's partners is not a shared goal but a private one.

Recent interventions exhibit much more of what Ruggie calls the "qualitative dimension" of multilateralism. They are organized according to and in defense of "generalized principles" of inter- national responsibility and the use of military force, many of which are codified in the United Nations charter, declarations, and standard oper- ating procedures. These emphasize international responsibilities for ensuring human rights and jus- tice and dictate appropriate means of intervening, such as the necessity of obtaining Security Council authorization for action. The difference between contemporary and nineteenth-centuiy multilater- alism also appears at the operational level. The Greek intervention was multilateral only in the sense that more than one state had forces in the area at the same time. There was little joint plan- ning and no integration of forces from different states. By contrast, contemporary multilateralism requires extensive joint planning and force integra- tion. UN norms require that intervening forces be composed not just of troops from more than one state but of troops from disinterested states, preferably not great powers—precisely the oppo- site nineteenth-century multilateral practice.

Contemporary multilateralism is political and normative, not strategic. It is shaped by shared no- tions about when the use of force is legitimate and appropriate, Contemporary legitimacy criteria for the use of force, in turn, derive from these shared principles, articulated most often through the U N , about consultation and coordination with other states before acting and about multinational com- position of forces. U.S. interventions in Somalia and Haiti were not made multilateral because the U.S. needed the involvement of other states for military or strategic reasons. The U.S. was capable of supplying the forces necessary and, in fact, did supply the lion's share of the forces. No other great power was particularly worried about U.S. oppor- tunism in these areas, and so none joined the ac- tion for surveillance reasons. These interventions were multilateral for political and normative rea- sons. For these operations to be legitimate and politically acceptable, the U.S. needed UN autho- rization and international participation. Whereas

Russia, France, and Britain tolerated each other's presence in the operation to save Christians from the infidel Turk, the U.S. had to beg other states to join it for a humanitarian operation in Haiti.

Multilateral norms create political benefits for conformance and costs for nonconforming action. They create, in part, the structure of incentives facing states. Realists or neoliberal institutionalists might argue that in the contemporary world, mul- tilateral behavior is efficient and unproblematically self-interested because multdateralism helps to generate political support both domestically and internationally for intervention. But this argument only begs the question, Why is multilateralism necessary to generate political support? It was not necessary in the nineteenth century. Indeed, multilateralism as currently practiced was incon- ceivable in the nineteenth century. As was dis- cussed earlier, there is nothing about the logic of multilateralism itself that makes it clearly superior to unilateral action. Each has advantages and costs to states, and the costs of multilateral intervention have become abundantly clear in recent UN opera- tions. One testament to the power of these multi- lateral norms is that states adhere to them even when they know that doing so compromises the ef- fectiveness of the mission. Criticisms of the UN's ineffectiveness for military operations are wide- spread. The fact that UN involvement continues to be an essential feature of these operations despite the UN's apparent lack of military competence un- derscores the power of multilateral norms.4 5

Realist and neoliberal approaches cannot ad- dress changing requirements for political legiti- macy like those reflected in changing multilateral practice any more than they can explain the "inter- est" prompting humanitarian intervention and its change over time. A century ago, protecting nonwhite non-Christians was not an "interest" of Western states, certainly not one that could prompt the deployment of troops. Similarly, a cen- tury ago states saw no interest in multilateral au- thorization, coordination, force integration, and use of troops from "disinterested" states. The argu- ment of this essay is that these interests and incen- tives have been constituted socially through state

practice and the evolution of shared norms by which states act. Humanitarian intervention is not new. It has, however, changed over time in some systemic and important ways. First, the definition of who qualifies as human and therefore as deserv- ing of humanitarian protection by foreign govern- ments has changed. Whereas in the nineteenth century European Christians were the sole focus of humanitarian intervention, this focus has been ex- panded and universalized such that by the late twentieth century all human beings are treated as equally deserving in the international normative discourse. * * *

Second, while humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century was frequently multilateral, it was not necessarily so. Russia, for example, claimed humanitarian justifications for its intervention in Bulgaria in the 1870s; France was similarly allowed to intervene unilaterally, with no companion force to guard against adventurism. These claims were not contested, much less rejected, by other states, as the claims of India, Tanzania, and Vietnam were (or would have been, had they made such claims) a century later, despite the fact that Russia, at least, had nonhumanitarian motives to intervene. By the twentieth century, not only does multilateralism appear to be necessary to claim humanitarian justi- fications but sanction by the United Nations or some other formal organization is also required. The U.S., Britain, and France, for example, went out of their way to find authority in UN resolutions for their protection of Kurds in Iraq.

The foregoing account also illustrates that these changes have come about through continual contestation over norms related to humanitarian intervention. The abolition of slavery, of the slave trade, and of colonization were all highly visible, often very violent, international contests about norms. Over time some norms won, others lost. The result was that by the second half of the twen- tieth century norms about who was "human" had changed, expanding the population deserving of humanitarian protection. At the same time norms about multilateral action had been strengthened, making multilateralism not just attractive but imperative.

Finally, I have argued here that the interna- tional normative fabric has become increasingly institutionalized in formal international organiza- tions, particularly the United Nations. * * * Inter- national organizations such as the UN play an important role in both arbitrating normative claims and structuring the normative discourse over colonialism, sovereignty, and humanitarian issues.46

Changes in norms create only permissive con- ditions for changes in international political be- havior. One important task of future research will be to define more specifically the conditions under which certain kinds of norms might prevail or fail in influencing action. A related task will be to clar- ify the mechanisms whereby norms are created, changed, and exercise their influence. I have sug- gested a few of these here—public opinion, the media, international institutions. More detailed study of individual cases is needed to clarify the role of each of these mechanisms. Finally, the way in which normative claims are related to power capabilities deserves attention. The traditional Gramscian view would argue that these are coter- minous; the international normative structure is created by and serves the most powerful. Humani- tarian action generally, and humanitarian inter- vention specifically, do not obviously serve the powerful. The expansion of humanitarian inter- vention practices since the last century suggests that the relationship between norms and power may not be so simple.

NOTES 1. One could have subsystemic normative con-

texts as well, as illustrated by several essays in this volume.

2. The term military intervention in this essay refers to the deploying of military forces by a foreign power or powers for the purpose of controlling domestic policies or political arrangements in the target state in ways that clearly violate sovereignty. Humanitarian in- tervention is used to mean military interven-

tion with the goal of protecting the lives and welfare of foreign civilians. Note that interven- tions to protect a state's own nationals from abuse are excluded from this analysis. See An- thony Clark Arend and Robert J. Beck, Inter- national Law and the Use of Force: Beyond the UN Charter Paradigm (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. ch. 8; and Fernando Teson, Hu- manitarian Intervention: An Inquiry Into Law and Morality (Dobbs Fetry, N.Y.: Transna- tional Publishers, 1988).

3. For a more extended discussion, see Martha Finnemore, Defining National Interests in In- ternational Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), ch. 1. There is not space here to discuss the various sociological and psycholog- ical links between norms and behavior. For one set of sociological arguments, see Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analy- sis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For a somewhat different view, see James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscov- ering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989). For psychological arguments, see Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

4. Obviously, single-actor characteristics may be defined in relation to or by comparison with those of others, but identification makes affec- tive relationship central in ways that identity does not.

5. The intellectual orientation of the regimes lit- erature probably had much to do with this at- omized treatment of norms. Norms were incorporated as a definitional part of regimes, but regimes were always conceived of as per- taining to individual issue areas. For an ex- tended discussion of normative fabrics and social structures, see Finnemore, Defining Na- tional Interests in International Society,

6. Intervention in the Boxer Rebellion in China (1898-1900) is an interesting related case. I omit it from the analysis here because the

primary goal of the intervenors was to protect their own nationals, not the Chinese. But the intervention did have the happy result of pro- tecting a large number of mostly Christian Chinese from slaughter.

7. J. A. R. Marriott, The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy (Ox- ford: Clarendon Press, 1917), pp. 183-85. There were plenty of atrocities on both sides in this conflict. See Eric Carlton, Massacres: An Historical Perspective (Aldershot, Hants, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 82; Marriott, The East- ern Question, p. 183; Cambridge Modern His- tory (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 10:178-83.

Atrocities continued throughout the five- plus years of the conflict and fueled the Rus- sian claims.

8. France had a long-standing protective arrange- ment with Eastern Christians, described be- low, and had consistendy favored armed intervention (Cambridge Modern History, 10:193).

9. William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 81; C. W. Crawley, The Question of Greek In- dependence (New York: Howard Ferrig, 1973), p. 1; Cambridge Modern History, 10:180.

10. Mason Whiting Tyler, The European Powers and the Near East, 1875-1908 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1925), p. 66 n.; Seton-Watson, Britain in Europe, pp. 519-20; Marriott, The Eastern Question, pp. 291-92; Cambridge Modern History, 12:384.

11. Seton-Watson, Britain in Europe, p. 519. 12. Mercia MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria,

1393-1885 (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 280. 13. Cambridge Modern History, 12:384. 14. Tyler, European Powers and the Near East, p. 70.

Gladstone even published a pamphlet on the subject, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, which sold more than 200,000 copies; Seton-Watson, Britain in Europe, p. 519; Marriott, The Eastern Question, p. 293,

15. MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria, p. 277; Tyler, European Powers and the Near East, p. 21.

16. Arguably, too, the action was not intervention, since the Russians actually declared war. Since the war aims involved reconfiguring internal Ottoman arrangements of rule, however, the incident seems to have properties sufficiently similar to those of intervention to merit con- sideration in this study.

17. Cambridge Modern History, 12:415-17; Mar- riott, The Eastern Question, pp. 349-51.

18. Of course, these events late in the nineteenth century were only the tip of the iceberg. More than a million Armenians were killed by Turks during World War I, but the war environment obviates discussions of military intervention for the purposes of this essay.

19. Indeed, there were many firsthand European accounts of the Constantinople massacres, since execution gangs even forced their way into the houses of foreigners to execute Ar- menian servants (Cambridge Modern History, 12:417).

20. Quotation is from Lord Rosebery, as cited in Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 3:234.

21. Cambridge Modern History, 12:417-18; Sohn and Buergendral, International Protection of Human Rights, p. 181.

22. For more on this, see Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Em- pire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, Reform, Revo- lution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

23. Christopher Hibbert, The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793-1911 (Newton Ab- bot, Devon, Eng.; Readers Union, 1971). Hib- bert estimates that the three-day massacre in Nanking alone killed more than 100,000 peo- ple (p. 303).

24. In one of the more egregious incidents of this kind, the Germans killed sixty-five thousand indigenous inhabitants of German Southwest Africa (Namibia) in 1904, See Barbara Harff, "The Etiology of Genocides," in Isidor Wall i- mann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Geno- cide and the Modem Age: Etiology and Case

Studies of Mass Death, pp. 46, 56 (New York: Greenwood, 1987).

25. The expansion of conceptions of humanity is also relevant to the development of interna- tional human rights and has been discussed by international legal scholars interested in such issues. See, for example, Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), ch. 1.

26. The quotation comes from the Eight Power Declaration concerning the universal abolition of the trade in Negroes, signed February 8, 1815, by Britain, France, Spain, Sweden, Aus- tria, Prussia, Russia, and Portugal (as quoted in Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1970), p. 14).

27. I do not mean to minimize the abuses suffered by freed slaves after emancipation, as Euro- peans tried in various ways to subvert the emancipation guarantees. I only wish to stress that emancipation entailed formal guarantees of a minimal kind.

28. Bethell, Abolition of Brazilian Slave Trade, ch. 1.

29. The United States is a possible exception. 30. For an extended treatment of the importance

of the categories civilized and barbarian on state behavior in the nineteenth century, see Gong, The Standard of "Civilisation" in Inter- national Society,

31. Gerrit Gong provides a much more extensive discussion of what "civilization" meant to Eu- ropeans from an international legal perspec- tive (see ibid.). Uday Mehta investigates the philosophical underpinnings of colonialism in Lockean liberalism and the strategies aimed at the systematic political exclusion of culturally dissimilar colonized peoples by liberals pro- fessing universal freedom and rights. See Uday S. Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," Politics and Society 18 (1990): 427-54.

32. To reiterate, I am making no claims about the causes of decolonization. These causes were obviously complex and have been treated ex- tensively in the vast literature on the subject. I

argue only that humanitarian norms were cen- tral in the justification for decolonization.

33. Neta Crawford makes similar but not identical arguments in "Decolonization as an Interna- tional Norm: The Evolution of Practices, Ar- guments, and Beliefs," in Reed and Kaysen, Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention, pp. 37-61.

34. For an excellent exposition, see Thomas M. Franck, The Power of Legitimacy Among Na- tions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. ch. 10.

35. Crawford, "Decolonization as an International Norm," p. 53. David Lumsdaine makes a simi- lar point about the expanding internal logic of domestic welfare arguments that led to the creation of the foreign aid regime in Moral Vi- sion in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949-1989 (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1993).

36. Even veto power on the Security Council could not protect colonial powers from the de- colonizing trend, as the Suez incident in 1956 made clear to Britain and France.

37. See, for example, Lumsdaine's excellent dis- cussion of the rise and expansion of foreign aid in Moral Vision in International Politics. See also the discussion of humanitarian inter- cession in Sohn and Buergenthal, International Protection of Human Rights.

38. Significantly, those who are more optimistic about solving these problems and about the utility of multilateral action rely on norms to overcome the problems. See Stephen D. Kras- ner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), and Ruggie, Multilat- eralism Matters.

39. Estimates of the number of refugees vary wildly. The Pakistani government put the number at two million; the Indian govern- ment claimed ten million. Independent esti- mates have ranged from five to nine million. See Tes6n, Humanitarian Intervention, p. 182, including n. 163, for discussion.

40. See ibid., p, 186 n. 187, for the text of a Gen- eral Assembly speech by the Indian representa-

tive articulating this justification. See also Ake- hurst, "Humanitarian Intervention," p. 96.

41. Akehurst concludes that India actually had prior statements concerning humanitarian justifications deleted from the Official Record of the UN (Akehurst, "Humanitarian Inter- vention," pp. 96-97).

42. As quoted in ibid., p. 97 n. 17. 43. One reason for the virtual absence of humani-

tarian arguments in this case, as compared with the Tanzanian case, may have been the way in which the intervention was conducted. Tanzania exerted much less control over the kind of regime that replaced Amin, making the subsequent Ugandan regime's defense of Tan- zania's actions as "liberation" less implausible than were Vietnam's claims that it, too, was helping to liberate Cambodia by installing a puppet regime that answered to Hanoi.

44. John G. Ruggie, "Multilateralism: The Anat- omy of an Institution," in Ruggie. Multilater- alism Matters, p. 6.

45. Contemporary multilateralism is not, there- fore, "better" or more efficient and effective than the nineteenth-century brand. My argu- ment is only that it is different. This difference in multilateralism poses a particular challenge to neoliberal institutionalists. Those scholars have sophisticated arguments about why inter- national cooperation should be robust and about why it might vary across issue-areas. They cannot, however, explain these qualita- tive changes in multilateralism, nor can they explain changes in the amount of multilateral activity over time, without appealing to exoge- nous variables (such as changes in markets or technology).

46. For more on the role of IOs in creating and disseminating norms, see Martha Finnemore, "International Organizations as Teachers of Norms: The United Nations Educational, Sci- entific, and Cultural Organization and Science Policy," International Organization 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 599-628.

4 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

Liberals, realists, and radicals offer different conceptions of the international system, as explained in Essentials. One prominent strand of liberal thinking conceives of the international system as an "international society." Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society (1977), a major statement of the so-called English School of international relations, argues that states in international society, no matter how competitive, have nonetheless had common interests, developed common rules, and participated together in common institutions. According to this variant of liberal thinking, these commonalities represent elements of order that regulate competition in the international system.

Realists and radicals disagree about the amount of order found in the international system. Realist Hans Morgenthau writes in Politics Among Nations (1948) that the international system is characterized by the desire of state actors to maximize power. For international stability to be achieved, a balance-of-power system is necessary. In this selection, Morgenthau discusses what states can do to insure that balance. For the radical world-system theorist and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, the international system is a capitalist world-system differentiated into three types of states: the core, periphery, and semiperiphery. Utilizing the historical trends developed in his widely read book, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974), Wallerstein traces the evolution of each group of states. He argues that with each group pursuing its own economic interest, the semiperiphery is the linchpin of the system, being exploited by the core and exploiting the periphery. In the radical vision, like the realist one, the international system is fundamentally conflictual.

Contemporary theorist Robert Jervis of Columbia University offers an inter- pretation of the international system of the twenty-first century. Writing in the influential journal Foreign Policy, Jervis argues that hegemons defend their interests in increasingly "expansive" ways. The United States is no exception, and he offers policymakers advice for avoiding the dangers of the imperial temptation.

H E D L E Y B U L L

Does Order Exist in World Politics?

* * *

The Idea of International Society

Throughout the history of the modern states sys- tem there have been three competing traditions of thought: the Hobbesian or realist tradition, which views international politics as a state of war; the Kantian or universalist tradition, which sees at work in international politics a potential commu- nity of mankind; and the Grotian or international- ist tradition, which views international politics as taking place within an international society.1 Here I shall state what is essential to the Grotian or in- ternationalist idea of international society, and what divides it from the Hobbesian or realist tradi- tion on the one hand, and from the Kantian or universalist tradition on the other. Each of these traditional patterns of thought embodies a descrip- tion of the nature of international politics and a set of prescriptions about international conduct.

The Hobbesian tradition describes interna- tional relations as a state of war of all against all, an arena of struggle in which each state is pitted against every other. International relations, on the Hobbesian view, represent pure conflict between states and resemble a game that is wholly distribu- tive or zero-sum: the interests of each state exclude the interests of any other. The particular interna- tional activity that, on the Hobbesian view, is most typical of international activity as a whole, or best provides the clue to it, is war itself. Thus peace, on the Hobbesian view, is a period of recuperation from the last war and preparation for the next.

The Hobbesian prescription for international conduct is that the state is free to pursue its goals

From Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Or- der in World Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1977), chap. 2,

in relation to other states without moral or legal restrictions of any kind. Ideas of morality and law, on this view, are valid only in the context of a soci- ety, but international life is beyond the bounds of any society. If any moral or legal goals are to be pursued in international politics, these can only be the moral or legal goals of the state itself. Either it is held (as by Machiavelli) that the state conducts foreign policy in a kind of moral and legal vacuum, or it is held (as by Hegel and his successors) that moral behaviour for the state in foreign policy lies in its own self-assertion. The only rules or princi- ples which, for those in the Hobbesian tradition, may be said to limit or circumscribe the behaviour of states in their relations with one another are rules of prudence or expediency. Thus agreements may be kept if it is expedient to keep them, but may be broken if it is not.

The Kantian or universalist tradition, at the other extreme, takes the essential nature of inter- national politics to lie not in conflict among states, as on the Hobbesian view, but in the trans-national social bonds that link the individual human beings who are the subjects or citizens of states. The dom- inant theme of international relations, on the Kantian view, is only apparently the relationship among states, and is really the relationship among all men in the community of mankind—which ex- ists potentially, even if it does not exist actually, and which when it comes into being will sweep the system of states into limbo.2

Within the community of all mankind, on the universalist view, the interests of all men are one and the same; international politics, considered from this perspective, is not a purely distributive or zero-sum game, as the Hobbesians maintain, but a purely cooperative or non-zero-sum game. Con- flicts of interest exist among the ruling cliques of states, but this is only at the superficial or transient level of the existing system of states; properly un-

derstood, the interests of all peoples are the same. The particular international activity which, on the Kantian view, most typifies international activity as a whole is the horizontal conflict of ideology that cuts across the boundaries of states and divides hu- man society into two camps—the trustees of the immanent community of mankind and those who stand in its way, those who are of the true faith and the heretics, the liberators and the oppressed.

The Kantian or universalist view of interna- tional morality is that, in contrast to the Hobbesian conception, there are moral imperatives in the field of international relations limiting the action of states, but that these imperatives enjoin not coexis- tence and co-operation among states but rather the overthrow of the system of states and its replace- ment by a cosmopolitan society. The community of mankind, on the Kantian view, is not only the cen- tral reality in international politics, in the sense that the forces able to bring it into being are present; it is also the end or object of the highest moral endeav- our, The rules that sustain coexistence and social intercourse among states should be ignored if the imperatives of this higher morality require it. Good faith with heretics has no meaning, except in terms of tactical convenience; between the elect and the damned, the liberators and the oppressed, the ques- tion of mutual acceptance of rights to sovereignty or independence does not arise.

What has been called the Grotian or internation- alist tradition stands between the realist tradition and the universalist tradition. The Grotian tradition de- scribes international politics in terms of a society of states or international society.3 As against the Hobbes- ian tradition, the Grotians contend that states are- not engaged in simple struggle, like gladiators in an arena, but are limited in their conflicts with one an- other by common rules and institutions. But as against the Kantian or universalist perspective the Grotians accept the Hobbesian premise that sover- eigns or states are the principal reality in international politics; the immediate members of international so- ciety are states rather than individual human beings. International politics, in the Grotian understanding, expresses neither complete conflict of interest be- tween states nor complete identity of interest; it re-

sembles a game that is partly distributive but also partly productive. The particular international activ- ity which, on the Grotian view, best typifies interna- tional activity as a whole is neither war between states, nor horizontal conflict cutting across the boundaries of states, but trade—or, more generally, economic and social intercourse between one coun- try and another.

The Grotian prescription for international conduct is that all states, in their dealings with one another, are bound by the rules and institutions of the society they form. As against the view of the Hobbesians, states in the Grotian view are bound not only by rules of prudence or expediency but also by imperatives of morality and law. But, as against the view of the universalists, what these im- peratives enjoin is not the overthrow of the system of states and its replacement by a universal com- munity of mankind, but rather acceptance of the requirements of coexistence and co-operation in a society of states.

Each of these traditions embodies a great variety of doctrines about international politics, among which there exists only a loose connection. In different periods each pattern of thought ap- pears in a different idiom and in relation to differ- ent issues and preoccupations. This is not the place to explore further the connections and distinctions within each tradition. Here we have only to take account of the fact that the Grotian idea of interna- tional society has always been present in thought about the states system, and to indicate in broad terms the metamorphoses which, in the last three to four centuries, it has undergone.

CHRISTIAN INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY

In the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies, when the universal political organisation of Western Christendom was still in process of disin- tegration, and modern states in process of articula- tion, the three patterns of thought purporting to describe the new international politics, and to pre- scribe conduct within it, first took shape. On the one hand, thinkers like Machiavelli, Bacon and Hobbes saw the emerging states as confronting one

another in the social and moral vacuum left by the receding respublica Christiana. On the other hand Papal and Imperialist writers fought a rearguard action on behalf of the ideas of the universal au- thority of Pope and Emperor. As against these al- ternatives there was asserted by a third group of thinkers, relying upon the tradition of natural law, the possibility that the princes now making them- selves supreme over local rivals and independent of outside authorities were nevertheless bound by common interests and rules. * * *

* * *

E U R O P E A N I N T E R N A T I O N A L SOCIETY

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the vestiges of Western Christendom came almost to disappear from the theory and practice of inter- national politics, when the state came to be fully articulated, first in its dynastic or absolutist phase, then in its national or popular phase, and when a body of modern inter-state practice came to be ac- cumulated and studied, the idea of international society assumed a different form. * * *

The international society conceived by theo- rists of this period was identified as European rather than Christian in its values or culture. Refer- ences to Christendom or to divine law as cement- ing the society of states declined and disappeared, as did religious oaths in treaties. References to Eu- rope took their place, for example in the tides of their books: in the 1740s the Abbe de Mably pub- lished his Droit public de I'Europe, in the 1770s J. J. Moser his Versuch des neuesten Europaischen Volkerrechts, in the 1790s Burke denounced the regicide Directory of France for having violated "the public law of Europe."4

As the sense grew of the specifically European character of the society of states, so also did the sense of its cultural differentiation from what lay outside: the sense that European powers in their dealings with one another were bound by a code of conduct that did not apply to them in their deal- ings with other and lesser societies. * * *

* * *

W O R L D I N T E R N A T I O N A L SOCIETY

* * *

In the twentieth century international society ceased to be regarded as specifically European and came to be considered as global or world wide. * * *

Today, when non-European states represent the great majority in international society and the United Nations is nearly universal in its mem- bership, the doctrine that this society rests upon a specific culture or civilisation is generally re- jected * * *

In the twentieth century, * * * there has been a retreat from the confident assertions, made in the age of Vattel [France, eighteenth century], that the members of international society were states and nations, towards the ambiguity and imprecision on this point that characterised the era of Grotius [Holland, seventeenth century]. The state as a bearer of rights and dudes, legal and moral, in in- ternational society today is widely thought to be joined by international organisations, by non-state groups of various kinds operating across frontiers, and—as implied by the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals, and by the Universal Dec- laration of Human Rights—by individuals. There is no agreement as to the relative importance of these different kinds of legal and moral agents, or on any general scheme of rules that would relate them one to another, but Vattel's conception of a society simply of states has been under attack from many different directions.

* * *

The twentieth-century emphasis upon ideas of a reformed or improved international society, as dis- tinct from the elements of society in actual prac- tice, has led to a treatment of the League of Nations, the United Nations and other general in- ternational organisations as the chief institutions of international society, to the neglect of those in- stitutions whose role in the maintenance of inter- national order is the central one. Thus there has developed the Wilsonian rejection of the balance of power, the denigration of diplomacy and the

tendency to seek to replace it by international ad- ministration, and a return to the tendency that prevailed in the Grotian era to confuse interna- tional law with international morality or interna- tional improvement.

* * *

T H E E L E M E N T O F S O C I E T Y

My contention is that the element of a society has always been present, and remains present, in the modern international system, although only as one of the elements in it, whose survival is sometimes precarious. The modern international system in fact reflects all three of the elements singled out, respectively, by the Hobbesian, the Kantian and the Grotian traditions: the element of war and struggle for power among states, the element of transnational solidarity and conflict, cutting across the divisions among states, and the element of co- operation and regulated intercourse among states. In different historical phases of the states system, in different geographical theatres of its operation, and in the policies of different states and states- men, one of these three elements may predominate over the others.

* * *

Because international society is no more than one of the basic elements at work in modern interna- tional politics, and is always in competition with the elements of a state of war and of transnational solidarity or conflict, it is always erroneous to inter- pret international events as if international society were the sole or the dominant element. This is the error committed by those who speak or write as if the Concert of Europe, the League of Nations or the United Nations were the principal factors in inter- national politics in their respective times; as if inter- national law were to be assessed only in relation to the function it has of binding states together, and not also in relation to its function as an instrument of state interest and as a vehicle of transnational purposes; as if attempts to maintain a balance of power were to be interpreted only as endeavours to

preserve the system of states, and not also as ma- noeuvres on the part of particular powers to gain ascendancy; as if great powers were to be viewed only as "great responsibles" or "great indispens- ables," and not also as great predators; as if wars were to be construed only as attempts to violate the law or to uphold it, and not also simply as attempts to advance the interests of particular states or of transnational groups. The element of international society is real, but the elements of a state of war and of transnational loyalties and divisions are real also, and to reify the first element, or to speak as if it an- nulled the second and third, is an illusion.

Moreover, the fact that international society provides some element of order in international politics should not be taken as justifying an attitude of complacency about it, or as showing that the ar- guments of those who are dissatisfied with the order provided by international society are without foun- dation. The order provided within modern interna- tional society is precarious and imperfect. To show that modern international society has provided some degree of order is not to have shown that or- der in world politics could not be provided more ef- fectively by structures of a quite different kind.

NOTES 1. This threefold division derives from Martin

Wight. The best published account of it is his "Western Values in International Relations," in Diplomatic Investigations, ed. Herbert Butter- field and Martin Wight (London: Allen & Un- win, 1967). The division is further discussed in my "Martin Wight and The Theory of Inter- national Relations. The Second Martin Wight Memorial Lecture," British Journal of Interna- tional Studies, vol. II, no. 2 (1976).

2. In Kant's own doctrine there is of course am- bivalence as between the universalism of The Idea of Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point Of View (1784) and the position taken up in Perpetual Peace (1795), in which Kant accepts the substitute goal of a league of "republican" states.

3. I have myself used the term "Grotian" in two senses: (i) as here, to describe the broad doctrine that there is a society of states; (ii) to describe the solidarist form of this doc- trine, which united Grotius himself and the twentieth-century neo-Grotians, in opposi- tion to the pluralist conception of international society entertained by Vattel and later positivist

writers. See "The Grotian Conception of In- ternational Society," in Diplomatic Investiga- tions.

4. See "Third Letter on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France," in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. John C. Nimmo (London: Bohn's British Classics, 1887).

H A N S M O R G E N T H A U

The Balance of Power1

The aspiration for power on the part of several nations, each trying either to maintain or overthrow the status quo, leads of necessity

to a configuration that is called the balance of power and to policies that aim at preserving it. We say "of necessity" advisedly. For here again we are confronted with the basic misconception that has impeded the understanding of international poli- tics and has made us the prey of illusions. This misconception asserts that men have a choice be- tween power politics and its necessary outgrowth, the balance of power, on the other hand, and a dif- ferent, better kind of international relations on the other. It insists that a foreign policy based on the balance of power is one among several possible foreign policies and that only stupid and evil men will choose the former and reject the latter.

It will be shown * * * that the international balance of power is only a particular manifestation of a general social principle to which all societies composed of a number of autonomous units owe the autonomy of their component parts; that the

From Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), chaps. 11, 12,14, Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

balance of power and policies aiming at its preser- vation are not only inevitable but are an essential stabilizing factor in a society of sovereign nations; and that the instability of the international balance of power is due not to the faultiness of the princi- ple but to the particular conditions under which the principle must operate in a society of sovereign nations.

Social Equilibrium

B A L A N C E O F P O W E R A S U N I V E R S A L C O N C E P T

The concept of "equilibrium" as a synonym for "balance" is commonly employed in many sci- ences—physics, biology, economics, sociology, and political science. It signifies stability within a sys- tem composed of a number of autonomous forces, Whenever the equilibrium is disturbed either by an outside force or by a change in one or the other el- ements composing the system, the system shows a tendency to re-establish either the original or a new equdibrium. Thus equilibrium exists in the human body, While the human body changes in the process of growth, the equilibrium persists as long as the changes occurring in the different or- gans of the body do not disturb the body's sta-

bility. This is especially so if the quantitative and qualitative changes in the different organs are pro- portionate to each other. When, however, the body suffers a wound or loss of one of its organs through outside interference, or experiences a malignant growth or a pathological transformation of one of its organs, the equilibrium is disturbed, and the body tries to overcome the disturbance by reestab- lishing the equilibrium either on the same or a dif- ferent level from the one that obtained before the disturbance occurred.2

The same concept of equilibrium is used in a social science, such as economics, with reference to the relations between the different elements of the economic system, e.g., between savings and invest- ments, exports and imports, supply and demand, costs and prices. Contemporary capitalism itself has been described as a system of "countervailing power."3 It also applies to society as a whole. Thus we search for a proper balance between different geographical regions, such as the East and the West, the North and the South; between different kinds of activities, such as agriculture and industry, heavy and light industries, big and small busi- nesses, producers and consumers, management and labor, between different functional groups, such as city and country, the old, the middle-aged, and the young, the economic and the political

sphere, the middle classes and the upper and lower classes.

Two assumptions are at the foundation of all such equilibriums: first, that the elements to be balanced are necessary for society or are entitled to exist and, second, that without a state of equilib- rium among them one element will gain ascen- dancy over the others, encroach upon their interests and rights, and may ultimately destroy them. Consequently, it is the purpose of all such equilibriums to maintain the stability of the system without destroying the multiplicity of the elements composing it. If the goal were stability alone, it could be achieved by allowing one element to de- stroy or overwhelm the others and take their place. Since the goal is stability plus the preservation of all the elements of the system, the equilibrium must aim at preventing any element from gaining ascendancy over the others. The means employed to maintain the equilibrium consist in allowing the different elements to pursue their opposing ten- dencies up to the point where the tendency of one is not so strong as to overcome the tendency of the others, but strong enough to prevent the others from overcoming its own. * * *

* * *

Different Methods of the

Balance of Power

The balancing process can be carried on either by diminishing the weight of the heavier scale or by increasing the weight of the lighter one.

Divide and Rule

The former method has found its classic manifes- tation, aside from the imposition of onerous con-

ditions in peace treaties and the incitement to treason and revolution, in the maxim "divide and rule." It has been resorted to by nations who tried to make or keep their competitors weak by divid- ing them or keeping them divided. The most con- sistent and important policies of this kind in modern times are the policy of France with respect to Germany and the policy of the Soviet Union with respect to the rest of Europe. From the

seventeenth century to the end of the Second World War, it has been an unvarying principle of French foreign policy either to favor the division of the German Empire into a number of small inde- pendent states or to prevent the coalescence of such states into one unified nation. * * * Simi- larly, the Soviet Union from the twenties to the present has consistently opposed all plans for the unification of Europe, on the assumption that the pooling of the divided strength of the Euro- pean nations into a "Western bloc" would give the enemies of the Soviet Union such power as to threaten the latter's security.

The other method of balancing the power of several nations consists in adding to the strength of the weaker nation. This method can be carried out by two different means: Either B can increase its power sufficiently to offset, if not surpass, the power of A, and vice versa; or B can pool its power with the power of all the other nations that pursue identical policies with regard to A, in which case A will pool its power with all the nations pursuing identical policies with respect to B. The former al- ternative is exemplified by the policy of compen- sations and the armament race as well as by disarmament; the latter, by the policy of alliances.

Compensations

Compensations of a territorial nature were a com- mon device in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies for maintaining a balance of power which had been, or was to be, disturbed by the territorial acquisitions of one nation. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which terminated the War of the Spanish Succession, recognized for the first time expressly the principle of the balance of power by way of ter- ritorial compensations. It provided for the division of most of the Spanish possessions, European and colonial, between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons "ad conservandum in Europa equilibrium," as the treaty put it.

* * *

In the latter part of the nineteenth and the begin- ning of the twentieth century, the principle of

compensations was again deliberately applied to the distribution of colonial territories and the de- limitation of colonial or semicolonial spheres of influence. Africa, in particular, was during that period the object of numerous treaties delimit- ing spheres of influence for the major colonial powers. Thus the competition between France, Great Britain, and Italy for the domination of Ethiopia was provisionally resolved * * * by the treaty of 1906, which divided the country into three spheres of influence for the purpose of estab- lishing in that region a balance of power among the nations concerned. * * *

Even where the principle of compensations is not deliberately applied, however, * * * it is nowhere absent from political arrangements, terri- torial or other, made within a balance-of-power system. For, given such a system, no nation will agree to concede political advantages to another nation without the expectation, which may or may not be well founded, of receiving proportionate advantages in return. The bargaining of diplomatic negotiations, issuing in political compromise, is but the principle of compensations in its most gen- eral form, and as such it is organically connected with the balance of power.

Armaments

The principal means, however, by which a nation endeavors with the power at its disposal to main- tain or re-establish the balance of power are arma- ments. The armaments race in which Nation A tries to keep up with, and then to outdo, the arma- ments of Nation B, and vice versa, is the typical in- strumentality of an unstable, dynamic balance of power. The necessary corollary of the armaments race is a constantly increasing burden of military preparations devouring an ever greater portion of the national budget and making for ever deepening fears, suspicions, and insecurity. The situation pre- ceding the First World War, with the naval compe- tition between Germany and Great Britain and the rivalry of the French and German armies, illus- trates this point.

It is in recognition of situations such as these

that, since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, re- peated attempts have been made to create a stable balance of power, if not to establish permanent peace, by means of the proportionate disarmament of competing nations. The technique of stabilizing the balance of power by means of a proportionate reduction of armaments is somewhat similar to the technique of territorial compensations. For both techniques require a quantitative evaluation of the influence that the arrangement is likely to exert on the respective power of the individual nations. The difficulties in making such a quantitative evalua- tion—in correlating, for instance, the military strength of the French army of 1932 with the mili- tary power represented by the industrial potential of Germany—have greatly contributed to the fail- ure of most attempts at creating a stable balance of power by means of disarmament. The only out- standing success of this kind was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, in which Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy agreed to a proportionate reduction and limitation of naval armanents. Yet it must be noted that this treaty was part of an over-all political and territorial set- tlement in the Pacific which sought to stabilize the power relations in that region on the foundation of Anglo-American predominance.

Alliances

The historically most important manifestation of the balance of power, however, is to be found not in the equilibrium of two isolated nations but in the relations between one nation or alliance of na- tions and another alliance.

* * *

Alliances are a necessary function of the balance of power operating within a multiple-state system. Nations A and B, competing with each other, have three choices in order to maintain and improve tiieir relative power positions. They can increase their own power, they can add to their own power the power of other nations, or they can withhold the power of other nations from the adversary. When they make the first choice, they embark

upon an armaments race. When they choose the second and third alternatives, they pursue a policy of alliances.

Whether or not a nation shall pursue a policy of alliances is, then, a matter not of principle but of expediency. A nation will shun alliances if it be- lieves that it is strong enough to hold its own un- aided or that the burden of the commitments resulting from the alliance is likely to outweigh the advantages to be expected. It is for one or the other or both of these reasons that, throughout the better part of their history, Great Britain and the United States have refrained from entering into peacetime alliances with other nations.

* * *

The "Holder" of the Balance

Whenever the balance of power is to be realized by means of an alliance—and this has been generally so throughout the history of the Western world— two possible variations of this pattern have to be distinguished. To use the metaphor of the balance, the system may consist of two scales, in each of which are to be found the nation or nations identi- fied with the same policy of the status quo or of imperialism. The continental nations of Europe have generally operated the balance of power in this way.

The system may, however, consist of two scales plus a third element, the "holder" of the balance or the "balancer." The balancer is not permanently identified with the policies of either nation or group of nations. Its only objective within the sys- tem is the maintenance of the balance, regardless of the concrete policies the balance will serve. In consequence, the holder of the balance will throw its weight at one time in this scale, at another time in the other scale, guided only by one considera- tion—the relative position of the scales. Thus it will put its weight always in the scale that seems to be higher than the other because it is lighter. The balancer may become in a relatively short span of history consecutively the friend and foe of all major powers, provided they all consecutively

threaten the balance by approaching predomi- nance over the others and are in turn threatened by others about to gain such predominance. To paraphrase a statement of Palmerston: while the holder of the balance has no permanent friends, it has no permanent enemies either; it has only the permanent interest of maintaining the balance of power itself.

The balancer is in a position of "splendid isola- tion." It is isolated by its own choice; for, while the two scales of the balance must vie with each other to add its weight to theirs in order to gain the over- weight necessary for success, it must refuse to enter into permanent ties with either side. The holder of the balance waits in the middle in watchful detach- ment to see which scale is likely to sink. Its isola- tion is "splendid"; for, since its support or lack of support is the decisive factor in the struggle for power, its foreign policy, if cleverly managed, is able to extract the highest price from those whom it supports. But since this support, regardless of the price paid for it, is always uncertain and shifts from one side to the other in accordance with the movements of the balance, its policies are resented and subject to condemnation on moral grounds. Thus it has been said of the outstanding balancer in modern times, Great Britain, that it lets others fight its wars, that it keeps Europe divided in order to dominate the continent, and that the fickleness of its policies is such as to make alliances with

Great Britain impossible. "Perfidious Albion" has become a byword in the mouths of those who either were unable to gain Great Britain's sup- port, however hard they tried, or else lost it after they had paid what seemed to them too high a price.

The holder of the balance occupies the key po- sition in the balance-of-power system, since its po- sition determines the outcome of the struggle for power. It has, therefore, been called the "arbiter" of the system, deciding who will win and who will lose. By making it impossible for any nation or combination of nations to gain predominance over the others, it preserves its own independence as well as the independence of all the other nations, and is thus a most powerful factor in international politics.

The holder of the balance can use this power in three different ways. It can make its joining one or the other nation or alliance dependent upon cer- tain conditions favorable to the maintenance or restoration of the balance. It can make its support of the peace settlement dependent upon similar conditions. It can, finally, in either situation see to it that the objectives of its own national policy, apart from the maintenance of the balance of power, are realized in the process of balancing the power of others.

* * *

Evaluation of the Balance of Power

* * *

The Unreality of the Balance of Power

[The] uncertainty of all power calculations not only makes the balance of power incapable of prac- tical application but leads also to its very negation in practice. Since no nation can be sure that its cal- culation of the distribution of power at any partic-

ular moment in history is correct, it must at Least make sure that, whatever errors it may commit, they will not put the nation at a disadvantage in the contest for power. In other words, the nation must try to have at least a margin of safety which will al- low it to make erroneous calculations and still maintain the balance of power, To that effect, all nations actively engaged in the struggle for power must actually aim not at a balance—that is, equality

— o f power, but at superiority of power in their own behalf. And since no nation can foresee how large its miscalculations will turn out to be, all na- tions must ultimately seek the maximum of power obtainable under the circumstances. Only thus can they hope to attain the maximum margin of safety commensurate with the maximum of errors they might commit. The limitless aspiration for power, potentially always present * * * in the power drives of nations, finds in the balance of power a mighty incentive to transform itself into an actuality.

Since the desire to attain a maximum of power is universal, all nations must always be afraid that their own miscalculations and the power increases of other nations might add up to an inferiority for themselves which they must at all costs try to avoid. Hence all nations who have gained an ap- parent edge over their competitors tend to consol- idate that advantage and use it for changing the distribution of power permanently in their favor. This can be done through diplomatic pressure by bringing the full weight of that advantage to bear upon the other nations, compelling them to make the concessions that will consolidate the temporary advantage into a permanent superiority. It can also be done by war. Since in a balance-of-power sys- tem all nations live in constant fear lest their rivals deprive them, at the first opportune moment, of their power position, all nations have a vital inter- est in anticipating such a development and doing unto the others what they do not want the others to do unto them. * * *

NOTES 1. The term "balance of power" is used in the text

with four different meanings: (1) as a policy aimed at a certain state of affairs, (2) as an ac- tual state of affairs, (3) as an approximately equal distribution of power, (4) as any distribu- tion of power. Whenever the term is used with- out qualification, it refers to an actual state of affairs in which power is distributed among sev-

eral nations with approximate equality. * * * 2. Cf , for instance, the impressive analogy be-

tween the equilibrium in the human body and in society in Walter B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W. W. Norton and Com- pany, 1932), pp. 293, 294: "At the outset it is noteworthy that the body politic itself exhibits some indications of crude automatic stabilizing processes. In the previous chapter I expressed the postulate that a certain degree of constancy in a complex system is itself evidence that agen- cies are acting or are ready to act to maintain that constancy. And moreover, that when a sys- tem remains steady it does so because any ten- dency towards change is met by increased effectiveness of the factor or factors which resist the change. Many familiar facts prove that these statements are to some degree true for society even in its present unstabilized condition. A display of conservatism excites a radical revolt and that in turn is followed by a return to con- servatism. Loose government and its conse- quences bring the reformers into power, but their tight reins soon provoke restiveness and the desire for release. The noble enthusiasms and sacrifices of war are succeeded by moral ap- athy and orgies of self-indulgence. Hardly any strong tendency in a nation continues to the stage of disaster; before that extreme is reached corrective forces arise which check the tendency and they commonly prevail to such an excessive degree as themselves to cause a reaction, A study of the nature of these social swings and their reversal might lead to valuable under- standing and possibly to means of more nar- rowly limiting the disturbances. At this point, however, we merely note that the disturbances are roughly limited, and that this limitation suggests, perhaps, the early stages of social homeostasis." (Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Copyright 1932, 1939, by Walter B. Cannon.)

3. John K. Galbraith, American Capitalism, the Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Miff l in , 1952).

I M M A N U E L W A L L E R S T E I N

The Rise and Future Demise of the World

Capitalist System: Concepts for

Comparative Analysis

The growth within the capitalist world-economy of the industrial sector of produc-tion, the so-called "industrial revolution," was accompanied by a very strong current of thought which defined this change as both a process of organic development and of progress. There were those who considered these economic developments and the concomitant changes in so- cial organization to be some penultimate stage of world development whose final working out was but a matter of time. These included such diverse thinkers as Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Weber, Durkheim. And then there were the critics, most notably Marx, who argued, if you will, that the nineteenth-century present was only an antepenul- timate stage of development, that the capitalist world was to know a cataclysmic political revolution which would then lead in the fullness of time to a fi- nal societal form, in this case the classless society.

One of the great strengths of Marxism was that, being an oppositional and hence critical doctrine, it called attention not merely to the contradictions of the system but to those of its ideologists, by ap- pealing to the empirical evidence of historical real- ity which unmasked the irrelevancy of the models proposed for the explanation of the social world. The Marxist critics saw in abstracted models con- crete rationalization, and they argued their case fundamentally by pointing to the failure of their opponents to analyze the social whole. * * *

From Comparative Studies in Society and History 14, no. 4 (1974): 387—415. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

We take the defining characteristic of a social sys- tem to be the existence within it of a division of la- bor, such that the various sectors or areas within are dependent upon economic exchange with oth- ers for the smooth and continuous provisioning of the needs of the area. Such economic exchange can clearly exist without a common political structure and even more obviously without sharing the same culture.

A minisystem is an entity that has within it a complete division of labor, and a single cultural framework. Such systems are found only in very simple agricultural or hunting and gathering soci- eties. Such minisystems no longer exist in the world. Furthermore, there were fewer in the past than is often asserted, since any such system that became tied to an empire by the payment of trib- ute as "protection costs"1 ceased by that fact to be a "system," no longer having a self-contained divi- sion of labor. For such an area, the payment of tribute marked a shift, in Polanyi's language, from being a reciprocal economy to participating in a larger redistributive economy.2

Leaving aside the now defunct minisystems, the only kind of social system is a world-system, which we define quite simply as a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural systems. It follows logically that there can, however, be two varieties of such world-systems, one with a com- mon political system and one without. We shall designate these respectively as world-empires and world-economies.

It turns out empirically that world-economies have historically been unstable structures leading either towards disintegration or conquest by one group and hence transformation into a world-

empire. Examples of such world-empires emerg- ing from world-economies are all the so-called great civilizations of premodern times, such as China, Egypt, Rome (each at appropriate periods of its history). On the other hand, the so-called nineteenth-century empires, such as Great Britain or France, were not world-empires at all, but nation-states with colonial appendages operating within the framework of a world-economy.

World-empires were basically redistributive in economic form. No doubt they bred clusters of merchants who engaged in economic exchange (primarily long distance trade), but such clusters, however large, were a minor part of the total econ- omy and not fundamentally determinative of its fate. * * *

It was only with the emergence of the modern world-economy in sixteenth-century Europe that we saw the full development and economic pre- dominance of market trade. This was the system called capitalism. Capitalism and a world-economy (that is, a single division of labor but multiple poli- ties and cultures) are obverse sides of the same coin. One does not cause the other. We are merely defining the same indivisible phenomenon by dif- ferent characteristics.

How and why it came about that this particular European world-economy of the sixteenth century did not become transformed into a redistributive world-empire but developed definitively as a capi- talist world-economy I have explained elsewhere.3

The genesis of this world-historical turning point is marginal to the issues under discussion in this paper, which is rather what conceptual apparatus one brings to bear on the analysis of developments within the framework of precisely such a capitalist world-economy.

Let us therefore turn to the capitalist world- economy. * * *

* * *

We must start with how one demonstrates the ex- istence of a single division of labor. We can regard a division of labor as a grid which is substantially interdependent. Economic actors operate on some assumption (obviously seldom clear to any indi-

vidual actor) that the totality of their essential needs—of sustenance, protection, and pleasure— will be met over a reasonable time span by a com- bination of their own productive activities and exchange in some form. The smallest grid that would substantially meet the expectations of the overwhelming majority of actors within those boundaries constitutes a single division of labor.

The reason why a small farming community whose only significant link to outsiders is the pay- ment of annual tribute does not constitute such a single division of labor is that the assumptions of persons living in it concerning the provision of protection involve an "exchange" with other parts of the world-empire.

This concept of a grid of exchange relationships assumes, however, a distinction between essential exchanges and what might be called "luxury" ex- changes. This is to be sure a distinction rooted in the social perceptions of the actors and hence in both their social organization and their culture. These perceptions can change. But this distinction is crucial if we are not to fall into the trap of identi- fying every exchange activity as evidence of the exis- tence of a system. Members of a system (a minisystem or a world-system) can be linked in limited exchanges with elements located outside the system, in the "external arena" of the system.

The form of such an exchange is very limited. Elements of the two systems can engage in an ex- change of preciosities. That is, each can export to the other what is in its system socially defined as worth little in return for the import of what in its system is defined as worth much. This is not a mere pedantic definitional exercise, as the ex- change of preciosities between world-systems can be extremely important in the historical evolution of a given world-system. The reason why this is so important is that in an exchange of preciosities, the importer is "reaping a windfall" and not obtaining a profit. Both exchange partners can reap windfalls simultaneously but only one can obtain maximum profit, since the exchange of surplus value within a system is a zero-sum game.

We are, as you see, coming to the essential fea- ture of a capitalist world-economy, which is

production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as fur- ther production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin. The classical economists tried to argue that such production for the market was somehow the "natural" state of man. But the combined writings of the anthropologists and the Marxists left few in doubt that such a mode of pro- duction (these days called "capitalism") was only one of several possible modes.

Since, however, the intellectual debate between the liberals and the Marxists took place in the era of the industrial revolution, there has tended to be a de facto confusion between industrialism and capitalism. This left the liberals after 1945 in the dilemma of explaining how a presumably non- capitalist society, the USSR, had industrialized. The most sophisticated response has been to con- ceive of "liberal capitalism" and "socialism" as two variants of an "industrial society," two variants destined to "converge." * * * But the same con- fusion left the Marxists, including Marx, with the problem of explaining what was the mode of pro- duction that predominated in Europe from the six- teenth to the eighteenth centuries, that is before the industrial revolution. Essentially, most Marx- ists have talked of a "transitional" stage, which is in fact a blurry non-concept with no operational in- dicators, This dilemma is heightened if the unit of analysis used is the state, in which case one has to explain why the transition has occurred at different rates and times in different countries.

Marx himself handled this by drawing a dis- tinction between "merchant capitalism" and "in- dustrial capitalism." This I believe is unfortunate teminology, since it leads to such conclusions as that of Maurice Dobb who says of this "transi- tional" period:

But why speak of this as a stage of capitalism at all? The workers were generally not proletarianized: that is, they were not separated from the instruments of production, nor even in many cases from occupa- tion of a plot of land. Production was scattered and decentralized and not concentrated. The capitalist

was still predominantly a merchant [italics mine] who did not control production directly and did not impose his own discipline upon the work of artisan- craftsmen, who both laboured as individual (or fam- ily) units and retained a considerable measure of independence (if a dwindling one).4

One might well say: why indeed? Especially if one remembers how much emphasis Dobb places a few pages earlier on capitalism as a mode of pro- duction—how then can the capitalist be primarily a merchant?—on the concentration of such owner- ship in the hands of a few, and on the fact that capitalism is not synonymous with private owner- ship, capitalism being different from a system in which the owners are "small peasant producers or artisan-producers." Dobb argues that a defining feature of private ownership under capitalism is that some are "obliged to [work for those that own] since [they own] nothing and [have] no ac- cess to means of production [and hence] have no other means of livelihood."5 Given this contradic- tion, the answer Dobb gives to his own question is in my view very weak: "While it is true that at this date the situation was transitional, and capital-to- wage-labour relations were still immaturely devel- oped, the latter were already beginning to assume their characteristic features."6

If capitalism is a mode of production, produc- tion for profit in a market, then we ought, I should have thought, to look to whether or not such pro- duction was or was not occurring. It turns out in fact that it was, and in a very substantial form. Most of this production, however, was not indus- trial production. What was happening in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is that over a large geographical area going from Poland in the northeast westwards and south- wards throughout Europe and including large parts of the Western Hemisphere as well, there grew up a world-economy with a single division of labor within which there was a world market, for which men produced largely agricultural prod- ucts for sale and profit. I would think the simplest thing to do would be to call this agricultural capi- talism.

This then resolves the problems incurred by

using the pervasiveness of wage labor as a defining characteristic of capitalism. An individual is no less a capitalist exploiting labor because the state assists him to pay his laborers low wages (including wages in kind) and denies these laborers the right to change employment. Slavery and so-called "sec- ond serfdom" are not to be regarded as anomalies in a capitalist system. Rather the so-called serf in Poland or the Indian on a Spanish encomienda in New Spain in this sixteenth-century world- economy were working for landlords who "paid" them (however euphemistic this term) for cash crop production. This is a relationship in which la- bor power is a commodity (how could it ever be more so than under slavery?), quite different from the relationship of a feudal serf to his lord in eleventh-century Burgundy, where the economy was not oriented to a world market, and where la- bor power was (therefore?) in no sense bought or sold.

Capitalism thus means labor as a commodity to be sure, But in the era of agricultural capitalism, wage labor is only one of the modes in which labor is recruited and recompensed in the labor market, Slavery, coerced cash-crop production (my name for the so-called "second feudalism"), sharecrop- ping, and tenancy are all alternative modes. It would be too long to develop here the conditions under which differing regions of the world- economy tend to specialize in different agricultural products. * * *

What we must notice now is that this special- ization occurs in specific and differing geographic regions of the world-economy. This regional spe- cialization comes about by the attempts of actors in the market to avoid the normal operation of the market whenever it does not maximize their profit. The attempts of these actors to use non-market de- vices to ensure short-run profits makes them turn to the political entities which have in fact power to affect the market—the nation-states. * * *

In any case, the local capitalist classes—cash- crop landowners (often, even usually, nobility) and merchants—turned to the state, not only to liber- ate them from non-market constraints (as tradi- tionally emphasized by liberal historiography) but

to create new constraints on the new market, the market of the European world-economy.

By a series of accidents—historical, ecological, geographic—northwest Europe was better situated in the sixteenth century to diversify its agricultural specialization and add to it certain industries (such as textiles, shipbuilding, and metal wares) than were other parts of Europe. Northwest Europe emerged as the core area of this world-economy, specializing in agricultural production of higher skill levels, which favored (again for reasons too complex to develop) tenancy and wage labor as the modes of labor control. Eastern Europe and the Western Hemisphere became peripheral areas spe- cializing in export of grains, bullion, wood, cotton, sugar—all of which favored the use of slavery and coerced cash-crop labor as the modes oflabor con- trol. Mediterranean Europe emerged as the semi- peripheral area of this world-economy specializing in high-cost industrial products (for example, silks) and credit and specie transactions, which had as a consequence in the agricultural arena share- cropping as the mode of labor control and little export to other areas.

The three structural positions in a world- economy—core, periphery, and semiperiphery— had become stabilized by about 1640. How certain areas became one and not the other is a long story.7

The key fact is that given slightly different starting points, the interests of various local groups con- verged in northwest Europe, leading to the devel- opment of strong state mechanisms, and diverged sharply in the peripheral areas, leading to very weak ones. Once we get a difference in the strength of the state machineries, we get the operation of "unequal exchange"8 which is enforced by strong states on weak ones, by core states on peripheral areas, Thus capitalism involves not only appropri- ation of the surplus value by an owner from a la- borer, but an appropriation of surplus of the whole world-economy by core areas. * * *

In the early Middle Ages, there was to be sure trade. But it was largely either "local," in a region that we might call the "extended" manor, or "long- distance," primarily of luxury goods. There was no exchange of "bulk" goods, of "staples" across

intermediate-size areas, and hence no production for such markets. Later on in the Middle Ages, world-economies may be said to have come into existence, one centering on Venice, a second on the cities of Flanders and the Hanse. For various reasons, these structures were hurt by the retrac- tions (economic, demographic, and ecological) of the period 1300-1450. It is only with the creating of a European division of labor after 1450 that cap- italism found firm roots.

Capitalism was from the beginning an affair of the world-economy and not of nation-states. It is a misreading of the situation to claim that it is only in the twentieth century that capitalism has be- come "world-wide," although this claim is fre- quently made in various writings, particularly by Marxists. Typical of this line of argument is Charles Bettelheim's response to Arghiri Em- manuel's discussion of unequal exchange:

The tendency of the capitalist mode of production to become worldwide is manifested not only through the constitution of a group of national economies forming a complex and hierarchical structure, including an imperialist pole and a domi- nated one, and not only through the antagonistic re- lations that develop between the different "national economies" and the different states, but also through the constant "transcending" of "national limits" by big capital (the formation of "interna- tional big capital," "world firms," etc....) 9

The whole tone of these remarks ignores the fact that capital has never allowed its aspirations to be determined by national boundaries in a capitalist world-economy, and that the creation of "na- tional" barriers—generically, mercantilism—has historically been a defensive mechanism of capital- ists located in states which are one level below the high point of strength in the system. Such was the case of England vis-a-vis the Netherlands in 1660-1715, France vis-a-vis England in 1715-1815, Germany vis-a-vis Britain in the nineteenth cen- tury, the Soviet U n i o n vis-a-vis the US in the twen- tieth. In the process a large number of countries create national economic barriers whose conse- quences often last beyond their initial objectives. At this later point in the process the very same cap-

italists who pressed their national governments to impose the restrictions now find these restrictions constraining. This is not an "internationalization" of "national" capital, This is simply a new political demand by certain sectors of the capitalist classes who have at all points in time sought to maximize their profits within the real economic market, that of the world-economy.

If this is so, then what meaning does it have to talk of structural positions within this economy and identify states as being in one of these posi- tions? And why talk of three positions, inserting that of "semiperiphery" in between the widely used concepts of core and periphery? The state ma- chineries of the core states were strengthened to meet the needs of capitalist landowners and their merchant allies. But that does not mean that these state machineries were manipulable puppets. Ob- viously any organization, once created, has a cer- tain autonomy from those who pressed it into existence for two reasons. It creates a stratum of officials whose own careers and interests are fur- thered by the continued strengthening of the orga- nization itself, however the interests of its capitalist backers may vary. Kings and bureaucrats wanted to stay in power and increase their personal gain constandy. Secondly, in the process of creating the strong state in the first place, certain "constitu- tional" compromises had to be made wi th other forces within the state boundaries and these insti- tutionalized compromises limit, as they are de- signed to do, the freedom of maneuver of the managers of the state machinery. The formula of the state as "executive committee of the rul ing class" is only valid, therefore, if one bears in m i n d that executive committees are never mere reflec- tions of the wills of their constituents, as anyone who has ever participated in any organization knows well.

The strengthening of the state machineries in core areas has as its direct counterpart the decline of the state machineries in peripheral areas. The decline of the Polish monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a striking example of this phenomenon. 1 0 There are two reasons for this. In peripheral countries, the interests of the capital.

ist landowners lie in an opposite direction from those of the local commercial bourgeoisie. Their interests lie in maintaining an open economy to maximize their profit from world-market trade (no restrictions in exports and access to lower-cost industrial products from core countries) and in elimination of the commercial bourgeoisie in favor of outside merchants (who pose no local political threat). Thus, in terms of the state, the coalition which strengthened it in core countries was pre- cisely absent.

The second reason, which has become ever more operative over the history of the modern world-system, is that the strength of the state ma- chinery in core states is a function of the weakness of other state machineries. Hence intervention of outsiders via war, subversion, and diplomacy is the lot of peripheral states,

A l l this seems very obvious. I repeat it only in order to make clear two points. One cannot rea- sonably explain the strength of various state ma- chineries at specific moments of the history of the modern world-system primarily in terms of a genetic-cultural line of argumentation, but rather in terms of the structural role a country plays in the world-economy at that moment in time. To be sure, the initial eligibility for a particular role is often decided by an accidental edge a particular country has, and the "accident" of which one is talking is no doubt located in part in past history, in part in current geography. But once this rela- tively minor accident is given, it is the operations of the world-market forces which accentuate the differences, institutionalize them, and make them impossible to surmount over the short run.

The second point we wish to make about the structural differences of core and periphery is that they are not comprehensible unless we realise that there is a third structural position: that of the semi periphery. This is not the result merely of establish- ing arbitrary cutting-points on a continuum of characteristics. Our logic is not merely inductive, sensing the presence of a third category from a comparison of indicator curves, it is also deductive. The semiperiphery is needed to make a capitalist world-economy run smoothly. Both kinds of

world-system, the world-empire with a redistribu- tive economy and the world-economy with a capi- talist market economy, involve markedly unequal distribution of rewards, Thus, logically, there is immediately posed the question of how it is possi- ble politically for such a system to persist. Why do not the majority who are exploited simply over- whelm the minority who draw disproportionate benefits? The most rapid glance at the historic record shows that these world-systems have been faced rather rarely by fundamental system-wide in- surrection. While internal discontent has been eter- nal, it has usually taken quite long before the accumulation of the erosion of power has led to the decline of a world-system, and as often as not, an external force has been a major factor in this de- cline.

There have been three major mechanisms that have enabled world-systems to retain relative polit- ical stability * * .One obviously is the concen- tration of military strength in the hands of the dominant forces. * * *

A second mechanism is the pervasiveness of an ideological commitment to the system as a whole. I do not mean what has often been termed the "le gitimation" of a system, because that term has been used to imply that the lower strata of a system feel some affinity with or loyalty towards the rulers, and I doubt that this has ever been a signifi- cant factor in the survival of world "systems. I mean rather the degree to which the staff or cadres of the system (and I leave this term deliberately vague) feel that their own well being is wrapped up in the survival of the system as such and the competence of its leaders, It is this staff which not only propa- gates the myths; it is they who believe them.

Hut neither force nor the ideological commit- ment of the staff would suffice were it not for the di- vision of the majority into a larger lower stratum and a smaller middle stratum. Both the revolution- ary call for polarization as a strategy of change and the liberal encomium to consensus as the basis of the liberal polity reflect this proposition. The import is far wider than its use in the analysis of contempo- rary political problems suggests. It is the normal condition of either kind of world-system to have a

three-layered structure. When and if this ceases to be the case, the world-system disintegrates.

In a world-empire, the middle stratum is in fact accorded the role of maintaining the margin- ally desirable long-distance luxury trade, while the upper stratum concentrates its resources on con- trolling the military machinery which can collect the tribute, the crucial mode of redistributing sur- plus. By providing, however, for an access to a lim- ited portion of the surplus to urbanized elements who alone, in premodern societies, could con- tribute political cohesiveness to isolated clusters of primary producers, the upper stratum effectively buys off the potential leadership of coordinated re- volt. And by denying access to political rights for this commercial-urban middle stratum, it makes them constantly vulnerable to confiscatory mea- sures whenever their economic profits become suf- ficiently swollen so that they might begin to create for themselves military strength.

In a world-economy, such "cultural" stratifica- tion is not so simple, because the absence of a sin- gle political system means the concentration of economic roles vertically rather tiran horizontally throughout the system. The solution then is to have three kinds of states, with pressures for cul- tural homogenization within each of them—thus, besides the upper stratum of core states and the lower stratum of peripheral states, there is a middle stratum of semiperipheral ones.

This semiperiphery is then assigned as it were a specific economic role, but the reason is less eco- nomic than political. That is to say, one might make a good case that the world-economy as an economy would function every bit as well without a semiperiphery. But it would be far less politically stable, for it would mean a polarized world-system. The existence of the third category means precisely that the upper stratum is not faced with the unified opposition of all the others because the middle stratum is both exploited and exploiter. It follows that the specific economic role is not all that im- portant, and has thus changed through the various historical stages of the modern world-system. * * *

Where then does class analysis fit in all of this? And what in such a formulation are nations,

nationalities, peoples, ethnic groups? First of all, without arguing the point now,11 I would contend that all these latter terms denote variants of a single phenomenon which I will term "ethno-nations."

Both classes and ethnic groups, or status groups, or ethno-nations are phenomena of world- economies and much of the enormous confusion that has surrounded the concrete analysis of their functioning can be attributed quite simply to the fact that they have been analyzed as though they existed within the nation-states of this world- economy, instead of within the world-economy as a whole. This has been a Procrustean bed indeed.

The range of economic activities being far wider in the core than in the periphery, the range of syndical interest groups is far wider there. Thus, it has been widely observed that there does not ex- ist in many parts of the world today a proletariat of the kind which exists in, say, Europe or North America. But this is a confusing way to state the observation. Industrial activity being dispropor- tionately concentrated in certain parts of the world-economy, industrial wage workers are to be found principally in certain geographic regions, Their interests as a syndical group are determined by their collective relationship to the world- economy. Their ability to influence the political functioning of this world-economy is shaped by the fact that they command larger percentages of the population in one sovereign entity than an- other, The form their organizations take have, in large part, been governed too by these political boundaries. The same might be said about indus- trial capitalists. Class analysis is perfectly capable of accounting for the political position of, let us say, French skilled workers if we look at their structural position and interests in the world-economy. Sim- ilarly with ethno-nations. The meaning of ethnic consciousness in a core area is considerably differ- ent from that of ethnic consciousness in a periph- eral area precisely because of the different class position such ethnic groups have in the world- economy.12

Political struggles of ethno-nations or segments of classes within national boundaries of course are the daily bread and butter of local politics. But their

significance or consequences can only be fruitfully analyzed if one spells out the implications of their organizational activity or political demands for the functioning of the world-economy. This also inci- dentally makes possible more rational assessments of these politics in terms of some set of evaluative criteria such as "left" and "right."

The functioning then of a capitalist world- economy requires that groups pursue their eco- nomic interests within a single world market while seeking to distort this market for their benefit by organizing to exert influence on states, some of which are far more powerful than others but none of which controls the world market in its entirety. Of course, we shall find on closer inspection that there are periods where one state is relatively quite powerful and other periods where power is more diffuse and contested, permitting weaker states broader ranges of action. We can talk then of the relative tightness or looseness of the world-system as an important variable and seek to analyze why this dimension tends to be cyclical in nature, as it seems to have been for several hundred years.

* * * We have adumbrated as our basic unit of observation a concept of world-systems that have structural parts and evolving stages. It is within such a framework, I am arguing, that we can fruit- fully make comparative analyses—of the wholes and of parts of the whole. Conceptions precede and govern measurements. I am all for minute and sophisticated quantitative indicators. I am all for minute and diligent archival work that will trace a concrete historical series of events in terms of all its immediate complexities. But the point of either is to enable us to see better what has happened and what is happening. For that we need glasses with which to discern the dimensions of difference, we need models with which to weigh significance, we need summarizing concepts with which to create the knowledge which we then seek to communi- cate to each other. And all this because we are men with hybris and original sin and therefore seek the good, the true, and the beautiful.

NOTES 1. See Frederic Lane's discussion of "protection

costs" which is reprinted in part 3 of Venice and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966). For the specific discussion of tribute, see pp. 389-90,416-20.

2. See Karl Polanyi, "The Economy as Instituted Process," in Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arsen- berg and Harry W. Pearson (eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empire (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957), pp. 243-70.

3. See my The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

4. Maurice Dobb, Capitalism Yesterday and Today (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1958), p. 21.

5. Ibid., pp. 6-7. 6. Ibid., p. 21. 7. I give a brief account of this in "Three Paths of

National Development in the Sixteenth Cen- tury," Studies in Comparative International De- velopment, 7: 2 (Summer 1972) 95-101, and below, ch. 2.

8. See Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

9. Charles Bettelheim, "Theoretical Comments," in Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, p. 295,

10. See J. Siemenski, "Constitutional Conditions in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," in Cambridge History of Poland, vol. 1, W. F. Reddaway et al (eds.), From the Origins to Sobieski (to 1696) (Cambridge: University Press, 1950), pp. 416-40; Janusz Tazbir, "The Commonwealth of the Gentry," in Aleksander Gieysztor ef al, History of Poland (Warszawa: PWN—Polish Scientific Publications, 1968), pp, 169-271.

11. See my fuller analysis in "Social Conflict in Post-Independence Black Africa: The Con- cepts of Race and Status-Group Reconsid- ered," in Ernest Q. Campbell (ed.), Racial Tensions and National Identity (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972), pp. 207-26.

12. See my "The Two Modes of Ethnic Conscious-

ness: Soviet Central Asia in Transition?" in Ed- in Soviet Central Asia (New York: Praeger, ward Allworth (ed.), The Nationality Question 1973), pp. 168-75.

R O B E R T J E R V I S

The Compulsive Empire

orried about the aggressive and unilat- eral exercise of U.S. power around the world today? Fine—just don't blame

U.S. President George W. Bush, September 11, or some shadowy neoconservative cabal. Nations en- joying unrivaled global power have always defined their national interests in increasingly expansive terms. Resisting this historical mission creep is the greatest challenge the United States faces today.

The United States today controls a greater share of world power than any other country since the emergence of the nation-state system. Never- theless, recent U.S. presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton still cultivated allies and strove to maintain large coalitions. They considered such strategies the best way for the United States to se- cure desired behavior from others, minimize costs to the nation, and most smoothly manage a com- plex and contentious world.

By contrast, the fundamental objective of the current Bush doctrine—which seeks to universal- ize U.S. values and defend preventively against new, nontraditional threats—is the establishment of U.S. hegemony, primacy, or empire. This stance was precipitated both by the election of George W. Bush (who brought to the presidency a more uni- lateral oudook) and the terrorist attacks of Sep- tember 11, 2001. Indeed, Bush's transformation after September 11 may parallel his earlier religious conversion: Just as coming to Christ gave meaning to his previously dissolute personal life, so the war on terrorism has become the defining characteris-

From Foreign Policy no, 137 (July/August 2003): 83-87.

tic of his foreign policy and his sacred mission. We can only speculate on what a President Al Gore would have done in the same situation; but while Gore probably would have invaded Afghanistan, he most likely would not have adopted anything like the Bush doctrine.

To some extent, then, the new assertiveness of U.S. hegemony is accidental, the product of a reac- tion of personalities and events, Yet deeper factors reveal that if this shift in policy was an accident, it was also an accident waiting to happen. The forceful and unilateral exercise of U.S. power is not simply the by-product of September 11, the Bush administration, or some shadowy neoconser- vative cabal—it is the logical outcome of the cur- rent unrivaled U.S. position in the international system.

Put simply, power is checked most effectively by counterbalancing power, and a state that is not subject to severe external pressures tends to feel few restraints at all. Spreading democracy and lib- eralism throughout the world has always been a U.S. goal, but having so much power makes this aim a more realistic one. It is not as if the Middle East has suddenly become more fertile ground for American ideals; it's just that the United States now has the means to impose its will. The quick U.S. triumph in Afghanistan contributed to the ex- pansion of Washington's goals, and the easy mil i - tary victory in Iraq will encourage an even broader agenda. The Bush administration is not worried its new doctrine of preventive war will set a precedent for other nations, because U.S. officials believe the dictates that apply to others do not bind the

United States. That is not a double standard, they argue; it is realistic leadership.

Nightmares of a Hegemon

Great power also instills new fears in the dominant state. A hegemon tends to acquire an enormous stake in world order. As power expands, so does a state's definition of its own interests. Most coun- tries are concerned mainly with what happens in their immediate neighborhoods; but for a hege- mon, the world is its neighborhood, and it is not only hubris that leads lone superpowers to be con- cerned with anything that happens anywhere. However secure states are, they can never feel se- cure enough. If they are powerful, governments will have compelling reasons to act early and thus prevent others from harming them in the future. The historian John S. Galbraith identified the dy- namic of the "turbulent frontier" that produced unintended colonial expansions. For instance, as European powers gained enclaves in Africa in the late 19th century, usually along a coast or river, they also gained unpacified boundaries that needed policing. That led to further expansion of influence and often of settlement, in turn producing new zones of threat and new areas requiring protection. This process encounters few natural limits.

Similarly, the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq led to the establishment of U.S. bases and se- curity commitments in Central Asia—one of the last areas in the globe without them. It is not hard to imagine the United States being drawn further into regional politics, even to the point of deploy- ing military force against terrorist or guerrilla movements that arise there, perhaps as a reaction to the hegemon's presence, (The same dynamic could easily play out in Colombia.)

The Bush administration's motives may not be selfish; rather, the combination of power, fear, and perceived opportunity lead it to seek to reshape global politics and various societies around the world. In the administration's eyes, the world can- not stand still. Without strong U.S. intervention, the international environment will become more

menacing to the United States and its values, but strong action can help increase global security and produce a better world.

Such reasoning helps elucidate recent interna- tional disagreements about U.S. policy toward Iraq. Most of the explanations for the French-led opposition centered either on France's preoccupa- tion with glory and its traditional disdain for the United States or on the peaceful European world- view induced by the continent's success in over- coming historical rivalries and submitting to the rule of law. Or, in neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan's terms, "Americans are from Mars, and Eu- ropeans are from Venus,"

But are Europeans really so averse to force, so wedded to law? When facing terrorism, Germany and other European countries have not hesitated to employ unrestrained state power the likes of which U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft would envy, and their current treatment of minorities, es- pecially Muslims, hardly seems liberal. The French disregarded legal rulings against their ban of British beef; they also continue to intervene in Africa and to join other European states in flouting international laws requiring them to allow the im- port of geneticaly modified foods. Most European nations also favored the war in Kosovo, Finally, had Europeans suffered a direct attack like that of September 11, it's unlikely that they would have maintained their aversion to the use of force.

The claims of a deep transatlantic culture di- vide overlook the fundamental differences between the European and U.S. positions in the interna- tional system. U.S. hegemony has three long-term implications that were in high relief during the de- bate over U.S. action in Iraq, First, only the United States has the power to do anything about a prob- lem like Iraq's Saddam Hussein; Europe faces obvious incentives to free ride in such situations. Second, the large European states have every rea- son to be concerned about U.S. hegemony and seek to constrain it; they understandably fear a world in which their values and interests are served only at Washington's sufferance. And third, the obsession of U.S. rivals with the role of the U . N , Security Council reflects less an abstract attach-

merit to law anct global governance than an ap- preciation of raw power. France especially, but also Russia and China (two countries that most certainly do not hail from Venus), would gain enormously by establishing the principle that large-scale force can be used only with the ap- proval of the council, of which they are permanent members. Indeed, Security Council membership is one of the major resources at these countries' dis- posal. If the council were not central, France's influence would be reduced to its African protec- torates.

Traditional power considerations also explain why many smaller European countries chose to support the United States on Iraq despite hostile public opinion. The dominance these nations fear most is not American but Franco-German. The United States is more powerful, but France and Germany are closer and more likely to overshadow them. Indeed, French and German resentment to- ward such nations is no more surprising than Washington's dismissal of "Old Europe." The irony is that even while France and Germany bit- terly decried U.S. efforts to hustle them into line, these two nations disparaged and bullied the East European states that sided with Bush—not exactly Venus-like behavior.

Ultimately, the war against Saddam made clear the links between preventive war and hegemony. Bush's goals are extraordinarily ambitious, involv- ing the remaking not only of international politics but also of recalcitrant societies, which is consid- ered an end in itself as well as a means to U.S. secu- rity. The belief of Bush administration officials that Saddam's regime posed an unacceptable menace to the United States only underscores their extremely expansive definition of those interests. The war is hard to understand if its only purpose was to dis- arm Saddam or to remove him from power—the danger was simply too remote to justify the effort. But if U.S. officials expect regime change in Iraq to bring democracy to the Middle East, to discour- age tyrants and energize reformers throughout the world, and to demonstrate the willingness of the United States to ensure a good dose of what the Bush administration considers world order, then

the war is a logical part of a larger project. Those who find such fears and hopes excessive would likely agree with the view of British statesman Lord Salisbury, when he opposed intervening against Russia in its conflict with Turkey in 1877-78. "It has generally been acknowledged to be madness to go to war for an idea," he maintained, "but if any- thing is more unsatisfactory, it is to go to war against a nightmare."

Lead Us Not Into Invasion

The United States is the strongest country in the world, yet its power remains subject to two famil- iar limitations: First, it is harder to build than to destroy. Second, success inevitably depends on others, because even a hegemon needs some exter- nal cooperation to achieve its objectives. Of course, countries like Syria and Iran cannot ignore U.S. military capabilities. They may well decide to limit their weapons of mass destruction programs and curtail support for terrorism, as Bush expects. But the prospects for long-run compliance are less bright. Although a frontal assault on U.S. interests is unlikely, highly motivated adversaries will not give up the quest to advance their own perceived interests. The war in Iraq has increased the risks of seeking nuclear weapons, for example, but it also has increased the rewards of obtaining them. Whatever else these weapons can do, they can de- ter all-out invasion, thus rendering them attractive to any state that fears it might be in the Pentagon's gun sights.

U.S. military strength matters less in relations with allies, and probably also with countries such as Russia, from whom the United States seeks sup- port on a range of issues such as sharing highly sensitive information on terrorism, rebuilding failed states, and managing the international econ- omy. The danger is not that Europe (or even "Old Europe") will counter the United States in the tra- ditional balance-of-power sense, because such a dynamic is usually driven by fears that the domi- nant state will pose a military threat. Nevertheless, political resistance remains possible, and the fate of

the U.S. design for world order lies in the hands of Washington's allies more than its adversaries. Al- though the United States governs many of the in- centives that allies and prospective supporters face, Washington cannot coerce cooperation along the full range of U.S. interests. Perhaps weaker states will decide they are better off by permitting and encouraging assertive U.S. hegemony, which would allow them to reap the benefits from world order while being spared most of the costs. They may also conclude that any challenge to the United States would fail or could incite a dangerous new rivalry.

But the behavior of current and potential U.S. allies will depend on their judgments about several questions: Can the U.S. domestic political system sustain the Bush doctrine in the long run? Wil l Washington accept allied influence and values?

Will it pressure Israel as well as the Palestinians to reach a final peace settlement? More generally, wil l the United States seek to advance the broad inter- ests of the diverse countries and peoples of the world, or will it exploit its power for its own nar- row political, economic, and social interests? Bush's worldview offers little place for other states—even democracies—beyond membership in a supporting cast. Conflating broad interests with narrow ones and believing one has a monop- oly on wisdom is an obvious way for a hegemon to become widely regarded as a tyrant.

In his 2000 presidential campaign, Bush said the United States needed a "more humble foreign policy." But the objectives and conceptions of the Bush doctrine point to quite the opposite. Avoid- ing this imperial temptation will be the greatest challenge the United States faces.

THE STATE

The state remains the key actor in international relations, although challenges to the state are increasing, as detailed in Chapter 5 of Essentials of International Re- lations. The selections in this chapter examine issues concerning the state, its strength, and its challenges. In a 2001 issue of Foreign Policy, Stanford University professor Stephen Krasner rebuts those scholars and pundits who suggest that the sovereign state is dead. He argues to the contrary, that the state is alive and well, although sovereign autonomy and control may have weakened over time. Global- ization and nongovernmental organizations may "nibble" at state sovereignty, but have not changed the underlying structure. Other scholars disagree, such as Anne- Marie Slaughter, president of the American Society of International Law, who pro- poses that state sovereignty will increasingly be challenged by the growth of transgovernmental networks. And Robert Rotberg investigates a group of states— failed states—for whom sovereignty is no longer a characteristic. What happens when states are unable to function? In his 2002 Foreign Affairs article, Rotberg concludes that failed states are breeding grounds for terrorists.

The state is challenged in other ways as well. Globalization, discussed in Chapter 10, undermines state power and authority, and transnational religious and ideological movements and ethnonational movement are threats to states and state sovereignty. Samuel P. Huntington, a prominent Harvard University political scientist, predicts that the future international system will be characterized by a clash between Western civilization and Islamic civilization. The article included here and the book which elaborates this thesis, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), have been widely discussed and criticized. One prominent critic is the late Edward Said of Columbia University, who charges that Huntington oversimplifies complex cultures and identities in reducing the world to "us vs. them...." Graham Fuller, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency, ex- amines nuances about political Islam that Said says are lacking in Huntington's argument, analyzing what Islam says about the state and governance, while offer- ing regime-specific examples.

S T E P H E N D . K R A S N E R

Sovereignty

The idea of states as autonomous, indepen-dent entities is collapsing under the com-bined onslaught of monetary unions, C N N , the Internet, and nongovernmental organizations. But those who proclaim the death of sovereignty misread history. The nation-state has a keen in- stinct for survival and has so far adapted to new challenges—even the challenge of globalization.

The Sovereign State Is Just About Dead

Very wrong. Sovereignty was never quite as vibrant as many contemporary observers suggest. The con- ventional norms of sovereignty have always been challenged. A few states, most notably the United States, have had autonomy, control, and recogni- tion for most of their existence, but most others have not. The polities of many weaker states have been persistently penetrated, and stronger nations have not been immune to external influence, China was occupied. The constitutional arrange- ments of Japan and Germany were directed by the United States after World War II. The United Kingdom, despite its rejection of the euro, is part of the European Union.

Even for weaker states—whose domestic struc- tures have been influenced by outside actors, and whose leaders have very little control over trans- border movements or even activities within their own country—sovereignty remains attractive. Al- though sovereignty might provide little more than international recognition, that recognition guar- antees access to international organizations and sometimes to international finance. It offers status

From Foreign Policy no. 122 (January-February 2001): 20-29.

to individual leaders. While the great powers of Europe have eschewed many elements of sover- eignty, the United States, China, and Japan have neither the interest nor the inclination to abandon their usually effective claims to domestic autonomy.

In various parts of the world, national borders still represent the fault lines of conflict, whether it is Israelis and Palestinians fighting over the status of Jerusalem, Indians and Pakistanis threatening to go nuclear over Kashmir, or Ethiopia and Eritrea clashing over disputed territories. Yet commenta- tors nowadays are mostly concerned about the erosion of national borders as a consequence of globalization. Governments and activists alike compjain that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund overstep their authority by promoting universal standards for everything from human rights and the environ- ment to monetary policy and immigration. How- ever, the most important impact of economic globalization and transnational norms will be to alter the scope of state authority rather than to generate some fundamentally new way to organize political life.

Sovereignty Means Final Authority

Not anymore, if ever. When philosophers Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes first elaborated the no- tion of sovereignty in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were concerned with establishing the legiti- macy of a single hierarchy of domestic authority. Although Bodin and Hobbes accepted the exis- tence of divine and natural law, they both (espe- cially Hobbes) believed the word of the sovereign was law. Subjects had no right to revolt. Bodin and

Hobbes realized that imbuing the sovereign with such overweening power invited tyranny, but they were predominately concerned with maintaining domestic order, without which they believed there could be no justice. Both were writing in a world riven by sectarian strife. Bodin was almost killed in religious riots in France in 1572. Hobbes published his seminal work, Leviathan, only a few years after Parliament (composed of Britain's emerging wealthy middle class) had executed Charles I in a civil war that had sought to wrest state control from the monarchy.

This idea of supreme power was compelling, but irrelevant in practice. By the end of the 17th century, political authority in Britain was divided between king and parliament. In the United States, the Founding Fathers established a constitutional structure of checks and balances and multiple sov- ereignties distributed among local and national in- terests that were inconsistent with hierarchy and supremacy. The principles of justice, and espe- cially order, so valued by Bodin and Hobbes, have best been provided by modern democratic states whose organizing principles are antithetical to the idea that sovereignty means uncontrolled domestic power.

If sovereignty does not mean a domestic order with a single hierarchy of authority, what does it mean? In the contemporary world, sovereignty pri- marily has been linked with the idea that states are autonomous and independent from each other. Within their own boundaries, the members of a polity are free to choose their own form of govern- ment. A necessary corollary of this claim is the principle of nonintervention: One state does not have a right to intervene in the internal affairs of another.

More recendy, sovereignty has come to be as- sociated with the idea of control over transb order movements. When contemporary observers assert that the sovereign state is just about dead, they do not mean that constitutional structures are about to disappear. Instead, they mean that technological change has made it very difficult, or perhaps im- possible, for states to control movements across their borders of all kinds of material things (from

coffee to cocaine) and not-so-material things (from Hollywood movies to capital flows).

Finally, sovereignty has meant that political au- thorities can enter into international agreements. They are free to endorse any contract they find at- tractive. Any treaty among states is legitimate pro- vided that it has not been coerced.

The Peace of Westphalia Produced the Modern

Sovereign State

No, it came later. Contemporary pundits often cite the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (actually two sepa- rate treaties, Munster and Osnabruck) as the polit- ical big bang that created the modern system of autonomous states. Westphalia—which ended the Thirty Years' War against the hegemonic power of the Holy Roman Empire—delegitimized the al- ready waning transnational role of the Catholic Church and validated the idea that international relations should be driven by balance-of-power considerations rather than the ideals of Christen- dom. But Westphalia was first and foremost a new constitution for the Holy Roman Empire. The pre- existing right of the principalities in the empire to make treaties was affirmed, but the Treaty of M u n - ster stated that "such Alliances be not against the Emperor, and the Empire, nor against the Publick Peace, and this Treaty, and without prejudice to the Oath by which every one is bound to the Em- peror and the Empire." The domestic political structures of the principalities remained embedded in the Holy Roman Empire. The Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Count of Pala- tine, and the Duke of Bavaria were affirmed as electors who (along with the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne) chose the emperor. They did not become or claim to be kings in their own right.

Perhaps most important, Westphalia estab- lished rules for religious tolerance in Germany. The treaties gave Up service to the principle (cuius regio, eius religio) that the prince could set the reli- gion of his territory—and then went on to violate

this very principle through many specific provi- sions. The signatories agreed that the religious rules already in effect would stay in place. Catholics and Protestants in German cities with mixed populations would share offices. Religious issues had to be settled by a majority of both Catholics and Protestants in the diet and courts of the empire. None of the major political leaders in Europe endorsed religious toleration in principle, but they recognized that religious conflicts were so volatile that it was essential to contain rather than repress sectarian differences. Al l in all, Westphalia is a pretty medieval document, and its biggest ex- plicit innovation'—provisions that undermined the power of princes to control religious affairs within their territories—was antithetical to the ideas of national sovereignty that later became associated with the so-called Westphalian system.

Universal Human Rights Are an Unprecedented Challenge

to Sovereignty

Wrong. The struggle to establish international rules that compel leaders to treat their subjects in a certain way has been going on for a long time. Over the centuries the emphasis has shifted from religious toleration, to minority rights (often fo- cusing on specific ethnic groups in specific coun- tries), to human rights (emphasizing rights enjoyed by all or broad classes of individuals). In a few instances states have voluntarily embraced in- ternational supervision, but generally the weak have acceded to the preferences of the strong: The Vienna settlement following the Napoleonic wars guaranteed religious toleration for Catholics in the Netherlands. A l l of the successor states of the Ot- toman Empire, beginning with Greece in 1832 and ending with Albania in 1913, had to accept provi- sions for civic and political equality for religious minorities as a condition for international recogni- tion. The peace settlements following World War 1 included extensive provisions for the protection of minorities. Poland, for instance, agreed to refrain

from holding elections on Saturday because such balloting would have violated the Jewish Sabbath. Individuals could bring complaints against govern- ments through a minority rights bureau estab- lished within the League of Nations.

But as the Holocaust tragically demonstrated, interwar efforts at international constraints on domestic practices failed dismally. After World War II, human, rather than minority, rights be- came the focus of attention. The United Nations Charter endorsed both human rights and the classic sovereignty principle of nonintervention. The 20-plus human rights accords that have been signed during the last half century cover a wide range of issues including genocide, torture, slavery, refugees, stateless persons, women's rights, racial discrimination, children's rights, and forced la- bor. These U . N . agreements, however, have few enforcement mechanisms, and even their provi- sions for reporting violations are often ineffective.

The tragic and bloody disintegration of Yu- goslavia in the 1990s revived earlier concerns with ethnic rights. International recognition of the Yu- goslav successor states was conditional upon their acceptance of constitutional provisions guarantee- ing minority rights. The Dayton accords estab- lished externally controlled authority structures in Bosnia, including a Human Rights Commission (a majority of whose members were appointed by the Western European states). N A T O created a de facto protectorate in Kosovo.

The motivations for such interventions—hu- manitarianism and security—have hardly changed. Indeed, the considerations that brought the great powers into the Balkans following the wars of the 1870s were hardly different from those that en- gaged N A T O and Russia in the 1990s.

Global izat ion Undermines State Contro l

No. State control could never be taken for granted. Technological changes over the last 200 years have increased the flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas—but the problems posed by such move-

merits are not new. In many ways, states are better able to respond now than they were in the past.

The impact of the global media on political au- thority (the so-called C N N effect) pales in compar- ison to the havoc that followed the invention of the printing press. Within a decade after Martin Luther purportedly nailed his 95 theses to the Wit- tenberg church door, his ideas had circulated throughout Europe. Some political leaders seized upon the principles of the Protestant Reformation as a way to legitimize secular political authority. No sovereign monarch could contain the spread of these concepts, and some lost not only their lands but also their heads. The sectarian controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries were perhaps more po- litically consequential than any subsequent trans- national flow of ideas.

In some ways, international capital movements were more significant in earlier periods than they are now. During the 19th century, Latin American states (and to a lesser extent Canada, the United States, and Europe) were beset by boom-and-bust cycles associated with global financial crises. The Great Depression, which had a powerful effect on the domestic politics of all major states, was pre- cipitated by an international collapse of credit. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s was not nearly as devastating. Indeed, the speed with which countries recovered from the Asian flu reflects how a better working knowledge of economic theories and more effective central banks have made it eas- ier for states to secure the advantages (while at the same time minimizing the risks) of being en- meshed in global financial markets.

In addition to attempting to control the flows of capital and ideas, states have long struggled to manage the impact of international trade. The opening of long-distance trade for bulk commodi- ties in the 19th century created fundamental cleav- ages in all of the major states. Depression and plummeting grain prices made it possible for Ger- man Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to prod the landholding aristocracy into a protectionist al- liance with urban heavy industry (this coalition of "iron and rye" dominated German politics for decades). The tariff question was a basic divide in

U.S. politics for much of the last half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. But, despite growing levels of imports and exports since 1950, the political salience of trade has receded because national governments have developed social wel- fare strategies that cushion the impact of interna- tional competition, and workers with higher skill levels are better able to adjust to changing interna- tional conditions. It has become easier, not harder, for states to manage the flow of goods and services.

Globalization Is Changing the Scope of State Control

Yes. The reach of the state has increased in some areas but contracted in others. Rulers have recog- nized that their effective control can be enhanced by walking away from issues they cannot resolve, For instance, beginning with the Peace of West- phalia, leaders chose to surrender their control over religion because it proved too volatile. Keep- ing religion within the scope of state authority undermined, rather than strengthened, political stability.

Monetary policy is an area where state control expanded and then ultimately contracted. Before the 20th century, states had neither the admin- istrative competence nor the inclination to conduct independent monetary policies, The mid-20th- century effort to control monetary affairs, which was associated with Keynesian economics, has now been reversed due to the magnitude of short-term capital flows and the inability of some states to con- trol inflation. With the exception of Great Britain, the major European states have established a single monetary author-ity. Confronting recurrent hyper- inflation, Ecuador adopted the U.S. dollar as its currency in 2000.

Along with the erosion of national currencies, we now see the erosion of national citizenship— the notion that an individual should be a citizen of one and only one country, and that the state has exclusive claims to that person's loyalty. For many states, there is no longer a sharp distinction be- tween citizens and noncitizens. Permanent rest-

dents, guest workers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants are entitled to some bundle of rights even if they cannot vote. The ease of travel and the desire of many countries to attract either capital or skilled workers have increased incentives to make citizenship a more flexible category.

Although government involvement in religion, monetary affairs, and claims to loyalty has de- clined, overall government activity, as reflected in taxation and government expenditures, has in- creased as a percentage of national income since the 1950s among the most economically advanced states. The extent of a country's social welfare pro- grams tends to go hand in hand with its level of integration within the global economy. Crises of authority and control have been most pronounced in the states that have been the most isolated, with sub-Saharan Africa offering the largest number of unhappy examples.

NGOs Are Nibbling at National Sovereignty

To some extent. Transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been around for quite awhile, especially if you include corporations. In the 18th century, the East India Company pos- sessed political power (and even an expeditionary military force) that rivaled many national govern- ments. Throughout the 19th century, there were transnational movements to abolish slavery, pro- mote the rights of women, and improve conditions for workers.

The number of transnational NGOs, however, has grown tremendously, from around 200 in 1909 to over 17,000 today. The availability of inexpen- sive and very fast communications technology has made it easier for such groups to organize and make an impact on public policy and international law—the international agreement banning land mines being a recent case in point. Such groups prompt questions about sovereignty because they appear to threaten the integrity of domestic deci- sion making. Activists who lose on their home ter- ritory can pressure foreign governments, which

may in turn influence decision makers in the ac- tivists' own nation.

But for all of the talk of growing NGO influ- ence, their power to affect a country's domestic affairs has been limited when compared to govern- ments, international organizations, and multina- tional corporations. The United Fruit Company had more influence in Central America in the early part of the twentieth century than any NGO could hope to have anywhere in the contemporary world. The International Monetary Fund and other mul- tilateral financial institutions now routinely nego- tiate conditionality agreements that involve not only specific economic targets but also domestic institutional changes, such as pledges to crack down on corruption and break up cartels.

Smaller, weaker states are the most frequent targets of external efforts to alter domestic institu- tions, but more powerful states are not immune. The openness of the U.S. political system means that not only NGOs, but also foreign governments, can play some role in political decisions. (The Mexican government, for instance, lobbied heavily for the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.) In fact, the permeability of the Amer- ican polity makes the United States a less threaten- ing partner; nations are more willing to sign on to U.S.-sponsored international arrangements be- cause they have some confidence that they can play a role in U.S. decision making.

Sovereignty Blocks Confl ict Resolution

Yes, sometimes. Rulers as well as their constituents have some reasonably clear notion of what sover- eignty means—exclusive control within a given territory—even if this norm has been challenged frequently by inconsistent principles (such as uni- versal human rights) and violated in practice (the U.S.- and British-enforced no-fly zones over Iraq). In fact, the political importance of conventional sovereignty rules has made it harder to solve some problems. There is, for instance, no conventional sovereignty solution for Jerusalem, but it doesn't

require much imagination to think of alternatives: Divide the city into small pieces; divide the Temple Mount vertically with the Palestinians controlling the top and the Israelis the bottom; establish some kind of international authority; divide control over different issues (religious practices versus taxation, for instance) among different authorities. Any one of these solutions would be better for most Israelis and Palestinians than an ongoing stalemate, but political leaders on both sides have had trouble delivering a settlement because they are subject to attacks by counterelites who can wave the sover- eignty flag.

Conventional rules have also been problematic for Tibet. Both the Chinese and the Tibetans might be better off if Tibet could regain some of the au- tonomy it had as a tributary state within the tradi- tional Chinese empire. Tibet had extensive local control, but symbolically (and sometimes through tribute payments) recognized the supremacy of the emperor. Today, few on either side would even know what a tributary state is, and even if the leaders of Tibet worked out some kind of settie- ment that would give their country more self- government, there would be no guarantee that they could gain the support of their own con- stituents.

If, however, leaders can reach mutual agree- ments, bring along their constituents, or are will- ing to use coercion, sovereignty rules can be violated in inventive ways. The Chinese, for in- stance, made Hong Kong a special administrative region after the transfer from British rule, allowed a foreign judge to sit on the Court of Final Appeal, and secured acceptance by other states not only for Hong Kong's participation in a number of inter- national organizations but also for separate visa agreements and recognition of a distinct Hong Kong passport. A l l of these measures violate con- ventional sovereignty rules since Hong Kong does not have juridical independence. Only by invent- ing a unique status for Hong Kong, which involved the acquiescence of other states, could China claim sovereignty while simultaneously preserving the confidence of the business community.

The European Union Is a New Model for Supranational

Governance

Yes, but only for the Europeans. The European Union (EU) really is a new thing, far more interest- ing in terms of sovereignty than Hong Kong. It is not a conventional international organization be- cause its member states are now so intimately linked with one another that withdrawal is not a viable option. It is not likely to become a "United States of Europe"—a large federal state that might look something like the United States of Amer- ica—because the interests, cultures, economies, and domestic institutional arrangements of its members are too diverse. Widening the EU to in- clude the former communist states of Central Eu- rope would further complicate any efforts to move toward a political organization that looks like a conventional sovereign state.

The EU is inconsistent with conventional sov- ereignty rules. Its member states have created supranational institutions (the European Court of Justice, the European Commission, and the Coun- cil of Ministers) that can make decisions opposed by some member states. The rulings of the court have direct effect and supremacy within national judicial systems, even though these doctrines were never explicitly endorsed in any treaty. The Euro- pean Monetary Union created a central bank that now controls monetary affairs for three of the union's four largest states. The Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty provide for majority or qualified majority, but not unanimous, voting in some issue areas. In one sense, the European Union is a product of state sovereignty because it has been created through voluntary agreements among its member states. But, in another sense, it fundamentally contradicts conventional under- standing of sovereignty because these same agree- ments have undermined the juridical autonomy of its individual members,

The European Union, however, is not a model that other parts of the world can imitate. The ini- tial moves toward integration could not have taken

place without the political and economic support of the United States, which was, in the early years of the Cold War, much more interested in creating a strong alliance that could effectively oppose the Soviet Union than it was in any potential European challenge to U.S. leadership. Germany, one of the largest states in the European Union, has been the most consistent supporter of an institutional struc- ture that would limit Berlin's own freedom of ac- tion, a reflection of the lessons of two devastating wars and the attractiveness of a European identity

for a country still grappling with the sins of the Nazi era. It is hard to imagine that other regional powers such as China, Japan, or Brazil, much less the United States, would have any interest in tying their own hands in similar ways. (Regional trading agreements such as Mercosur and NAFTA have very limited supranational provisions and show few signs of evolving into broader monetary or political unions.) The EU is a new and unique in- stitutional structure, but it wi l l coexist with, not displace, the sovereign-state model.

A N N E - M A R I E S L A U G H T E R

The Real New Wor ld Order

The State Strikes Back

Many thought that the new world order pro- claimed by George Bush was the promise of 1945 fulfilled, a world in which international institu- tions, led by the United Nations, guaranteed inter- national peace and security with the active support of the world's major powers. That world order is a chimera. Even as a liberal internationalist ideal, it is infeasible at best and dangerous at worst. It re- quires a centralized rule-making authority, a hier- archy of institutions, and universal membership. Equally to the point, efforts to create such an order have failed. The United Nations cannot function effectively independent of the major powers that compose it, nor will those nations cede their power and sovereignty to an international institution. Ef- forts to expand supranational authority, whether by the U.N. secretary-general's office, the Euro- pean Commission, or the World Trade Organi- zation (WTO), have consistently produced a backlash among member states.

From Foreign Affairs 75, no. 5 (September/October 1997): 183-97.

The leading alternative to liberal international- ism is "the new medievalism," a back-to-the-future model of the 21st century. Where liberal interna- tionalists see a need for international rules and institutions to solve states' problems, the new medievalists proclaim the end of the nation-state. Less hyperbolically, in her article, "Power Shift," in the January/February 1997 Foreign Affairs, Jessica T. Mathews describes a shift away from the state— up, down, and sideways—to supra-state, sub-state, and, above all, nonstate actors. These new players have multiple allegiances and global reach.

Mathews attributes this power shift to a change in the structure of organizations: from hierarchies to networks, from centralized compulsion to vol- untary association. The engine of this transforma- tion is the information technology revolution, a radically expanded communications capacity that empowers individuals and groups while diminish- ing traditional authority. The result is not world government, but global governance. If government denotes the formal exercise of power by established institutions, governance denotes cooperative problem-solving by a changing and often uncer- tain cast. The result is a world order in which

global governance networks link Microsoft, the Roman Catholic Church, and Amnesty Interna- tional to the European Union, the United Nations, and Catalonia.

The new medievalists miss two central points. First, private power is still no substitute for state power. Consumer boycotts of transnational corpo- rations destroying rain forests or exploiting child labor may have an impact on the margin, but most environmentalists or labor activists would prefer national legislation mandating control of foreign subsidiaries. Second, the power shift is not a zero- sum game. A gain in power by nonstate actors does not necessarily translate into a loss of power for the state. On the contrary, many of these nongovern- mental organizations (NGOs) network with their foreign counterparts to apply additional pressure on the traditional levers of domestic politics.

A new world order is emerging, with less fan- fare but more substance than either the liberal in- ternationalist or new medievalist visions. The state is not disappearing, it is disaggregating into its separate, functionally distinct parts. These parts— courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures—are networking with their counter- parts abroad, creating a dense web of relations that constitutes a new, transgovernmental order. Today's international problems—terrorism, orga- nized crime, environmental degradation, money laundering, bank failure, and securities fraud— created and sustain these relations. Government institutions have formed networks of their own, ranging from the Basle Committee of Central Bankers to informal ties between law enforcement agencies to legal networks that make foreign judi- cial decisions more and more familiar. While polit- ical scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye first observed its emergence in the 1970s, today trans- governmentalism is rapidly becoming the most widespread and effective mode of international governance.

Compared to the lofty ideals of liberal interna- tionalism and the exuberant possibilities of the new medievalism, transgovernmentalism seems mundane. Meetings between securities regulators, antitrust or environmental officials, judges, or leg-

islators lack the drama of high politics. But for the internationalists of the 1990s—bankers, lawyers, businesspeople, public-interest activists, and crim- inals—transnational government networks are a reality. Wall Street looks to the Basle Committee rather than the World Bank. Human rights lawyers are more likely to develop transnational litigation strategies for domestic courts than to petition the U .N. Committee on Human Rights.

Moreover, transgovernmentalism has many virtues. It is a key element of a bipartisan foreign policy, simultaneously assuaging conservative fears of a loss of sovereignty to international institutions and liberal fears of a loss of regulatory power in a globalized economy. While presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) demonize the U .N. and the WTO as supranational bureaucracies that seek to dictate to national gov- ernments, Senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Paul Wellstone (D-Mich.) inveigh against interna- tional capital mobility as the catalyst of a global "race to the bottom" in regulatory standards. Net- works of bureaucrats responding to international crises and planning to prevent future problems are more flexible than international institutions and expand the regulatory reach of all participating na- tions. This combination of flexibility and effective- ness offers something for both sides of the aisle.

Transgovernmentalism also offers promising new mechanisms for the Clinton administration's "enlargement" policy, aiming to expand the com- munity of liberal democracies. Contrary to Samuel Huntington's gloomy predictions in The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order (1996), ex- isting government networks span civilizations, drawing in courts from Argentina to Zimbabwe and financial regulators from Japan to Saudi Ara- bia. The dominant institutions in these networks remain concentrated in North America and West- ern Europe, but their impact can be felt in every corner of the globe. Moreover, disaggregating the state makes it possible to assess the quality of spe- cific judicial, administrative, and legislative institu- tions, whether or not the governments are liberal democracies. Regular interaction with foreign col- leagues offers new channels for spreading demo-

cratic accountability, governmental integrity, and the rule of law.

An offspring of an increasingly borderless world, transgovernmentalism is a world order ideal in its own right, one that is more effective and po- tentially more accountable than either of the cur- rent alternatives. Liberal internationalism poses the prospect of a supranational bureaucracy an- swerable to no one. The new medievalist vision appeals equally to states' rights enthusiasts and supranationalists, but could easily reflect the worst of both worlds. Transgovernmentalism, by con- trast, leaves the control of government institutions in the hands of national citizens, who must hold their governments as accountable for their trans- national activities as for their domestic duties.

Judicial Foreign Policy

Judges are building a global community of law. They share values and interests based on their be- lief in the law as distinct but not divorced from politics and their view of themselves as profession- als who must be insulated from direct political in- fluence. At its best, this global community reminds each participant that his or her professional perfor- mance is being monitored and supported by a larger audience.

National and international judges are network- ing, becoming increasingly aware of one another and of their stake in a common enterprise. The most informal level of transnational judicial con- tact is knowledge of foreign and international judi- cial decisions and a corresponding willingness to cite them. The Israeli Supreme Court and the Ger- man and Canadian constitutional courts have long researched U.S. Supreme Court precedents in reaching their own conclusions on questions like freedom of speech, privacy rights, and due pro- cess. Fledgling constitutional courts in Central and Eastern Europe and in Russia are eagerly following suit. In 1995, the South African Supreme Court, finding the death penalty unconstitutional under the national constitution, referred to decisions from national and supranational courts around the world, including ones in Hungary, India, Tanza-

nia, Canada, and Germany and the European Court of Human Rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has typically been more of a giver than a receiver in this exchange, but Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently chided American lawyers and judges for their insularity in ignoring foreign law and pre- dicted that she and her fellow justices would find themselves "looking more frequently to the deci- sions of other constitutional courts."

Why should a court in Israel or South Africa cite a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in reach- ing its own conclusion? Decisions rendered by out- side courts can have no authoritative value. They carry weight only because of their intrinsic logical power or because the court invoking them seeks to gain legitimacy by linking itself to a larger commu- nity of courts considering similar issues. National courts have become increasingly aware that they and their foreign counterparts are often engaged in a common effort to delimit the boundaries of indi- vidual rights in the face of an apparendy overrid- ing public interest. Thus, the British House of Lords recently rebuked the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision to uphold the kidnapping of a Mexican doctor by U.S. officials determined to bring him to trial in the United States.

Judges also cooperate in resolving transna- tional or international disputes. In cases involving citizens of two different states, courts have long been willing to acknowledge each other's potential interest and to defer to one another when such def- erence is not too costly. U.S. courts now recognize that they may become involved in a sustained dia- logue with a foreign court. For instance, Judge Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit recently al- lowed a French litigant to invoke U.S. discovery provisions without exhausting discovery options in France, reasoning that it was up to the French courts to identify and protest any infringements of French sovereignty. U.S. courts would then re- spond to such protests.

Judicial communication is not always harmo- nious, as in a recent squabble between a U.S. judge and a Hong Kong judge over an insider trading case. The U.S. judge refused to decline jurisdiction in favor of the Hong Kong court on grounds that

"in Hong Kong they practically give you a medal for doing this sort of thing [insider trading]." In response, the Hong Kong judge stiffly defended the adequacy of Hong Kong law and asserted his will- ingness to apply it. He also chided his American counterpart, pointing out that any conflict "should be approached in the spirit of judicial comity rather than judicial competitiveness." Such conflict is to be expected among diplomats, but what is striking here is the two courts' view of themselves as quasi-autonomous foreign policy actors doing battle against international securities fraud.

The most advanced form of judicial coopera- tion is a partnership between national courts and a supranational tribunal. In the European Union (EU), the European Court of Justice works with national courts when questions of European law overlap national law. National courts refer cases up to the European Court, which issues an opinion and sends the case back to national courts; the supranational recommendation guides the na- tional court's decision. This cooperation marshals the power of domestic courts behind the judgment of a supranational tribunal. While the Treaty of Rome provides for this reference procedure, it is the courts that have transformed it into a judicial partnership.

Finally, judges are talking face to face. The judges of the supreme courts of Western Europe began meeting every three years in 1978. Since then they have become more aware of one an- other's decisions, particularly with regard to each other's willingness to accept the decisions handed down by the European Court of Justice. Meetings between U.S. Supreme Court justices and their counterparts on the European Court have been sponsored by private groups, as have meetings of U.S. judges with judges from the supreme courts of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia.

The most formal initiative aimed at bringing judges together is the recendy inaugurated Organi- zation of the Supreme Courts of the Americas. Twenty-five supreme court justices or their de- signees met in Washington in October 1995 and drafted the OCSA charter, dedicating the organiza- tion to "promot[ing] and strengthen[ing] judicial

independence and the rule of law among the mem- bers, as well as the proper constitutional treatment of the judiciary as a fundamental branch of the state." The charter calls for triennial meetings and envisages a permanent secretariat. It required rati- fication by 15 supreme courts, achieved in spring 1996. An initiative by judges, for judges, it is not a stretch to say that OCSA is the product of judicial foreign policy.

Champions of a global rule of law have most frequently envisioned one rule for all, a unified le- gal system topped by a world court. The global community of law emerging from judicial net- works will more likely encompass many rules of law, each established in a specific state or region. No high court would hand down definitive global rules. National courts would interact with one an- other and with supranational tribunals in ways that would accommodate differences but acknowl- edge and reinforce common values.

The Regulatory Web

The densest area of transgovernmental activity is among national regulators. Bureaucrats charged with the administration of antitrust policy, securi- ties regulation, environmental policy, criminal law enforcement, banking and insurance supervi- sion—in short, all the agents of the modern regula- tory state—regularly collaborate with their foreign counterparts.

National regulators track their quarry through cooperation. While frequently ad hoc, such coop- eration is increasingly cemented by bilateral and multilateral agreements. The most formal of these are mutual legal assistance treaties, whereby two states lay out a protocol governing cooperation be- tween their law enforcement agencies and courts. However, the preferred instrument of cooperation is the memorandum of understanding, in which two or more regulatory agencies set forth and ini- tial terms for an ongoing relationship. Such mem- orandums are not treaties; they do not engage the executive or the legislature in negotiations, delib- eration, or signature. Rather, they are good-faith agreements, affirming ties between regulatory

agencies based on their like-minded commitment to getting results.

"Positive comity," a concept developed by the U.S. Department of Justice, epitomizes the chang- ing nature of transgovernmental relations. Comity of nations, an archaic and notoriously vague term beloved by diplomats and international lawyers, has traditionally signified the deference one nation grants another in recognition of their mutual sov- ereignty. For instance, a state will recognize an- other state's laws or judicial judgments based on comity. Positive comity requires more active coop- eration, As worked out by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the EU's Euro- pean Commission, the regulatory authorities of both states alert one another to violations within their jurisdiction, with the understanding that the responsible authority will take action. Positive comity is a principle of enduring cooperation be- tween government agencies.

In 1988 the central bankers of the world's ma- jor financial powers adopted capital adequacy requirements for all banks under their supervi- sion—a significant reform of the international banking system. It was not the World Bank, the In- ternational Monetary Fund, or even the Group of Seven that took this step. Rather, the forum was the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, an organization composed of 12 central bank gover- nors. The Basle Committee was created by a simple agreement among the governors themselves. Its members meet four times a year and follow their own rules. Decisions are made by consensus and are not formally binding; however, members do implement these decisions within their own sys- tems. The Basle Committee's authority is often cited as an argument for taking domestic action.

National securities commissioners and insur- ance regulators have followed the Basle Commit- tee's example. Incorporated by a private bill of the Quebec National Assembly, the International Or- ganization of Securities Commissioners has no formal charter or founding treaty. Its primary pur- pose is to solve problems affecting international securities markets by creating a consensus for enactment of national legislation. Its members

have also entered into information-sharing agree- ments on their own initiative. The International Association of Insurance Supervisors follows a similar model, as does the newly created Tripartite Group, an international coalition of banking, in- surance, and securities regulators the Basle Com- mittee created to improve the supervision of financial conglomerates.

Pat Buchanan would have had a field day with the Tripartite Group, denouncing it as a prime ex- ample of bureaucrats taking power out of the hands of American voters. In fact, unlike the inter- national bogeymen of demagogic fantasy, trans- national regulatory organizations do not aspire to exercise power in the international system inde- pendent of their members. Indeed, their main purpose is to help regulators apprehend those who would harm the interests of American voters. Transgovernmental networks often promulgate their own rules, but the purpose of those rules is to enhance the enforcement of national law.

Traditional international law requires states to implement the international obligations they incur through their own law. Thus, if states agree to a 12- mile territorial sea, they must change their domes- tic legislation concerning the interdiction of vessels in territorial waters accordingly. But this legisla- tion is unlikely to overlap with domestic law, as national legislatures do not usually seek to regulate global commons issues and interstate relations.

Transgovernmental regulation, by contrast, pro- duces rules concerning issues that each nation already regulates within its borders: crime, securi- ties fraud, pollution, tax evasion. The advances in technology and transportation that have fueled globalization have made it more difficult to en- force national law. Regulators benefit from coordi- nating their enforcement efforts with those of their foreign counterparts and from ensuring that other nations adopt similar approaches.

The result is the nationalization of interna- tional law. Regulatory agreements between states are pledges of good faith that are self-enforcing, in the sense that each nation wil l be better able to en- force its national law by implementing the agree- ment if other nations do likewise. Laws are binding

or coercive only at the national level. Uniformity of result and diversity of means go hand in hand, and the makers and enforcers of rules are national leaders who are accountable to the people.

Bipartisan Globalization

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright seeks to re- vive the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of the late 1940s. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott argues that promoting democracy worldwide satis- fies the American need for idealpolitik as well as realpolitik. President Clinton, in his second inau- gural address, called for a "new government for a new century," abroad as well as at home. But bi- partisanship is threatened by divergent responses to globalization, democratization is a tricky busi- ness, and Vice President Al Gore's efforts to "rein- vent government" have focused on domestic rather than international institutions. Transgovernmen- talism can address all these problems.

Globalization implies the erosion of national boundaries. Consequently, regulators' power to implement national regulations within those boundaries declines both because people can easily flee their jurisdiction and because the flows of cap- ital, pollution, pathogens, and weapons are too great and sudden for any one regulator to control. The liberal internationalist response to these as- saults on state regulatory power is to build a larger international apparatus. Globalization thus leads to internationalization, or the transfer of regula- tory authority from the national level to an inter- national institution. The best example is not the W T O itself, but rather the stream of proposals to expand the WTO's jurisdiction to global competi- tion policy, intellectual property regulation, and other trade-related issues. Liberals are likely to support expanding the power of international in- stitutions to guard against the global dismantling of the regulatory state.

Here's the rub. Conservatives are more likely to favor the expansion of globalized markets without the internationalization that goes with it, since in- ternationalization, from their perspective, equals a loss of sovereignty. According to Buchanan, the

U.S. foreign policy establishment "want[s] to move America into a New World Order where the World Court decides quarrels between nations; the WTO writes the rules for trade and settles all disputes; the IMF and World Bank order wealth transfers from continent to continent and country to coun- try; the Law of the Sea Treaty tells us what we may and may not do on the high seas and ocean floor, and the United Nations decides where U.S. mili- tary forces may and may not intervene." The rhetoric is deliberately inflammatory, but echoes resound across the Republican spectrum.

Transgovernmental initiatives are a compro- mise that could command bipartisan support. Reg- ulatory loopholes caused by global forces require a coordinated response beyond the reach of any one country. But this coordination need not come from building more international institutions. It can be achieved through transgovernmental coop- eration, involving the same officials who make and implement policy at the national level. The trans- governmental alternative is fast, flexible, and effec- tive.

A leading example of transgovernmentalism in action that demonstrates its bipartisan appeal is a State Department initiative christened the New Transatlantic Agenda. Launched in 1991 under the Bush administration and reinvigorated by Secre- tary of State Warren Christopher in 1995, the ini- tiative structures the relationship between the United States and the EU, fostering cooperation in areas ranging from opening markets to fighting terrorism, drug trafficking, and infectious disease. It is an umbrella for ongoing projects between U.S. officials and their European counterparts. It reaches ordinary citizens, embracing efforts like the Transatlantic Business Dialogue and engag- ing individuals through people-to-people ex- changes and expanded communication through the Internet.

Democratization, Step by Step

Transgovernmental networks are concentrated among liberal democracies but are not limited to them. Some nondemocratic states have institutions

capable of cooperating with their foreign coun- terparts, such as committed and effective regula- tory agencies or relatively independent judiciaries. Transgovernmental ties can strengthen institutions in ways that will help them resist political domina- tion, corruption, and incompetence and build democratic institutions in their countries, step by step. The Organization of Supreme Courts of the Americas, for instance, actively seeks to strengthen norms of judicial independence among its mem- bers, many of whom must fend off powerful polit- ical forces.

Individuals and groups in nondemocratic countries may also "borrow" government institu- tions of democratic states to achieve a measure of justice they cannot obtain in their own countries. The court or regulatory agency of one state may be able to perform judicial or regulatory functions for the people of another. Victims of human rights violations, for example, in countries such as Ar- gentina, Ethiopia, Haiti, and the Philippines have sued for redress in the courts of the United States. U.S. courts accepted these cases, often over the ob- jections of the executive branch, using a broad in- terpretation of a moribund statute dating back to 1789. Under this interpretation, aliens may sue in U.S. courts to seek damages from foreign govern- ment officials accused of torture, even if the tor- ture allegedly took place in the foreign country. More generally, a nongovernmental organization seeking to prevent human rights violations can of- ten circumvent their own government's corrupt legislature and politicized court by publicizing the plight of victims abroad and mobilizing a foreign court, legislature, or executive to take action.

Responding to calls for a coherent U.S. foreign policy and seeking to strengthen the community of democratic nations, President Clinton substituted the concept of "enlargement" for the Cold War principle of "containment." Expanding transgov- ernmental outreach to include institutions from nondemocratic states would help expand the circle of democracies one institution at a time.

A New World Order Ideal

Transgovernmentalism offers its own world order ideal, less dramatic but more compelling than ei- ther liberal internationalism or the new medieval- ism. It harnesses the state's power to find and implement solutions to global problems. Interna- tional institutions have a lackluster record on such problem-solving; indeed, NGOs exist largely to compensate for their inadequacies. Doing away with the state, however, is hardly the answer. The new medievalist mantra of global governance is "governance without government." But gover- nance without government is governance without power, and government without power rarely works. Many pressing international and domestic problems result from states' insufficient power to establish order, build infrastructure, and provide minimum social services. Private actors may take up some slack, but there is no substitute for the state.

Transgovernmental networks allow govern- ments to benefit from the flexibility and decen- tralization of nonstate actors. Jessica T. Mathews argues that "businesses, citizens' organizations, ethnic groups, and crime cartels have all readily adopted the network model," while governments "are quintessential hierarchies, wedded to an orga- nizational form incompatible with all that the new technologies make possible." Not so. Disaggregat- ing the state into its functional components makes it possible to create networks of institutions en- gaged in a common enterprise even as they repre- sent distinct national interests. Moreover, they can work with their subnational and supranational counterparts, creating a genuinely new world order in which networked institutions perform the func- tions of a world government—legislation, admin- istration, and adjudication—without the form.

These globe-spanning networks will strengthen the state as the primary player in the international system. The state's defining attribute has tradition- ally been sovereignty, conceived as absolute power in domestic affairs and autonomy in relations with other states. But as Abram and Antonia Chayes ob-

serve in The New Sovereignty (1995), sovereignty is actually "status—the vindication of the state's existence in the international system." More im- portantly, they demonstrate that in contemporary international relations, sovereignty has been rede- fined to mean "membership . . . in the regimes that make up the substance of international life." Dis- aggregating the state permits the disaggregation of sovereignty as well, ensuring that specific state in- stitutions derive strength and status from partici- pation in a transgovernmental order.

Transgovernmental networks will increasingly provide an important anchor for international or- ganizations and nonstate actors alike. U.N. officials have already learned a lesson about the limits of supranational authority; mandated cuts in the in- ternational bureaucracy will further tip the balance of power toward national regulators. The next gen- eration of international institutions is also likely to look more like the Basle Committee, or, more for- mally, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, dedicated to providing a forum for transnational problem-solving and the harmo- nization of national law. The disaggregation of the state creates opportunities for domestic institu- tions, particularly courts, to make common cause with their supranational counterparts against their fellow branches of government. Nonstate actors will lobby and litigate wherever they think they will have the most effect. Many already realize that corporate self-regulation and states' promises to comply with vague international agreements are no substitute for national law.

The spread of transgovernmental networks will depend more on political and professional conver- gence than on civilizational boundaries. Trust and awareness of a common enterprise are more vul- nerable to differing political ideologies and cor- ruption than to cultural differences. Government networks transcend the traditional divide between high and low politics. National militaries, for in- stance, network as extensively as central bankers with their counterparts in friendly states. Judicial

and regulatory networks can help achieve gradual political convergence, but are unlikely to be of much help in the face of a serious economic or military threat. If the coming conflict with China is indeed coming, transgovernmentalism will not stop it.

The strength of transgovernmental networks and of transgovernmentalism as a world order ideal will ultimately depend on their accountability to the world's peoples. To many, the prospect of transnational government by judges and bureau- crats looks more like technocracy than democracy. Critics contend that government institutions en- gaged in policy coordination with their foreign counterparts will be barely visible, much less ac- countable, to voters still largely tied to national ter- ritory.

Citizens of liberal democracies will not accept any form of international regulation they cannot control. But checking unelected officials is a familiar problem in domestic politics. As national legislators become increasingly aware of transgov- ernmental networks, they will expand their over- sight capacities and develop networks of their own. Transnational NGO networks will develop a simi- lar monitoring capacity. It will be harder to moni- tor themselves.

Transgovernmentalism offers answers to the most important challenges facing advanced indus- trial countries: loss of regulatory power with eco- nomic globalization, perceptions of a "democratic deficit" as international institutions step in to fill the regulatory gap, and the difficulties of engag- ing nondemocratic states. Moreover, it provides a powerful alternative to a liberal internationalism that has reached its limits and to a new medieval- ism that, like the old Marxism, sees the state slowly fading away. The new medievalists are right to emphasize the dawn of a new era, in which infor- mation technology will transform the globe. But government networks are government for the in- formation age. They offer the world a blueprint for the international architecture of the 21st century.

R O B E R T I . R O T B E R G

Failed States in a World of Terror

The Road to Hell

In the wake of September 11, the threat of terror- ism has given the problem of failed nation-states an immediacy and importance that transcends its previous humanitarian dimension. Since the early 1990s, wars in and among failed states have killed about eight million people, most of them civilians, and displaced another four million. The number of those impoverished, malnourished, and deprived of fundamental needs such as security, health care, and education has totaled in the hundreds of mil- lions.

Although the phenomenon of state failure is not new, it has become much more relevant and worrying than ever before. In less interconnected eras, state weakness could be isolated and kept dis- tant. Failure had fewer implications for peace and security. Now, these states pose dangers not only to themselves and their neighbors but also to peoples around the globe. Preventing states from failing, and resuscitating those that do fail, are thus strate- gic and moral imperatives.

But failed states are not homogeneous. The nature of state failure varies from place to place, sometimes dramatically. Failure and weakness can flow from a nation's geographical, physical, his- torical, and political circumstances, such as colo- nial errors and Cold War policy mistakes. More than structural or institutional weaknesses, human agency is also culpable, usually in a fatal way. De- structive decisions by individual leaders have almost always paved the way to state failure, Presi- dent Mobutu Sese Seko's three-plus decades of kleptocratic rule sucked Zaire (now the Democra- tic Republic of Congo, or DRC) dry until he was deposed in 1997. In Sierra Leone, President Siaka

From Foreign Affairs 81 no. 4 (July/August 2002): 127-140.

Stevens (1967-85) systematically plundered his tiny country and instrumentalized disorder. Presi- dent Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-91) did the same in Somalia. These rulers were personally greedy, but as predatory patrimonialists they also licensed and sponsored the avarice of others, thus preor- daining the destruction of their states.

Today's failed states, such as Afghanistan, Si- erra Leone, and Somalia, are incapable of project- ing power and asserting authority within their own borders, leaving their territories governmentally empty. This outcome is troubling to world order, especially to an international system that de- mands—indeed, counts on—a state's capacity to govern its space. Failed states have come to be feared as "breeding grounds of instability, mass migration, and murder" (in the words of political scientist Stephen Walt), as well as reservoirs and exporters of terror. The existence of these kinds of countries, and the instability that they harbor, not only threatens the lives and livelihoods of their own peoples but endangers world peace.

Into the Abyss

The road to state failure is marked by several re- vealing signposts. On the economic side, living standards deteriorate rapidly as elites deliver finan- cial rewards only to favored families, clans, or small groups. Foreign-exchange shortages provoke food and fuel scarcities and curtail government spending on essential services and political goods; accordingly, citizens see their medical, educational, and logistical entitlements melt away. Corruption flourishes as ruling cadres systematically skim the few resources available and stash their ill-gotten gains in hard-to-trace foreign bank accounts.

On the political side, leaders and their associ- ates subvert prevailing democratic norms, coerce

legislatures and bureaucracies into subservience, strangle judicial independence, block civil society, and gain control over security and defense forces. They usually patronize an ethnic group, clan, class, or kin. Other groups feel excluded or discrimi- nated against, as was the case in Somalia and Sierra Leone in the 1970s and 1980s. Governments that once appeared to operate for the benefit of all the nation's citizens are perceived to have become par- tisan.

As these two paths converge, the state provides fewer and fewer services. Overall, ordinary citizens become poorer as their rulers become visibly wealthier. People feel preyed upon by the regime and its agents—often underpaid civil servants, po- lice officers, and soldiers fending for themselves. Se- curity, the most important political good, vanishes. Citizens, especially those who have known more prosperous and democratic times, increasingly feel that they exist solely to satisfy the power lust and fi- nancial greed of those in power. Meanwhile, corrupt despots drive grandly down city boulevards in mo- torcades, commandeer commercial aircraft for for- eign excursions, and put their faces prominentiy on the local currency and on oversize photographs in public places. President Robert Mugabe of Zim- babwe, for example, purchased 19 expensively ar- mored limousines for his own motorcade before his reelection earlier this year.

In the last phase of failure, the state's legiti- macy crumbles. Lacking meaningful or realistic democratic means of redress, protesters take to the streets or mobilize along ethnic, religious, or lin- guistic lines. Because small arms and even more formidable weapons are cheap and easy to find, because historical grievances are readily remem- bered or manufactured, and because the spoils of separation, autonomy, or a total takeover are at- tractive, the potential for violent conflict grows exponentially as the state's power and legitimacy recede.

If preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution, or external intervention cannot arrest this process of disaffection and mutual antagonism, the state at risk can collapse completely (Somalia), break down and be sundered (Angola, the DRC and Su-

dan), or plunge into civil war (Afghanistan and Liberia). The state may also lapse and then be restored to various degrees of health by the UN (Bosnia and Cambodia), a regional or subregional organization (Sierra Leone and Liberia), or a well- intentioned or hegemonic outside power (Syria in Lebanon, Russia in Tajikistan). A former colonial territory such as East Timor can be brought back to life by the efforts and cash infusions of a U N - run transitional administration.

Law and Order

State failure threatens global stability because national governments have become the primary building blocks of order. International security re- lies on states to protect against chaos at home and limit the cancerous spread of anarchy beyond their borders and throughout the world. States exist to deliver political (i.e., public) goods to their inhabi- tants. When they function as they ideally should, they mediate between the constraints and chal- lenges of the international arena and the dynamic forces of their own internal economic, political, and social realities.

The new concern over state failure notwith- standing, strong, effective states are more nu- merous now than before 1914. This shift occurred after the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro- Hungarian empires, continued with the demise of colonialism in Africa and Asia, and concluded with the implosion of the Soviet Union. In 1914, 55 polities could be considered members of the global system; in 1960, there were 90 such states. After the Cold War, that number climbed to 192. But given the explosion in the number of states—so many of which are small, resource-deprived, geographically disadvantaged, and poor—it is no wonder that nu- merous states are at risk of failure.

States are not created equal. Their sizes and shapes, their human endowments, their capacity for delivering services, and their leadership capa- bilities vary enormously. More is required of the modern state, too, than ever before. Each is ex- pected to provide good governance; to make its

people secure, prosperous, healthy, and literate; and to instill a sense of national pride. States also exist to deliver political goods—i.e., services and benefits that the private sector is usually less able to provide. Foremost is the provision of national and individual security and public order. That promise includes security of property and inviolable con- tracts (both of which are grounded in an enforce- able code of laws), an independent judiciary, and other methods of accountability. A second but vital political good is the provision, organization, and regulation of logistical and communications infra- structures. A nation without well-maintained ar- teries of commerce and information serves its citizens poorly. Finally, a state helps provide basic medical care and education, social services, a social safety net, regulation and supply of water and en- ergy, and environmental protection. When gov- ernments refuse to or cannot provide such services to all of their citizens, failure looms.

But not all of the states that fit this general pro- file fail. Some rush to the brink of failure, totter at the abyss, remain fragile, but survive. Weakness is endemic in many developing nations—the halfway house between strength and failure. Some weak states, such as Chad and Kyrgyzstan (and even once-mighty Russia), exhibit several of the defin- ing characteristics of failed states and yet do not fail. Others, such as Zimbabwe, may slide rapidly from comparative strength to the very edge of fail- ure. A few, such as Sri Lanka and Colombia, may suffer from vicious, enduring civil wars without ever failing, while remaining weak and susceptible to failure. Some, such as Tajikistan, have retrieved themselves from possible collapse (sometimes with outside help) and remain shaky and vulnerable, but they no longer can be termed "failed." Thus it is important to ask what separates strong from weak states, and weak states from failed states. What defines the phenomenon of failure?

The Essence of Failure

Strong states control their territories and deliver a high order of political goods to their citizens. They

perform well according to standard indicators such as per capita G D P , the UN's Human Development Index, Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, and Freedom House's Freedom in the World report. Strong states offer high levels of security from political and criminal violence, ensure political freedom and civil liberties, and create environments conducive to the growth of economic opportunity. They are places of peace and order.

In contrast, failed states are tense, conflicted, and dangerous. They generally share the following characteristics: a rise in criminal and political vio- lence; a loss of control over their borders; rising ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural hostilities; civil war; the use of terror against their own citi- zens; weak institutions; a deteriorated or insuffi- cient infrastructure; an inability to collect taxes without undue coercion; high levels of corruption; a collapsed health system; rising levels of infant mortality and declining life expectancy; the end of regular schooling opportunities; declining levels of G D P per capita; escalating inflation; a widespread preference for non-national currencies; and basic food shortages, leading to starvation.

Failed states also face rising attacks on their fundamental legitimacy. As a state's capacity weak- ens and its rulers work exclusively for themselves, key interest groups show less and less loyalty to the state. The people's sense of political community vanishes and citizens feel disenfranchised and mar- ginalized. The social contract that binds citizens and central structures is forfeit. Perhaps already divided by sectional differences and animosity, citizens transfer their allegiances to communal warlords. Domestic anarchy sets in. The rise of ter- rorist groups becomes more likely.

Seven failed states exist today: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, the D R C , Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. They each exhibit most, if not all, of the traits listed above. Internal hot wars are also a leading indicator of failure, but failure usually pre- cedes the outbreak of war. Hence, the extent of in- ternecine antagonisms and how they are handled are important predictors of failure. Likewise, the nature of the rulers' approach toward minorities,

working classes, and other weak or marginalized peoples is indicative.

Among today's failed states, Angola and Sudan have oil wealth, and Angola, the DRC, and Sierra Leone boast diamonds and other mineral re- sources. But all four countries' governments, as well as those of Afghanistan, Burundi, and Liberia, share a common feature: they deliver security in limited quantities and across circumscribed areas. Moreover, their per capita GDP rates are very low, life expectancies are declining, and basic govern- mental services are lacking. In each case, the rul- ing regime projects little power. Each confronts ongoing civil strife, a proliferation of substate au- thorities, porous borders, high rates of civilian ca- sualties, and a challenge to the regime's intrinsic legitimacy by competing internal forces. Utter col- lapse is possible in each case, as is dismemberment, outside tutelage, or an interim assumption of UN control. A l l remain on the humanitarian watch list as potent sources of displaced persons and refugees. (Sierra Leone, however, has recently es- tablished a rudimentary government and has qui- eted its civil war with the assistance of 17,000 British and UN soldiers. But it was a collapsed state from the late 1990s until 2000.)

Total Collapse

Truly collapsed states, a rare and extreme version of a failed state, are typified by an absence of au- thority. Indeed, a collapsed state is a shell of a polity. Somalia is the model of a collapsed state: a geographical expression only, with borders but with no effective way to exert authority within those borders. Substate actors have taken over. The central government has been divided up, replaced by a functioning, unrecognized state called Soma- liland in the north and a less well defined, putative state called Punt in the northeast. In the rump of the old Somalia, a transitional national govern- ment has emerged thanks to outside support. But it has so far been unable to project its power even locally against the several warlords who control sections of Mogadishu and large swaths of the

countryside. Private entrepreneurialism has dis- placed the central provision of political goods. Yet life somehow continues, even under conditions of unhealthy, dangerous chaos.

An example of a once-collapsed state is Lebanon, which had disintegrated before Syria's intervention in 1990 provided security and gave a sense of governmental legitimacy to the shell of the state. Lebanon today qualifies as a weak, rather than failed, polity because its government is credi- ble, civil war is absent, and political goods are be- ing provided in significant quantities and quality. Syria provides the security blanket, denies fractious warlords the freedom to aggrandize themselves, and mandates that the usually antagonistic Muslim and Christian communities cooperate. The fear of being attacked preemptively by rivals, or of losing control of critical resources, is alleviated by Syria's imposed hegemony, Within that framework of se- curity, the Lebanese people's traditional entrepre- neurial spirit has transformed a failed state into a much stronger one.

The Art of Prevention

Experience suggests that the prevention of state failure depends almost entirely on a scarce com- modity: international political will. In part, pre- vention relies on outsiders' recognizing early that a state's internal turmoil has the potential to be fatally destructive, That recognition should be accompanied by subregional, regional, and UN overtures, followed, if required, by private remon- strations—that is, quiet diplomacy. If such en- treaties have little effect, there will be a need for public criticism by donor countries, international agencies, the U N , and regional groupings such as the European Union (EU) or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, These entities should also cease economic assistance, impose "smart sanc- tions," ban international travel by miscreant lead- ers, and freeze their overseas accounts—much as the EU and the United States did to Mugabe and his cohort in February. Furthermore, misbehaving nations should be suspended from international

organizations. In retrospect, if the international community had more effectively shunned Siad Barre, Mobutu, Idi Amin of Uganda, or Sani Abacha of Nigeria, it might have helped to mini- mize the destruction of their states. Ostracizing such strongmen and publicly criticizing their rogue states would also reduce the necessity for any sub- sequent UN peacekeeping and relief missions.

Zimbabwe is an instructive case. Two years ago, Mugabe began employing state-sponsored vi- olence to harass opponents and intimidate voters during the runup to parliamentary elections. But South Africa and the other members of the South- ern African Development Community (SADC) refrained from public criticism of Zimbabwe. The EU and the United States expressed displeasure at Mugabe's tactics of terror but likewise decided that constructive engagement would be more ef- fective than an open rebuke. As brutally as Mugabe was acting, outsiders believed that Zimbabwe's despot could be persuaded to behave more respon- sibly.

Instead, Mugabe set about destroying the eco- nomic and political fabric of his country. Zim- babwe, once unquestionably secure, economically strong, socially advanced, and successfully mod- ern, has plummeted rapidly toward failure—mim- icking Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, Burma from the 1960s onward, and the DRC, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone in the 1990s. In the last several years, Zimbabwe's per capita GDP has fallen annually by 10 percent, while HIV infection rates have climbed to nearly 30 percent. Two thou- sand Zimbabweans die of AIDS each week. Life ex- pectancy has dropped from 60 to 40 years, while annual inflation has increased from 40 to 116 per- cent. Corruption has become blatant. The central government no longer effectively provides funda- mental political goods such as personal security, schooling, and medical facilities and treatment. Public order has broken down. This year [2002] many Zimbabweans may starve due to extremely serious food shortages, and fuel supplies are dwin- dling. Political institutions have ceased to function fully. Sizable sectional, ethnic, and linguistic fis- sures exist, and disaffection is everywhere. Even

though the state remains intact, the government's legitimacy is now seriously challenged.

By the time of the presidential election in March, therefore, Mugabe had already driven his country to the very edge of failure. Observers, es- pecially South Africa and its neighbors, focused on the election as a way to remove htm, provided it were free and fair. But Mugabe persistently refused to play by the common rules of democratic con- tests. Ahead of the election, he escalated violence against his opponents and anyone who failed to obey him and his ruling party. He unleashed a wave of thugs against the opposition and white farmers. He bombed independent newspapers and tried to jail their editors. He packed the nation's supreme court and refused to carry out its rulings when it still failed to toe the line. Meanwhile, Zim- babwe's neighbors, its major overseas friends and trading partners, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan continued to try to bring about change through quiet diplomacy. But Mugabe ignored New York, London, Washington, and Brussels. He thumbed his nose at President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, reneging on solemn promises about fair play, the rule of law, and respect for free speech and media freedom.

Very belatedly, on the eve of the election, the EU and the United States finally turned firm and imposed sanctions. But it was too late, well past the many opportunities for South Africa, the SADC, the United States, and the EU to isolate Mugabe. Ostracizing Mugabe and his close colleagues much earlier in 2001, through gradually escalating smart sanctions, might have led to freer and fairer elec- tions in 2002 and helped to level the playing field. At the very least, international public criticism of Mugabe's tactics might have helped to encour- age the growth of civil society in Zimbabwe. But Mbeki's trenchant criticisms were hesitant and muted. And South Africa, the regional super- power, did not threaten to cut off Zimbabwe's sup- plies of electric power and petroleum. No one in the West or in Africa effectively warned Mugabe that attacking one's own people, destroying a state, and stealing an election were impermissible.

Getting Nation Building Right

If, as in Zimbabwe's case, preventive diplomacy, targeted financial assistance, and other methods of stanching failure prove unsuccessful and a weak state actually fails, earnest efforts at reconstruction are required. President George W. Bush might still dread "nation building," but the United States should support such efforts fully in the cases of Af- ghanistan, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan—indeed, wherever terror can easily find a home.

The examples of Tajikistan and Lebanon sug- gest that failed states can be helped to recover. Even the seemingly hopeless cases, such as Soma- lia, are not irredeemable. Likewise, the accom- plishments of the UN transitional administrations in Cambodia and East Timor, as well as the N A T O - U N interim administration in Kosovo, in- dicate that nation building is possible if there is sufficient political will and targeted external assis- tance.

In each of the last three cases mentioned above, an international interim administration pro- vided security and developed a rudimentary local police force, patiently trained local administrators across departments, reintroduced legal codes and methods, and helped to rejuvenate and regularize existing economies. The transitional government eventually registered voters and sponsored interna- tionally guaranteed expressions of political choice through the ballot box, thus leading all three coun- tries out of a state of tutelage toward home rule and independence. But in each instance the in- terim government has been anxious to do its job and leave. Short-term fixes and quick reconstruc- tion efforts were imperative for those who funded the interim administrations. Yet sustainable nation building demands more than a quick fix. It re- quires a long-term commitment by outsiders to building capacities, strengthening security, and developing human resources. The uncomfortable but necessary lesson of these partially effective attempts is that the revival of failed states will prove more successful if a regional or international

organization takes charge and only very gradually relinquishes authority to an indigenous transi- tional administration.

A lasting cease-fire must be achieved as the first step in healing a failed state. It is then essential to disarm and demobilize combatants—a key step that was unfortunately omitted in Somalia in 1993. The ex-combatants should be provided, if possible, with jobs or plots of arable land as a way to reinte- grate them into society. Collecting and destroying the weapons of ex-combatants, as Mozambique has accomplished, is also critical. So is the discov- ery and disposal of land mines, which remain strewn across the landscape in Afghanistan, An- gola, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone,

Before a peace process can truly become a re- building endeavor, the transitional administration must be able to deliver security throughout the country. Roads must be made safe for travelers and commerce, if necessary by peacekeepers. As men- tioned above, the large number of UN troops in Sierra Leone finally restored safety in that failed state in early 2002. That lesson should be applied to Afghanistan, a country with a terrible history of lawlessness and infamous levels of insecurity. A few thousand international peacekeepers in Kabul alone will hardly pacify the entire country, A well- disciplined force more along the lines of NATO's operations in Kosovo, or the UN battalions in Si- erra Leone, remains critical.

Afghanistan is the international community's greatest challenge. Without a return to law and or- der, no transitional administration can hope to produce an atmosphere conducive to resuscitation. But once stability and confidence have been at least partially restored, the transitional administration and international agencies can together focus on four primary and parallel objectives: jump-starting the economy, restoring the rule of law, re-creating political institutions, and rejuvenating civil society. The fundamental economic requirements also in- clude establishing fiscal and macroeconomic sta- bility, paying civil servants and police officers, and creating jobs. Without those accomplishments, a new probity, and a sense of coming prosperity, the local economy will languish and continue to rely

on opium exports for cash. Crucial foreign invest- ment, as well as aid from developed-world donors, will be conspicuously absent.

Reintroducing the rule of law can be done in stages, over time, but citizens will not support re- construction efforts until they are certain that legal redress will be available. A functioning court sys- tem should be among the first political institutions to be reborn. A police force, a central bank, and the repair of roads and telephone networks are also es- sential. Together, such initiatives will reestablish a sense that a new government exists and has begun to work for, rather than against, the people.

Police personnel, judges, bureaucrats, and par- liamentarians will have to be trained or retrained. Defense forces have to be reconfigured and their chiefs reoriented. Strong local leadership cannot be assumed but must be nurtured and strengthened. Once these initiatives start succeeding, it will be important to write a new constitution and consti- tute a government through well-supervised elec- tions. But rushing into a national electoral contest is inadvisable before peace, law and order, and a strong administration are in place.

Afghanistan's reconstruction will be expensive, costing as much as $15 billion over the next ten years, plus the cost of training a new army and police force. But humanitarian relief, repeated peacemaking, and the war against terror are also

expensive. It wil l help the United States and Europe restore their battered credibility in the developing world if they supply the large sums necessary to Afghanistan and other failed states to resume functional governance. Nothing less than a new Marshall Plan is needed to mobilize peo- ple, money, and ideas for the crucial efforts in Afghanistan, the D R C , Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan.

When a state fails or collapses, it destroys trust and mutilates its institutions. That is why sus- tained state rebuilding requires time and enduring economic and technical commitments. Rich na- tions must promise not to abandon state rebuild- ing before the tough work is finished—before a failed state has functioned well for several years and has had its political, economic, and social health restored. The worst enemy of reconstruc- tion is a premature exit by donors, international agencies, and countries backing reconstruction ini- tiatives. Today's Haiti and Somalia reflect such un- timely exit strategies.

The new imperative of state building should supersede any lingering unilateralism. State build- ing trumps terror. If state building is done on the cheap, or if the big powers walk away from the failed states too soon and decide that the long slog of reconstruction is for others, then the real war against terror wi l l not have been won.

S A M U E L P . H U N T I N G T O N

The Clash of Civilizations?

The Next Pattern of Conflict

World politics is entering a new phase, and intel- lectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be—the end of history, the return of

From Foreign Affairs 72 no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22-49.

traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerg- ing reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a cen- tral, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be pri- marily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the domi- nating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the batde lines of the future.

Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes—emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most impor- tant, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. * * * [A]s a result of the Russian Revolution and the re- action against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two super- powers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology.

* * * With the end of the Cold War, interna- tional politics moves out of its Western phase, and its centerpiece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non- Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.

The Nature of Civilizations

During the Cold War the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divi- sions are no longer relevant. It is far more mean- ingful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.

What do we mean when we talk of a civiliza- tion? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a vil- lage in northern Italy, but both will share in a com- mon Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Ch i - nese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civiliza- tions. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cul- tural identity people have short of that which dis- tinguishes humans from other species. It is de- fined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institu- tions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. * * *

* * * Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are sel- dom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dy- namic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time.

Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.

Why Civilizations Will Clash

Civilization identity wil l be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confu- cian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization, The most important conflicts of the future will oc- cur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.

Why will this be the case? First, differences among civilizations are not

only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differen- tiated from each other by history, language, cul- ture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. * * *

Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions between peoples of different civi- lizations are increasing; these increasing interac- tions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations, * * *

Third, the processes of economic moderniza- tion and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identi- ties. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity, In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist." Such movements are found in Western Christian- ity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. * * * The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twenti- eth century," * * *

Fourth, the growth of c iv i l iza t ion- consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of

power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return to the roots phenomenon is oc- curring among non-Western civilizations. Increas- ingly one hears references to trends toward a turning inward and "Asianization" in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and the "Hinduization" of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism and nationalism and hence "re-Islamization" of the Middle East, and now a debate over Westerniza- tion versus Russianization in Boris Yeltsin's coun- try. A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non- Western ways.

* * *

Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. * * * Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.

Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. * * * On the one hand, successful economic re- gionalism will reinforce civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civi- lization, The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and West- ern Christianity. The success of the North Ameri- can Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now underway of Mexican, Canadian and Ameri- can cultures. Japan, in contrast, faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity in East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to itself. * * *

* * *

As people define their identity in ethnic and reli- gious terms, they are likely to see an "us" versus

"them" relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion. The end of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come to the fore. Dif- ferences in culture and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the envi- ronment. * * * Most important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liber- alism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic inter- ests engender countering responses from other civ- ilizations. * * *

The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro-level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle over the control of inter- national institutions and third parties, and com- petitively promote their particular political and religious values.

The Fault Lines between Civilizations

The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain di- vided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disap- peared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Ortho- dox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christian- ity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania

from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now sepa- rating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yu- goslavia, In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European history—feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revo- lution, the Industrial Revolution; they are generally economically better off than the peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common European economy and to the consolidation of democratic political sys- tems. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim; they historically be- longed to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they seem much less likely to de- velop stable democratic political systems. The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe. As the events in Yugoslavia show, it is not only a line of difference; it is also at times a line of bloody conflict.

Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. * * *

* * +

This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could be- come more virulent. The Gulf War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein had attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West's mil i - tary presence in the Persian Gulf, the West's over- whelming military dominance, and their apparent inability to shape their own destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social develop- ment where autocratic forms of government be- come inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in

Arab political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist movements. * * *

Those relations are also complicated by demog- raphy. The spectacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly in North Africa, has led to increased migration to Western Europe. The move- ment within Western Europe toward minimizing internal boundaries has sharpened political sensi- tivities with respect to this development. * * *

* * *

Historically, the other great antagonistic interac- tion of Arab Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this antago- nism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting in Chad between Libyan- supported insurgents and the government, the ten- sions between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, and the political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The modern- ization of Africa and the spread of Christianity are likely to enhance the probability of violence along this fault line. Symptomatic of the intensification of this conflict was the Pope John Paul IIs speech in Khartoum in February 1993 attacking the ac- tions of the Sudan's Islamist government against the Christian minority there.

On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly erupted between Orthodox and Mus- lim peoples, including the carnage of Bosnia and Sarajevo, the simmering violence between Serb and Albanian, the tenuous relations between Bulgari- ans and their Turkish minority, the violence be- tween Ossetians and Ingush, the unremitting slaughter of each other by Armenians and Azeris, the tense relations between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia. * * *

The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia. The historic clash between Mus- l im and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and

India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India's substantial Muslim minority. The de- struction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992 brought to the fore the issue of whether India wll remain a secular democratic state or become a Hindu one. * * *

* * *

Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become involved in war with people from a differ- ent civilization naturally try to rally support from other members of their own civilization. * * *

* * *

Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has been growing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much further. As the conflicts in the Per- sian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia continued, the positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly were along civilizational lines. Populist politicians, religious leaders and the me- dia have found it a potent means of arousing mass support and of pressuring hesitant governments. In the coming years, the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those, as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines be- tween civilizations. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.

The West versus the Rest

The West is now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared from the map. Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled. Apart from Japan, the West faces no economic challenge. It dominates international political and security in- stitutions and with Japan international economic institutions. Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France, world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion of lesser

and largely non-Western countries. Decisions made at the U . N . Security Council or in the Inter- national Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to the world as reflecting the desires of the world community. The very phrase "the world community" has become the eu- phemistic collective noun (replacing "the Free World") to give global legitimacy to actions reflect- ing the interests of the United States and other Western powers.1 * * *

* X- *

* * * V. S. Naipaul has argued that Western civi- lization is the "universal civilization" that "fits all men," At a superficial level much of Western cul- ture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts dif- fer fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liber- alism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, die separation of church and state often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against "human rights imperialism" and a reaffir- mation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be a "universal civi- lization" is a Western idea, direcdy at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the author of a review of 100 comparative studies of values in different societies concluded that "the values that are most important in the West are least important worldwide."2 In the political realm, of course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights, Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the prod- uct of Western colonialism or imposition.

The central axis of world politics in the future

is likely to be, in Kishore Mahbubani's phrase, the conflict between "the West and the Rest" and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values.3 Those responses generally take one or a combination of three forms. At one ex- treme, non-Western states can, like Burma and North Korea, attempt to pursue a course of isola- tion, to insulate their societies from penetration or "corruption" by the West, and, in effect, to opt out of participation in the Western-dominated global community. The costs of this course, however, are high, and few states have pursued it exclusively. A second alternative, the equivalent of "band- wagoning" in international relations theory, is to attempt to join the West and accept its values and institutions. The third alternative is to attempt to "balance" the West by developing economic and military power and cooperating with other non- Western societies against the West, while preserv- ing indigenous values and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to Westernize.

* * *

Implications for the West

This article does not argue that civilization identi- ties will replace all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each civilization will be- come a single coherent political entity, that groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight each other. This paper does set forth the hy- potheses that differences between civilizations are real and important; civilization-consciousness is increasing; conflict between civilizations will sup- plant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form of conflict; international relations, historically a game played out within Western civilization, will increasingly be de- Westernized and become a game in which non- Western civilizations are actors and not simply ob- jects; successful political, security and economic international institutions are more likely to de- velop within civilizations than across civilizations; conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more

violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between "the West and the Rest"; the elites in some torn non-Western coun- tries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to ac- complishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.

This is not to advocate the desirability of con- flicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descrip- tive hypotheses as to what the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is neces- sary to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications should be divided be- tween short-term advantage and long-term accom- modation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater coopera- tion and unity within its own civilization, particu- larly between its European and North American components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cul- tures are close to those of the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter- civilization conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to mod- erate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international in- stitutions that reflect and legitimate Western inter- ests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions.

In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have at- tempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in

this quest. Non-Western civilizations will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being mod- ern. They will also attempt to reconcile this moder- nity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increas- ingly have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will re- quire the West to maintain the economic and mil- itary power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It wil l also, however, require the West to develop a more profound un- derstanding of the basic religious and philosophi- cal assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.

NOTES 1. Almost invariably Western leaders claim they

are acting on behalf of "the world community." One minor lapse occurred during the run-up to the Gulf War. In an interview on "Good Morn- ing America," Dec. 21, 1990, British Prime M i n - ister John Major referred to the actions "the West" was taking against Saddam Hussein. He quickly corrected himself and subsequendy re- ferred to "the world community." He was, how- ever, right when he erred.

2. Harry C. Triandis, The New York Times, Dec. 25, 1990, p. 41, and "Cross-Cultural Stud- ies of Individualism and Collectivism," Ne- braska Symposium on Motivation, vol. 37,1989, pp. 41-133.

3. Kishore Mahbubani, "The West and the Rest," The National Interest, Summer 1992, pp. 3-13.

E D W A R D W . S A I D

The Clash of Ignorance

Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and re- action. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what "global politics is likely to be in the coming years." Un- hesitatingly he pressed on:

"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideo- logical or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur be- tween nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global poli- tics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent k ind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard

From The Nation 273 n. 12 (October 22, 2001): 11-13.

Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and cul- ture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one al- ways more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cul- tures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole reli- gion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam.

The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in par- ticular. More troubling is Huntington's assump- tion that his perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary at- tachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludi- crously compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title in

1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and demon- strate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was.

The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is—the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for crimi- nal purposes—international luminaries from for- mer Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pon- tificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michaelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for his insult to "Islam.")

But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The Economist, in its issue of September 22-28 [2001], can't resist reaching for the vast generalization, praising Hunt- ington extravagantly for his "cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal says with unseemly solem- nity, Huntington writes that "the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.' " Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?

Uncountable are the editorials in every Ameri- can and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed

not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inap- propriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.

This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I remember interrupting a man who, after a lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1994, rose from the audience and started to attack my ideas as "Western," as op- posed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. "Why are you wearing a suit and tie?" was the first retort that came to mind. "They're Western too." He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face, but I recalled the incident when information on the Sep- tember 11 terrorists started to come in: how they had mastered all the technical details required to inflict their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line be- tween "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi declared, "Islam's" inability to be a part of "mod- ernity"?

One cannot easily do so, of course. How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions, At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending dis- agreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate ter- rorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabu- lary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the

supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose state- ments for the purpose of mobilizing collective pas- sions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."

In a remarkable series of three articles pub- lished between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, com- ing down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obses- sion with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion," And this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, as- pect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradi- tion, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds." As a timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad and then goes on to show that in the word's current confinement to indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize the Islamic—religion, society, culture, history or politics—as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages." The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "con- cerned with power, not with the soul; with the mo- bilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time- bound political agenda." What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes of dis- course.

It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinc- tions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous prac- tices without preparation or transition. And it

was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent (1907), who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation.

For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepti- cism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for sit- uations such as the one we face now. Hence the al- together more reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition between Is- lam and the West, from which official discourse drew its vocabulary in the first days after the Sep- tember 11 attacks. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.

One further reason for its persistence is the in- creased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United States. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its cen- ter. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his land- mark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to a new civilization domi- nated by northern powers (Germany and Carolin- gian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its historical-cultural enemies, What Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science,

philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.

Then there is the persisting legacy of monothe- ism itself, the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Mas- signon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided con- test among these three followers—not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp—of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically ir- reconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic pres-

ence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the mid- dle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradi- tion and modernity."

But we are all swimming in those waters, West- erners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give mo- mentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or in- formed analysis. "The Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of the Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.

G R A H A M E . F U L L E R

The Future of Political Islam

It's Not Over 'Til It's Over

Were the attacks of September 11, 2001, the final gasp of Islamic radicalism or the opening salvo of a more violent confrontation between Muslim ex- tremists and the West? And what does the current crisis imply for the future of the Islamic world it- self? Wil l Muslims recoil from the violence and sweeping anti-Westernism unleashed in their name, or will they allow Osama bin Laden and his cohort to shape the character of future relations between Muslims and the West?

The answers to these questions lie partly in the

From Foreign Affairs 81 no. 2 (March/April 2002): 48-60.

hands of the Bush administration. The war on ter- rorism has already dealt a major blow to the per- sonnel, infrastructure, and operations of bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Just as important, it has burst the bubble of euphoria and sense of invinci- bility among radical Islamists that arose from the successful jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But it is not yet clear whether the war will ultimately alleviate or merely exacerbate the current tensions in the Muslim world.

Depending on one's perspective, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon can be seen either as a success, evidence that a few ac- tivists can deal a grievous blow to a superpower in the name of their cause, or as a failure, since the at-

tackers brought on the demise of their state spon- sor and most likely of their own organization while galvanizing nearly global opposition. To help the latter lesson triumph, the United States will have to move beyond the war's first phase, which has pun- ished those direcdy responsible for the attacks, and address the deeper sources of political violence and terror in the Muslim world today.

The Many Faces of Islamism

President Bush has repeatedly stressed that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. But by seeking to separate Islam from politics, the West ignores the reality that the two are intricately intertwined across a broad swath of the globe from northern Africa to Southeast Asia. Transforming the Muslim environment is not merely a matter of rewriting school textbooks or demanding a less anti-Western press. The simple fact is that political Islam, or Is- lamism—defined broadly as the belief that the Ko- ran and the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet's life) have something important to say about the way society and governance should be ordered— remains the most powerful ideological force in that part of the world.

The Islamist phenomenon is hardly uniform, however; multiple forms of it are spreading, evolv- ing, and diversifying. Today one encounters Is- lamists who may be either radical Or moderate, political or apolitical, violent or quietist, tradi- tional or modernist, democratic or authoritarian. The oppressive Taliban of Afghanistan and the murderous Algerian Armed Islamic Group (known by its French acronym, GIA) lie at one fanatic point of a compass that also includes Pak- istan's peaceful and apolitical preaching-to-the- people movement, the Tablighi Jamaat; Egypt's mainstream conservative parliamentary party, the Muslim Brotherhood; and Turkey's democratic and modernist Fazilet/Ak Party.

Turkey's apolitical Nur movement embraces all aspects of science as compatible with Islam because secular scientific knowledge reinforces the wonder

of God's world, Indonesia's syncretic Nahdatul Ulama eschews any Islamic state at all in its quest to further appreciation of God's role in human life. Islamist feminist movements are studying the Ko- ran and Islamic law (the shari'a) in order to inter- pret the teachings for themselves and distinguish between what their religion clearly stipulates and those traditions arbitrarily devised and enforced by patriarchal leaders (such as mandatory head-to-toe covering or the ban on female driving in Saudi Arabia). These are but a few among the vast array of movements that work in the media, manage Web sites, conduct massive welfare programs, run schools and hospitals, represent flourishing Mus- lim nongovernmental organizations, and exert a major impact on Muslim life.

Islamism has become, in fact, the primary vehi- cle and vocabulary of most political discourse throughout the Muslim world. When Westerners talk about political ideals, they naturally hark back to the Magna Carta, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Muslims go back to the Koran and the Hadith to derive general principles about good governance (including the ruler's obligation to consult the people) and concepts of social and economic justice. Neither Islam nor Is- lamism says much about concrete state institu- tions, and frankly nobody knows exactly what a modern Islamic state should look like—-since few have ever existed and none provides a good model. But Islamists today use general Islamic ideals as a touchstone for criticizing, attacking, or even trying to overthrow what are perceived as authoritarian, corrupt, incompetent, and illegitimate regimes.

No other ideology has remotely comparable sway in the Muslim world. The region's nationalist parties are weak and discredited, and nationalism itself has often been absorbed into Islamism; the left is marginalized and in disarray; liberal demo- crats cannot even muster enough supporters to stage a demonstration in any Muslim capital. Like it or not, therefore, various forms of Islamism will be the dominant intellectual current in the region for some time to come.—and the process is still in its infancy. In the end, modern liberal governance

is more likely to take root through organically evolving liberal Islamist trends at the grassroots level than from imported Western modules of "in- stant democracy."

A Dynamic Phenomenon

Most Western observers tend to look at the phe- nomenon of political Islam as if it were a butterfly in a collection box, captured and skewered for eternity, or as a set of texts unbendingly prescrib- ing a single path. This is why some scholars who examine its core writings proclaim Islam to be in- compatible with democracy—as if any religion in its origins was about democracy at all.

Such observers have the question wrong. The real issue is not what Islam is, but what Muslims want. People of all sorts of faiths can rapidly de- velop interpretations of their religion that justify practically any political quest. This process, more- over, is already underway among Muslims. Con- temporary Islam is a dynamic phenomenon. It includes not only bin Laden and the Taliban, but also liberals who are clearly embarking on their own Reformation with potentially powerful long- term consequences. Deeply entrenched traditional- ists find these latter stirrings a threat, but many more Muslims, including many Islamists, see such efforts to understand eternal values in contempo- rary terms as essential to a living faith.

Regrettably, until recently Islam had been liv- ing (with striking periodic exceptions) in a state of intellectual stagnation for many hundreds of years. Western colonizers further vitiated and marginal- ized Islamic thought and institutions, and post- independence leadership has done no better, tending to draw on quasi-fascist Western models of authoritarian control. Only now is Islam emerg- ing into a period of renewed creativity, freedom, and independence. Much of this new activity, iron- ically, is occurring in the freedom of the West, where dozens of Islamic institutes are developing new ideas and employing modern communica- tions to spur debate and disseminate information.

The process of diversification and evolution within modern Islamism is driven by multiple in- ternal forces, but these developments are always ultimately contingent on the tolerance of local regimes, the nature of local politics, and the reign- ing pattern of global power. Most regimes see al- most any form of political Islam as a threat, since it embodies a major challenge to their unpopular, failing, and illegitimate presidents-for-life or iso- lated monarchs. How the regime responds to the phenomenon often plays a major role in determin- ing how the local Islamist movement develops.

Does the regime permit elections and free po- litical discussion? How repressive is it, and how vi- olent is the political culture in which it operates? How do existing economic and social conditions affect the political process? The answers to these questions go a long way toward describing how Is- lamists—like all other political actors—will behave in any particular country. That said, these days nearly all Islamists push hard for democracy, be- lieving that they will benefit from it and flourish within it. They also have discovered the impor- tance of human rights—at least in the political field—'precisely because they are usually the pri- mary victims of the absence of rights, filling re- gional jails in disproportionate numbers.

Some skepticism is due, of course, about the ability of Islamists to run effective and moderate governments, especially when the three Islamic state models to date—Iran, Sudan, and the Tali- ban's Afghanistan—have all failed dramatically in this area. Only Iran has lately shown signs of excit- ing evolution within an Islamic framework. But it is worth recalling that all of those regimes came to power by social revolution, military coup, or civil war, virtually guaranteeing continuing despotism regardless of which party was in charge.

The true test of any Islamist party comes when it gains office by the ballot box and must then ad- here while in power to the democratic norms it touted in opposition. History unfortunately gives few precedents here. Turkey's brief experience un- der an elected Islamist-led coalition comes closest, but the government was removed by the military

after a year of mixed performance, leaving the ex- periment unfinished. Secular Turks continue to elect Islamist mayors in major cities across the country, however, including Istanbul and Ankara, because they deliver what constituents want.

Americans brought up to venerate the separa- tion of church and state may wonder whether a movement with an explicit religious vision can ever create a democratic, tolerant, and pluralistic polity. But if Christian Democrats can do it, there is no reason in principle why Islamists cannot. This is what the cleric President Mohammed Kha- tami is trying to achieve in Iran, in fact, although his efforts are being blocked by a hard-line clerical faction. Non-Muslims should understand that de- mocratic values are latent in Islamic thought if one wants to look for them, and that it would be more natural and organic for the Muslim world to derive contemporary liberal practices from its own sources than to import them wholesale from for- eign cultures. The key question is whether it will actually do so.

Who's Besieging Whom?

The liberal evolution of political Islam faces some formidable obstacles. The first, as noted, comes from the local political scene, where Islamists are routinely suppressed, jailed, tortured, and exe- cuted. Such circumstances encourage the emer- gence of secret, conspiratorial, and often armed groups rather than liberal ones.

The second obstacle comes from international politics, which often pushes Islamist movements and parties in an unfortunate direction. A famdiar phenomenon is the Muslim national liberation movement. In more than a dozen countries, large, oppressed Muslim minorities, who are also ethni- cally different from their rulers, have sought autonomy or independence—witness the Pal- estinians, Chechens, Chinese Uighurs, Filipino Moros, and Kashmiris, among others. In these cases, Islam serves to powerfully bolster national liberation struggles by adding a "holy" religious el- ement to an emerging ethnic struggle. These causes

have attracted a kind of Muslim "foreign legion" of radicalized, volunteer mujahideen, some of whom have joined al Qaeda.

A third obstacle comes from the Islamists' own long list of grievances against the forces and poli- cies perceived to be holding Muslims back in the contemporary world, many of them associated with liberalism's supposed avatar, the United States. The litany includes U.S. support for author- itarianism in the Muslim world in the name of sta- bility or material interests such as ensuring the flow of oil, routine U.S. backing of Israeli policies, and Washington's failure to press for democratic political processes out of fear that they might bring Islamist groups to power.

Islamists, too, deserve criticism for playing frequently opportunistic political games—like so many other fledgling parties. Where they exist legally, they often adopt radical postures on Is- lamic issues to embarrass the government. The major Islamist PAS movement in Malaysia, for ex- ample—which now governs two of the country's ten states—has called for full implementation of the shari 'a and application of traditional Muslim punishments (including amputations and ston- ing), in part to show up the poor Islamic cre- dentials of the central government. In Egypt and Kuwait, meanwhile, Islamist groups regularly call for more conservative social measures, partly to score political points, and have often inhibited the intellectual freedom on Islamic issues which these societies desperately require. Such posturing tends to bid up the level of Islamic strictness within the country in question in a closed atmosphere of Is- lamic political correctness. Still, most Islamists have quite concrete domestic agendas related to lo- cal politics and social issues that are far removed from the transnational, apocalyptic visions of a bin Laden.

Ironically, even as Westerners feel threatened by Islam, most in the Muslim world feel them- selves besieged by the West, a reality only dimly grasped in the United States. They see the interna- tional order as dramatically skewed against them and their interests, in a world where force and the potential for force dominate the agenda. They are

overwhelmed by feelings of political impotence. Muslim rulers fear offending their protectors in Washington, Muslim publics have little or no in- fluence over policy within their own states, bad leaders cannot be changed, and public expression of dissent is punished, often brutally. This is the "stability" in the Middle East to which the United States seems wedded.

Under such conditions, it should not be sur- prising that these frustrated populations perceive the current war against terrorism as functionally a war against Islam. Muslim countries are the chief target, they contend, Muslims everywhere are sin- gled out for censure and police attention, and U.S. power works its will across the region with little re- gard for deeper Muslim concerns. A vicious circle exists: dissatisfaction leads to anti-regime action, which leads to repression, which in turn leads to terrorism, U.S. military intervention, and finally further dissatisfaction. Samuel Huntington's the- ory of a "clash of civilizations" is seemingly vindi- cated before the Muslim world's eyes.

Their Musl im Problem — And Ours

Several regimes have decided to play the dangerous game of trying to "out-Islam the Islamists," em- bracing harsh social and intellectual interpreta- tions of Islam themselves so as to bolster their credentials against Islamist opposition. Thus in Egypt, the government-controlled University of al-Azhar, a prestigious voice in interpreting Islam, issues its own brand of intolerant fundamentalist rulings; Pakistan does something similar. The issue here is not the actual Islamist agenda but whose Is- lamist writ will dominate. Islam is simply the vehi- cle and coinage of the struggle between the state and its challengers.

In a comparable fashion, Islam and Islamist movements today provide a key source of identity to peoples intent on strengthening their social co- hesion against Western cultural assault. Religious observance is visibly growing across the region, of- ten accompanied by the "Arabization" of customs

in clothing, food, mosque architecture, and rit- ual—even in areas such as Africa and East Asia, where no such customs had previously existed and where claims to cultural authenticity or tradition are weak to say the least. Association with the broader umma, the international Musl im commu- nity, is attractive because it creates new bonds of solidarity that can be transformed into increased international clout.

Islam and Islamist concepts, finally, are often recruited into existing geopolitical struggles. In the 1980s, for example, the rivalry between Saudi Ara- bia and Iran, often cloaked as a simple Sunni ver- sus Shi'a competition, was as much political as it was religious. The Saudis hoped that their puritan- ical and intolerant Wahhabi vision of Islam would prevail over the Iranian revolutionary vision. For better or worse it did, partly because the Saudis could bankroll movements and schools far outside Saudi borders, and partly because many Sunnis considered Iran's Sh ' ism anathema. The radical Islamic groups one sees today in the Philippines, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and Pa- kistan, among other places, are partly the fruits of this export of Wahhabism, nourished by local conditions, ideological and material needs, and grievances.

Islam has thus become a vehicle and vocabu- lary for the expression of many different agendas in the Muslim world. The West is not at war with the religion itself, but it is indeed challenged by the radicalism that some groups have embraced. Mus- lims may too readily blame the West for their own problems, but their frustrations and current griev- ances are real. Indeed, the objective indicators of living conditions in the Islamic world—whether political, economic, or social—are generally turn- ing clown. Cultures and communities under siege naturally tend to opt for essentialism, seeking com- fort and commonality in a back-to-basics view of religion, a narrowing and harshening of cultural and nationalist impulses, and a return to tradi- tional community values. Muslims under pressure today are doing just this, retreating back to the solid certainties of essentialist Islam while their so- cieties are in chaos. When Grozny was flattened by

Russian troops, the Chechens declared Islamic law—clinging to an unquestioned traditional moral framework for comfort, familiarity, and reassuring moral discipline.

As a result, even as liberalization is occurring within some Islamist movements, much of the Is- lamic community is heading in the other direction, growing more austere and less tolerant and mod- ernist. The same harsh conditions produce a quest for heroes, strongmen, and potential saviors. One of the saddest commentaries today, in fact, is the Muslim thirst for heroes who will stand up and defy the dominant U.S.-led order—a quest that has led them to cheer on the Saddam Husseins and bin Ladens of the world.

The Muslim world is therefore in a parlous condition. Some in the West may think that Is- lam's problem is not their problem, that Muslims just need to face reality and get on with it. But the September 11 attacks showed that in a globalized world, their problems can become our problems. The U.S. tendency to disregard popular Muslim concerns as Washington cooperates with oppres- sive and insecure regimes fosters an environment in which acts of terrorism become thinkable and, worse, even gratifying in the eyes of the majority. The vast bulk of Muslims, of course, will go no fur- ther than to cheer on those who lash out. But such an environment is perhaps the most danger- ous of all, because it legitimizes and encourages not the tolerant and liberalizing Islamists and peace-makers, but the negativistic hard-liners and rejectionists.

The Silent Muslim Majority

Few Muslims around the world want to inflict end- less punishment on the United States or go to war with it. Most of them recognize what happened on September 11 as a monstrous crime. But they still hope that the attacks will serve as a "lesson" to the United States to wake up and change its policies toward the Middle East. Most would emphatically reject, however, a key contention of President George W. Bush, that those who sympathize with

the attacks are people who "hate freedom." Nearly all Muslims worldwide admire and aspire to the same political freedoms that Americans take for granted. A central complaint of theirs, in fact, is that U.S. policies have helped block the freedoms necessary to develop their personal and national capacities in comparable ways.

Muslim societies may have multiple problems, but hating American political values is not among them. U.S. policymakers would be wise to drop this simplistic, inaccurate, and self-serving descrip- tion of the problem. They should instead consider what steps the United States can take to spread those political values to areas where they have been noticeable chiefly by their absence.

For Muslims who live in the West, the at- tacks of September 11 posed a moment of self- definition. However acutely attuned they might have been to the grievances of the broader Muslim world, the vast majority recognized that it was Western values and practices with which they identified most. This reaction suggests there may be a large silent majority in the Islamic world, caught between the powerful forces of harsh and entrenched regimes on the one hand and the inex- orable will of an angry superpower on the other. Right now they have few channels of expression between acceptance of a miserable status quo and siding with the world-wreckers' vision of apocalyp- tic confrontation. How can the United States help mobilize this camp? What can make the members of this silent majority think they are anything but ringside spectators at a patently false clash of civi- lizations unfolding before their eyes?

Today most moderate Islamists, as well as the few Muslim liberals around, maintain a discourag- ingly low profile. Although they have condemned the September 11 attacks, they have been reluctant to scrutinize the conditions of their own societies that contribute to these problems. This myopia stems partly from an anxiety about signing on to the sweeping, unpredictable, and open-ended U.S. agenda for its war on terrorism, That said, how- ever, it also stems from a failure of will to preach hard truths when society is under siege.

Given the authoritarian realities of life in the

region, what acceptable outlets of expression are available? Islamists and other social leaders should find some way of setting forth a critique of Muslim society that will galvanize a call for change. Even if presidents-for-life cannot be removed, other de- mands can be made—for better services, more rights, freer economies. It is inexcusable that a Muslim civilization that led the entire world for a thousand years in the arts and sciences today ranks near the bottom of world literacy rates. Although conditions for women vary widely in the Muslim world, overall their levels of education and social engagement are depressingly low—not just a hu- man scandal but also a prime indicator of under- development. When highly traditional or fanatic groups attempt to define Islam in terms of a social order from a distant past, voices should be raised to deny them that monopoly.

The United States, meanwhile, should con- tribute to this effort by beginning to engage over- seas Muslims vigorously, including those Islamic clerics who enjoy great respect and authority as men of uncompromised integrity. Both sides will benefit from a dialogue that initially will reveal deep fissures in thought and approach, but that over time may begin to bridge numerous gaps. Many of these clerics represent undeniably mod- erate forces within political Islam, but their own understanding of the West, though far from uni- formly hostile, is flawed and often initially unsym- pathetic. They could learn from visits to the United States and dialogue with Americans—if ever they were granted visas.

It is worth noting, however, that this process will be fought hard by elements on both sides. The first group of opponents will be the friendly Mus- l im tyrants themselves, those regimes that stifle cri- tiques from respected independent clerics and restrict their movements. The second group of op- ponents will come from the United States and will try to discredit the Muslim travelers by pointing to rash statements about Israel they may have made at one point or another. Given the passions aroused in the Middle East by the Arab-Israeli con- flict, very few if any prominent Muslim figures will have the kind of liberal record of interfaith dia-

logue and tolerance that Americans find natural and appropriate. That should not disqualify them as potential interlocutors, however. Given the im- portance of the issues involved and the realities of the situation, the initial litmus test for being in- cluded in the conversation should be limited to a prohibition on incitement to terrorism and advo- cacy of war.

Turkish Delight?

Americans need to be mindful of the extent to which Islam is entwined with politics through- out the Muslim world. This connection may pose problems, but it is a reality that cannot be changed by mere appeals for secularism. The United States should avoid the Manichean formulation adopted by Bush that nations are either "with us or with the terrorists"; that is not what is going on, any more than Islamism is what bin Laden calls "a struggle between Islam and unbelief." The real story is the potential rise of forces in the Musl im world that will change not Islam itself, but rather the human understanding of Islam, laying the groundwork for a Muslim Reformation and the eventual emer- gence of a politics at once authentically Islamist yet also authentically liberal and democratic. The en- couragement of such trends should be an impor- tant objective of U.S. policy.

One successful model that merits emulation is Turkey. This is not because Turkey is "secular"; in fact, Turkish "secularism" is actually based on to- tal state control and even repression of religion. Turkey is becoming a model precisely because Turkish democracy is beating back rigid state ide- ology and slowly and reluctandy permitting the emergence of Islamist movements and parties that reflect tradition, a large segment of public opinion, and the country's developing democratic spirit. Political Islam in Turkey has evolved rapidly out of an initially narrow and nondemocratic under- standing of Islam into a relatively responsible force, whether it overlaps entirely with American ideals or not.

Other promising cases to explore include

Kuwait, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, Yemen, Malay- sia, and Indonesia—all of which are at differing stages of political and social liberalization and evolution. A l l are working to avoid the social explosion that comes with repression of Islamic politics as a vehicle of change. Opening the politi- cal process enables people to sort out the effective moderates from the rhetorical radicals and reac- tionaries. Significantly, citizens of these states have not been prominent among the major terrorist groups of the world, unlike citizens of the U.S. al- lies Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Most great religions have elements of both tol- erance and intolerance built into them: intolerance because they believe they carry the truth, per- haps the sole truth, and tolerance because they also speak of humanity, the common origins of man- kind, concepts of divine justice, and a humane order for all. Violence does not flow from religion alone—even bigoted religion. After all, the greatest horrors and killing machines in history stemmed from the Western, secular ideologies of fascism and communism. Religion is not about to vanish from the face of the earth, even in the most ad-

vanced Western nations, and certainly not in the Islamic world. The West will have to deal with this reality and help open up these embittered societies. In the process, the multiple varieties of Islam—the key political realities of today—will either evolve in positive directions with popular support, or else be discredited when they deliver little but venom. Muslim publics will quickly know the difference when offered a choice.

Terrorists must be punished. But will Wash- ington limit itself to a merely punitive agenda to treat only the symptoms of crisis in the Mus- lim world? A just settlement for the Palestinians and support of regional democratization remain among the key weapons that can fight the growth of terrorism. It will be a disaster for the United States, and another cruel chapter in the history of the Muslim world, if the war on terrorism fails to liberalize these battered societies and, instead, ex- acerbates those very conditions that contribute to the virulent anti-Americanism of today. If a society and its politics are violent and unhappy, its mode of religious expression is likely to be just the same.

THE INDIVIDUAL

Individual psychology is also important in shaping international relations. Indi- viduals include not. only foreign policy elites—the so-called "great men" who move the world—but also groups of individuals who share common characteristics, and nonelite activists who make a difference in how international issues are addressed. Using psychological concepts, political psychologist Margaret Hermann and politi- cal scientist Joe Hagan sketch out the role elite leaders play in international deci- sionmaking. They contend that the major issue is not whether or not leaders matter (they do!), but how such leaders matter and how they balance interna- tional and domestic factors.

Drawing heavily on psychology, Robert Jervis articulates hypotheses on the origins of misperceptions in a now classic piece published in 1968. He suggests strategies for decisionmakers to mitigate the effects of misperception.

Cynthia Enloe, author of the feminist classic Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (1989), from which this selection is drawn, injects women into international rela- tions. Long neglected by most theorists, the addition of women brings up different issues, such as rape, the sex trade, and women factory workers, where once- personal issues are now political.

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182 C H A P T E R 6 T H E I N D I V I D U A L

M A R G A R E T G . H E R M A N N A N D JOE D . H A G A N

International Decision Making:

Leadership Matters

hen conversations turn to foreign pol- icy and international politics, they of- ten focus on particular leaders and

evaluations of their leadership. We grade Bill Clin- ton's performance abroad; argue about why Ben- jamin Netanyahu is or is not stalling the Middle East peace process; debate Mohammed Khatami's intentions regarding Iranian relations with the United States; and ponder what will happen in South Africa or Russia when Nelson Mandela or Boris Yeltsin leaves office. In each case, our atten- tion is riveted on individuals whose leadership seems to matter beyond the borders of the coun- tries they lead.

Yet, though many of us find such discussions informative, for the past several decades most scholars of world politics would have discounted them, proposing instead to focus on the interna- tional constraints that limit what leaders can do. Their rationale went as follows: Because the sys- temic imperatives of anarchy or interdependence are so clear, leaders can choose from only a limited range of foreign policy strategies. If they are to ex- ercise rational leadership and maximize their state's movement toward its goals, only certain ac- tions are feasible. Consequently, incorporating leaders and leadership into general theories of in- ternational relations is unnecessary since such knowledge adds little to our understanding of the dynamics of conflict, cooperation, and change in international affairs.

In the bipolar international system that charac- terized the Cold War, such a rationale might have seemed reasonable. But today there is little consen- sus on the nature of the "new world order" and

From Foreign Policy, no. 110 (Spring 1998): 124-37.

more room for interpretation, innovation, misun- derstanding, and miscommunication. In such an ambiguous environment, the perspectives of the leaders involved in foreign policy making can have more influence on what governments do. More- over, as international constraints on foreign policy have become more flexible and indeterminate, the importance of domestic political concerns has in- creased. Scholars of international relations have begun to talk not only about different kinds of states—democracies, transitional democracies, and autocracies—but also about how domestic politi- cal pressures can help to define the state—strong, weak; stable, unstable; cohesive, fragmented; satis- fied, revisionist. And they have started to empha- size that government leaders have some choice in the roles that their states play in international politics—doves, hawks; involved, isolationist; uni- lateral, multilateral; regional, global; pragmatists, radicals. These differences preordain different kinds of reactions within the international arena.

Ironically, some of the more interesting illus- trations of the effects that leaders and domestic politics can have on world politics have emerged in the very literature that originally dismissed their significance. Researchers have tried to account for why states with similar positions in international affairs have reacted in varied (and often self- defeating) ways. For example, in examining the crises of the 1930s, students of international rela- tions have puzzled over why the democracies of the time reacted in divergent ways to the Great De- pression and why they failed to balance against seemingly obvious security threats. Scholars seeking to answer such questions have looked at domestic pressures and leadership arrangements with an eye toward developing a theory of state behavior.

Although interest in leaders and domestic poli- tics has ebbed and flowed, scholars who focus on understanding the foreign policy process have made progress in identifying the conditions under which these factors do matter and in specifying the nature of their effects. Building on the research of Graham Allison, Michael Brecher, Alexander George, Morton Halperin, Ole Holsti, Irving Janis, Robert Jervis, Ernest May, James Rosenau, and Richard Snyder, they have explored how leaders perceive and interpret constraints in their interna- tional and domestic environments, make deci- sions, and manage domestic political pressures on their foreign policy choices. These scholars con- tend that state leaders play a pivotal role in balanc- ing international imperatives with those arising from, or embedded in, domestic politics. What has emerged is a more nuanced picture of the pro- cesses that drive and guide the actions of states in world politics.

The Role Leaders Play

L E A D E R S P E R C E I V E A N D I N T E R P R E T C O N S T R A I N T S

Leaders define states' international and domestic constraints, Based on their perceptions and inter- pretations, they build expectations, plan strategies, and urge actions on their governments that con- form with their judgments about what is possible and likely to maintain them in their positions. Such perceptions help frame governments' orien- tations to international affairs. Leaders' interpreta- tions arise out of their experiences, goals, beliefs about the world, and sensitivity to the political context.

The view that the world is anarchic—embod- ied in former secretary of state Henry Kissinger's axiom that "tranquility is not the natural state of the world; peace and security are not the law of na- ture"—leads to a focus on threats and security, a sense of distrust, and a perceived need for carefully managing the balance of power. Leaders with this view must always remain alert to challenges to their state's power and position in the interna- tional system. John Vasquez has argued that the

rise to power of militant hardliners who view the world in such realpolitik terms is a crucial prereq- uisite for war. Thus, the American road to war in Korea and Vietnam was marked first by the de- mise of former President Franklin Roosevelt's ac- commodation of nationalism, then by the fall of George Kennan's selective containment strategy, and ultimately by the rise of former secretary of state Dean Acheson's focus on military contain- ment. Describing the vulnerability of empire, Charles Kupchan has observed that the entrenched belief that one's state is "highly vulnerable" has led the leaders of declining states to appease perceived rising powers (consider British behavior before World War II) and encouraged leaders of rising powers to become overly competitive (Wilhelmine Germany before World War I).

Drawing on a more optimistic view of human nature, scholars such as Bruce Russett have argued that democracies do not fight one another because democratic leaders assume their peers have peace- ful intentions, adhere to cooperative norms, and face domestic political constraints on the use of force. Others such as Ido Oren and John Owen have proposed that leaders who follow a liberal ideology interpret the world in this manner and act accordingly—they place a higher degree of trust in the leaders of countries they currently perceive are democratic.

L E A D E R S O F T E N D I S A G R E E

But what happens if there is no single dominant leader or no set of leaders who share a common in- terpretation of the world? What if a government is led, as in the People's Republic of China, by a standing committee whose members range in views along a continuum composed of hardliners and reformers? Or what if there is a coalition gov- ernment such as the one Prime Minister Net- anyahu must lead in Israel, composed of leaders with different interests and constituencies and, as a result, various perspectives on what is at stake in the peace process?

Before action is possible, leaders must achieve consensus on how to interpret the problem, what

options are feasible, what further information is needed and from whom, who gets to participate in decision making, and where implementation will occur. If consensus is highly unlikely, dealing with the problem will probably be postponed until a decision is forced or the decision unit can be re- constituted.

At issue are the rules of aggregation that facili- tate consensus building when disagreement exists among those who must make policy. Ideas derived from studies of group dynamics, bureaucratic politics, and coalition building have proved use- ful in understanding the factors that influence the shift from individual to collective decisions. Thus, scholars have found that excessive group co- hesion can produce "groupthink" and premature closure around options preferred by the more powerful policymakers; bureaucratic interests gen- erally only yield to compromise; the possession of some "idiosyncrasy credit"—be it vital informa- tion, control over a critical resource, expertise, or charisma—can lead that party's position to prevail; the lack, or failure, of "rules of the game" usually means deadlock and a politically unstable situa- tion; logrolling provokes overcommitment and overextension.

So how can we determine whose positions count in foreign policy? During an international crisis, when the values of the state are threatened and time for decision making is short, authority tends to concentrate among those persons or groups that bear ultimate responsibility for main- taining the government in power. How these indi- viduals, cabinets, juntas, or standing committees interpret the problem will dominate the state's re- actions. Little outside input is sought or tolerated. The experiences, fears, interests, and expectations of these decision makers remain unfettered and af- fect any action that is chosen. Consider the British cabinet during the Falkland Islands crisis or the Bush administration during the Gulf War. In both cases, the tendency was to close ranks and insulate policymakers from both domestic and in- ternational influences. Each group recognized that its government would rise or fall depending on its decisions, and that an overly participatory

decision-making process could mean dangerous delays.

The nature of the foreign policy problem can also help to dictate whose positions count. Eco- nomic, security, environmental, and human rights issues, for example, may all be handled by different parts of the government or by different sets of ac- tors, each brought together to interpret what is happening and make judgments about policy These actors may not be at the apex of power but are often given ultimate authority to make foreign policy decisions for the government because of their expertise, past experience, particular point of view, or official position. The recent threat on the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission to detail Japanese-flag liner vessels in American ports over questions of market access is an extreme example of a well-documented fact: The power to negotiate —and then ratify—trade agreements is generally dispersed across ministries, legislatures, and inter- est groups.

Another crucial factor is the extent to which ri- valries exist within a domestic political system When authority becomes fragmented and compe- tition for power turns fierce, an unstable situation is likely to ensue, with each person, group, or orga- nization acting on its own in an uncoordinated fashion. Witness the disparate actions in Iran on radical students, relatively moderate politicians in the Provisional Revolutionary Government, hard- line clerics dominating the Revolutionary (Council and Ayatollah RuhoEah Khomeini following the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Unti, Khomeini consolidated his power and coordinated action, a coherent Iranian foreign policy was im- possible. When authority is dispersed but little competition for power exists, the result is an oli- garchy like that of the Soviet Politburo during the late 1960s and early 1970s: Building consen sus among these leaders took time since no one wanted to concede any authority. The current [1998] division in the U.S. government between Democratic administration and a Congress domi- nated by Republicans serves as an example of wha happens when consolidated authority is combined with strong competition for power—each side

questions the other's foreign policy record and of- ten attempts to block the other's initiatives.

L E A D E R S A N D D O M E S T I C O P P O S I T I O N

In addition to interpreting potential constraints in the international arena, leaders must also respond effectively to domestic pressures. As Robert Put- nam and Andrew Moravcsik have observed, lead- ers are the "central strategic actors" in the "two-level game" that links domestic politics and international bargaining. In the domestic political game, they face the dual challenge of building a coalition of supporters to retain their authority while contending with opposition forces to main- tain their legitimacy.

An appreciation of the alternative strategies that leaders use to respond to domestic opposition is key to understanding how domestic politics af- fects foreign policy. Leaders who prefer to avoid controversy at home often seek to accommodate the opposition by granting concessions on foreign policy. The result is frequently a policy that is largely unresponsive to international pressures and involves little risk. Note, for example, how nation- alistic feelings in both Russia and Japan have precluded the leaders of these countries from re- solving ownership issues over the islands that con- stitute Japan's "Northern Territories," despite the likely diplomatic and economic benefits of a peace treaty and normalized relations. Leaders can also seek to consolidate their domestic position by pushing a foreign policy that mobilizes new sup- port, logrolls with complementary interests, or un- dercuts the opposition. By this logic, the political attraction of NATO expansion for the Clinton administration is that it garners support from two otherwise contentious groups—liberal inter- nationalists, who favor the spread of democracy; and conservative internationalists, who worry about resurgent threats. Another strategy is to insulate foreign policy from domestic pressures altogether by coopting, suppressing, or ignoring opposition. Leaders of nondemocracies can more easily insulate their foreign policies from domestic pressures than their counterparts in democracies.

Leaders in transitional democracies are learning this the hard way as they face the unfamiliar chal- lenge of having their agendas scrutinized by an in- quisitive press and elected legislatures.

Bridging Tomorrow's Gaps

As Alexander George has observed, practitioners find it difficult to use academic approaches that "assume that all state actors are alike and can be expected to behave in the same way in given situa- tions." Instead, policymakers prefer to work with "actor-specific models that grasp the different in- ternal structures and behavioral patterns of each state and leader with which they must deal."

Today, scholars who study the dynamics of for- eign policy decision making recognize the need to bridge the gap between theory and practice. In par- ticular, skeletal theoretical frameworks must be fleshed out with nuanced detail. Here, the issue of context looms large. What type of state is being ex- amined? Citizens in advanced democracies have different wants and expectations than those in transitional states, poor economies, or states in- volved in ethnic conflicts. They will be attracted to different kinds of leaders to push for their agendas. How do the leaders who are selected view their state's place in the world? Do they view their state as participating in a cooperative international system or as struggling to maintain ascendancy in an anarchic world? Do they view it as part of a regional (Europe), cultural (Arab), ideological (socialist), religious (Hindu), or ethnic (Serbian) grouping?

Which leaders' interpretations prevail in the formulation of foreign policy depends on the na- ture of the decision unit and who is ultimately re- sponsible for making a decision. Is an individual (for example, Deng Xiaoping), a single group (such as the junta in Burma), or a coalition of ac- tors (much like the Israeli Labor-Likud coalition cabinet of the 1980s) in charge? When one pre- dominant leader makes the decisions, the focus is on theories that explore political cognition, politi- cal socialization, and leadership—what is that per- son like, and how does he or she view the world

and interact with others? When the decision unit is a single group, the focus shifts to theories growing out of group dynamics, bureaucratic politics, and public administration—where does member loy- alty lie, and is there a shared view of the problem? If the decision unit is a coalition of contending ac- tors, then attention must turn to theories of bar- gaining and negotiation, political stability, and institution building—is one actor more pivotal than others, and is compromise possible?

Determining the nature of the decision unit is not always as obvious as it would seem. A ruling oligarchy might be dominated by a single personal- ity. A leader whose authority appears unchallenged might be answerable in reality to a coalition that helps keep him or her in power. Who, for instance, is currendy in charge of foreign policy in Iran? President Khatami raised eyebrows in the West when he called recendy for improved relations with the United States. But Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who controls its security services and enjoys the support of the conservative Majlis, has openly ruled out any dialogue with the "Great Satan."

Also consider the Japanese government. As Pe- ter Katzenstein has pointed out, some scholars view Japan's government as a highly centralized state bureaucracy, as evidenced by the Liberal Dem- ocratic Party's ability to remain in power with few interruptions for 40 years. Haruhiro Fukui and others, however, have suggested that Japanese gov- ernments are best described as corporatist systems that grow out of a deeply embedded political norm that requires consensus building across party fac- tions and business interests. Iran and Japan serve as reminders that understanding a government's formal structure is less important than under- standing whose positions actually count at a par- ticular point in time.

THE ORIGINS OP PREFERENCES

To what extent are leaders the products of their cultures, genders, and domestic political systems? Samuel Huntington, J. Ann Tickner, and Bruce Russett would have us believe that these ties are

quite strong. Socialization into Christian, demo- cratic, or male-dominated cultures, they would ar- gue, imbues people with certain predispositions and expectations. In sharp contrast, James David Barber has pointed out that the leadership styles of American presidents often derive from the same techniques that helped them achieve their initial political successes. Ronald Reagan, who was presi- dent of the Screen Actors' Guild when that organi- zation fought off a communist takeover, learned from his experience that the United States could only negotiate with the Soviet Union from a posi- tion of strength,

Other scholars have shown that the worldviews of leaders are shaped in large part by the genera- tion that they happened to be born into—-specifi- cally, by what critical political events they and their cohorts have faced during their lifetimes. Yet, we have also observed leaders who appear to have un- dergone substantial changes in their perspectives. Consider former Egyptian president Anwar el- Sadat and his journey to Jerusalem, former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and his pursuit of the Oslo accords, and ex-president Richard Nixon and his decision to open U.S. relations with China. Arguments abound as to whether these leaders themselves changed or whether they were merely responding to changes in the international scene, their own domestic arenas, or perceived opportu- nities to attain goals that might previously have been foreclosed to others.

Underlying this debate is the question concern- ing the extent to which leaders shape their own preferences. On the one hand, we have leaders— such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Cuban president Fidel Castro—who are crusaders or ideologues, highly insensitive to information and constituencies unless these can help further their causes or spread their world- views. These leaders are interested in persuading others, not in being persuaded. On the other hand, we have leaders—former Iranian president Al i Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani among them—who ap- pear chameleon-like, their views mirroring what- ever other important players are saying or doing at the moment. They seek cues from their environ-

ment to help them choose whichever position is Likely to prevail In between these two extremes, we find leaders—such as Syrian president Hafez, al- Assad—who take a more strategic approach; they know where they want to go but proceed with in- cremental steps, forever testing the waters to see if the time is right for action, Thus, preferences tend to be more fixed for crusaders and more fluid for pragmatic and strategic leaders.

BALANCING FOREIGN AND DOM ESTIC PRESSURES

At times, governments can seem nearly oblivious to the international arena, focusing instead on matters at home. Consider the Cultural Revolution in China, the Botha regime in South Africa, and former president Lyndon Johnson's inner circle of advisers, the "Tuesday Lunch Group." In each case, domestic conditions isolated the state's lead- ership from full participation in world politics, During the Cultural Revolution, no one was effec- tively in charge of China. Al l attention had to be directed toward the return of political stability. Former president P. W. Botha was a crusader for apartheid and intent on maintaining it regardless of world opinion and sanctions. And the Tuesday Lunch Group suppressed its skepticism and doubt about U.S. involvement in Vietnam rather than lose favor with the president. With their attention captured by events at home, these decision units turned their focus inward, intent on maintaining their authority and legitimacy on the domestic front. But the opposite also proves true at times. Decision units may decide to use foreign policy to help them domestically.

Knowledge about the inner workings of deci- sion units can offer clues as to whether their efforts will be internally or externally oriented. The cur- rent literature suggests that the leadership focuses on domestic pressures when its opposition sits close to the centers of power, controls many of the resources needed to deal with the problem, chal- lenges domestic political order, or has legitimacy of its own—in other words, when the leadership feels vulnerable domestically. Consider how Net- anyahu's current [1998] resistance to international

pressure for greater Israeli cooperation in the peace process reflects not only his own hardline convic- tions but the Likud-led coalition's tenuous major- ity in the Knesset, his dependence on cabinet hardliners holding key ministries, and, more gen- erally, the realignment of Israeli party politics in the 1990s.

There can be a time lag, however, before certain decision units respond to such domestic pressures. The crusading predominant leader or the highly co- hesive, loyal ruling group may try to suppress the opposition or opt to engage in several diversionary foreign activities before realizing the seriousness of the domestic situation. In coalitions where minority parties have a veto—as when Fourth Republic France stalled over the question of granting in- dependence to Algeria or when Dutch cabinets deadlocked over accepting N A T O cruise missi les- foreign policy may be paralysed as the different parties work to preserve a government.

STRATEGIC ATTRIBUTION

Much of what goes on in world politics revolves around interactions between governments— two or more states trying to gauge the rationales be- hind the other's actions and anticipate its next moves. Here, the critical issue is how leaders assess the intentions and attitudes of their foreign coun- terparts, Are these assessments derived from per- sonal interactions with the leaders of the other state, are they filtered through other peoples' lenses, or are they hunches and guesses based on the past behavior of that state, a shared identity, or national interests? Leaders tend to extrapolate from their own perspectives in solving problems when they have had little or no contact with their counterparts on the other side. But even with con- tact, a decision unit led by a crusading leader, for example, will see what that leader wants to see. When leaders make incorrect assessments, the consequences can be serious. Nikita Khrushchev's attempted deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba in 1962 is one example of how strategies can back- fire if there is confusion as to what the other side's leadership is doing,

Adding to the complexity is the realization that leaders must not only engage in this two-level game of balancing their own perceived domestic and international pressures, but must simultane- ously try to comprehend the nature of the balanc- ing act in which their counterparts are engaged. Such comprehension is critical in today's multipo- lar world, where leaders vary in their interpreta- tions of how international politics should work and face increased pressure from constituents at home who clamor for an ever improving quality of life. Moreover, governments are becoming aware of the importance of knowing whose positions count in other states and toward which side of the internal-external debate these individuals are likely to lean. Without such information, it is difficult to predict which decision makers will take the sta- bility of international relations for granted and retreat from international affairs to deal with do- mestic ones, which will stand their ground and take bold initiatives, and which will engage in be- havior that coidd cause their states to implode.

Understanding Leadership

The leaders who dominated the world stage at the beginning of the Cold War—Stalin, Churchill, De Gaulle, and Truman—often seem upon reflection to have been larger than life. Today, with the col- lapse of the Soviet Union and the expansion of market democracies, it is hard to imagine such leaders coming to power with the same kind of au- thority. In fact, much of contemporary interna- tional relations theory would contend that with the end of the Cold War we have merely exchanged one set of constraints for another. Leaders are said to be as limited now as they were when super- power rivalry defined their actions. The key sys-

tematic constraints no longer center on security is- sues but on economic and environmental ones.

Yet, even in today's multipolar world, leader- ship still matters. Leaders are called on to interpret and frame what is happening in the international arena for their constituencies and governments. In addition, more leaders are becoming involved in tire regional and international regimes defining the rules and norms that will guide the international system into the twenty-first century. Thus, for ex- ample, Clinton must convince a skeptical public and a recalcitrant Congress that it is in their best interests to free up funds for the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund's bailout of Asia, as well as try to strike a bargain with congres- sional Democrats that will grant him fast-track authority.

Rather than proceed with the debate over whether or not leaders matter, it is essential to con- tinue the study of how leaders work to balance what they see as the important international fac- tors impinging on their countries with what they believe are their domestic imperatives. The lesson to be learned so far is that international constraints only have policy implications when they are per- ceived as such by the leaders whose positions count in dealing with a particular problem. Whether and how such leaders judge themselves constrained de- pends on the nature of the domestic challenges to their leadership, how the leaders are organized, and what they are like as people. To chart the shape of any future world, we need to be able to demarcate which leaders and leadership groups will become more caught up in the flow of events, and thus perceive external forces as limiting their parameters for action, and which will instead chal- lenge the international constraints they see in their path.

n determining how he will behave, an actor must try to predict how others will act and how their actions will affect his values. The actor

must therefore develop an image of others and of their intentions. This image may, however, turn out to be an inaccurate one; the actor may, for a number of reasons, misperceive both others' ac- tions and their intentions. * * * I wish to discuss the types of misperceptions of other states' inten- tions which states tend to make. * * *

Theories—Necessary and Dangerous

* The evidence from both psychology and his- tory overwhelmingly supports the view (which may be labeled Hypothesis I) that decision-makers tend to fit incoming information into their existing theories and images. Indeed, their theories and im- ages play a large part in determining what they no- tice, In other words, actors tend to perceive what they expect. Furthermore (Hypothesis la), a the- ory will have greater impact on an actor's interpre- tation of data (a) the greater the ambiguity of the data and (b) the higher the degree of confidence with which the actor holds the theory.1

* * *

* * * Hypothesis 2: scholars and decision-makers are apt to err by being too wedded to the estab- lished view and too closed to new information, as opposed to being too willing to alter their theories.

From World Politics 20 no. 3 (April 1968): 454-479. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

Another way of making this point is to argue that actors tend to establish their theories and expecta- tions prematurely. In politics, of course, this is of- ten necessary because of the need for action. But experimental evidence indicates that the same ten- dency also occurs on the unconscious level.* * *

However, when we apply these and other find- ings to politics and discuss kinds of misperception, we should not quickly apply the label of cognitive distortion. We should proceed cautiously for two related reasons. The first is that the evidence avail- able to decision-makers almost always permits sev- eral interpretations. It should be noted that there are cases of visual perception in which different stimuli can produce exactly the same pattern on an observer's retina. Thus, for an observer using one eye the same pattern would be produced by a sphere the size of a golf ball which was quite close to the observer, by a baseball-sized sphere that was further away, or by a basketball-sized sphere still further away. Without other clues, the observer cannot possibly determine which of these stimuli he is presented with, and we would not want to call his incorrect perceptions examples of distortion. Such cases, relatively rare in visual perception, are frequent in international relations. The evidence available to decision-makers is almost always very ambiguous since accurate clues to others' inten- tions are surrounded by noise2 and deception. In most cases, no matter how long, deeply, and "ob- jectively" the evidence is analyzed, people can differ in their interpretations, and there are no general rules to indicate who is correct.

The second reason to avoid the label of cogni- tive distortion is that the distinction between perception and judgment, obscure enough in indi- vidual psychology, is almost absent in the making of inferences in international politics. Decision- makers who reject information that contradicts

R O B E R T J E R V I S

Hypotheses on Misperception

their views—or who develop complex interpreta- tions of it—often do so consciously and explicitly. Since the evidence available contains contradictory information, to make any inferences requires that much information be ignored or given interpreta- tions that will seem tortuous to those who hold a different position.

Indeed, if we consider only the evidence avail- able to a decision-maker at the time of decision, the view later proved incorrect may be supported by as much evidence as the correct one—or even by more. Scholars have often been too unsympa- thetic with the people who were proved wrong. On closer examination, it is frequently difficult to point to differences between those who were right and those who were wrong with respect to their openness to new information and willingness to modify their views. Winston Churchill, for exam- ple, did not open-mindedly view each Nazi action to see if the explanations provided by the appeasers accounted for the data better than his own beliefs. Instead, like Chamberlain, he fitted each bit of am- biguous information into his own hypotheses. That he was correct should not lead us to overlook the fact that his methods of analysis and use of the- ory to produce cognitive consistency did not basi- cally differ from those of the appeasers.

A consideration of the importance of expecta- tions in influencing perception also indicates that the widespread belief in the prevalence of "wishful thinking" may be incorrect, or at least may be based on inadequate data. The psychological litera- ture on the interaction between affect and percep- tion is immense and cannot be treated here, but it should be noted that phenomena that at first were considered strong evidence for the impact of af- fect on perception often can be better treated as demonstrating the influence of expectations.3

Thus, in international relations, cases like the United States' misestimation of the political cli- mate in Cuba in April 1961, which may seem at first glance to have been instances of wishful think- ing, may instead be more adequately explained by the theories held by the decision-makers (e.g., Communist governments are unpopular). Of course, desires may have an impact on perception

by influencing expectations, but since so many other factors affect expectations, the net influence of desires may not be great.

There is evidence from both psychology1 and international relations that when expectations and desires clash, expectations seem to be more impor- tant. The United States would like to believe that North Vietnam is about to negotiate or that the USSR is ready to give up what the United States believes is its goal of world domination, but am- biguous evidence is seen to confirm the opposite conclusion, which conforms to the United States' expectations. Actors are apt to be especially sensi- tive to evidence of grave danger if they think they can take action to protect themselves against the menace once it has been detected.

Safeguards

Can anything then he said to scholars and decision-makers other than "Avoid being either too open or too closed, but be especially aware of the latter danger"? Although decision-makers will always be faced with ambiguous and confusing ev- idence and will be forced to make inferences about others which will often be inaccurate, a number of safeguards may be suggested which could enable them to minimize their errors. First, and most ob- vious, decision-makers should be aware that they do not make "unbiased" interpretations of each new bit of incoming information, but rather are inevitably heavily influenced by the theories they expect to be verified. They should know that what may appear to them as a self-evident and unam- biguous inference often seems so only because of their preexisting beliefs. To someone with a differ- ent theory the same data may appear to be unim- portant or to support another explanation. Thus many events provide less independent support for the decision-makers' images than they may at first realize. Knowledge of this should lead decision- makers to examine more closely evidence that oth- ers believe contradicts their views.

Second, decision-makers should see if their at- titudes contain consistent or supporting beliefs

that are not logically linked. These may be exam- ples of true psycho-logic. While it is not logically surprising nor is it evidence of psychological pres sures to find that people who believe that Russia is aggressive are very suspicious of any Soviet move, other kinds of consistency are more suspect. For example, most people who feel that it is important for the United States to win the war in Vietnam also feel that a meaningful victory is possible. And most people who feel defeat would neither endan- ger U.S. national security nor be costly in terms of other values also feel that we cannot win. Although there are important logical linkages between the two parts of each of these views (especially through theories of guerrilla warfare), they do not seem strong enough to explain the degree to which the opinions are correlated. Similarly, in Finland in the winter of 1939, those who felt that grave conse- quences would follow Finnish agreement to give Russia a military base also believed that the Soviets would withdraw their demand if Finland stood firm. And those who felt that concessions would not lead to loss of major values also believed that Russia would fight if need be.5 In this country, those who favored a nuclear test ban tended to ar- gue that fallout was very harmful, that only limited improvements in technology would flow from fur- ther testing, and that a test ban would increase the chances for peace and security. Those who op- posed the test ban were apt to disagree on all three points, This does not mean, of course, that the people holding such sets of supporting views were necessarily wrong in any one element. The Finns who wanted to make concessions to the USSR were probably correct in both parts of their argument. But decision-makers should be suspicious if they hold a position in which elements that are not logically connected support the same conclusion. This condition is psychologically comfortable and makes decisions easier to reach (since competing values do not have to be balanced off against each other). The chances are thus considerable that at least part of the reason why a person holds some of these views is related to psychology and not to the substance of the evidence,

Decision-makers should also be aware that ac-

tors who suddenly find themselves having an im- portant shared interest with other actors have a tendency to overestimate the degree of common interest involved. This tendency is especially strong for those actors (e.g., the United States, at least be- fore 1950) whose beliefs about international rela- tions and morality imply that they can cooperate only with "good" states and that with those states there will be no major conflicts. On the other hand, states that have either a tradition of limited cooperation with others (e.g., Britain) or a strongly held theory that differentiates occasional from per- manent allies6 (e.g„ the Soviet Union) find it easier to resist this tendency and need not devote special efforts to combating its danger.

A third safeguard for decision makers would he to make their assumptions, beliefs, and the predictions that follow from them as explicit as possible. An actor should try to determine, before events occur, what evidence would count for and against his theories. By knowing what to expect he would know what to be surprised by, and surprise could indicate to that actor that his beliefs needed ree valuation/'

A fourth safeguard is more complex. The decision maker should try to prevent individuals and organisations from letting their main task, po- litical future, and identity become tied to specific theories and images of other actors. If this occurs, subgoals originally sought for their contribution to higher ends will take on value of their own, and in- formation indicating possible alternative routes to the original goals will not be carefully considered. For example, the U.S. Forest Service was unable to carry out its original purpose as effectively when it began to see its distinctive competence not in pro- moting the best use of lands and forests but rather in preventing all types of forest fires."9

Organizations that claim to be unbiased may not realize the extent to which their definition of their role has become involved with certain beliefs about the world. Allen Dulles is a victim of this lack of understanding when he says, "I grant that we are all creatures of prejudice, including CIA of- ficials, but by entrusting intelligence coordina- tion to our central intelligence service, which is

excluded from policy-making and is married to no particular military hardware, we can avoid, to the greatest possible extent, the bending of facts ob- tained through intelligence to suit a particular oc- cupational viewpoint."1 0 This statement overlooks the fact that the CIA has developed a certain view of international relations and of the cold war which maximizes the importance of its information- gathering, espionage, and subversive activities. Since the CIA would lose its unique place in the govern- ment if it were decided that the "back alleys" of world politics were no longer vital to U.S. security, it is not surprising that the organization interprets information in a way that stresses the continued need for its techniques.

Fifth, decision-makers should realize the valid- ity and implications of Roberta Wohlstetter's argu- ment that "a willingness to play with material from different angles and in the context of unpopular as well as popular hypotheses is an essential ingredi- ent of a good detective, whether the end is the so- lution of a crime or an intelligence estimate."11

However, it is often difficult, psychologically and politically, for any one person to do this. Since a decision-maker usually cannot get "unbiased" treatments of data, he should instead seek to struc- ture conflicting biases into the decision-making process. The decision-maker, in other words, should have devil's advocates around. Just as, as Neustadt points out, 1 2 the decision-maker will want to create conflicts among his subordinates in order to make appropriate choices, so he will also want to ensure that incoming information is ex- amined from many different perspectives with many different hypotheses in mind. To some ex- tent this kind of examination will be done auto- matically through the divergence of goals, training, experience, and information that exists in any large organization. But in many cases this divergence will not be sufficient. The views of those analyzing the data will still be too homogeneous, and the decision-maker wil l have to go out of his way not only to cultivate but to create differing viewpoints.

While all that would be needed would be to have some people examining the data trying to val- idate unpopular hypotheses, it would probably be

more effective if they actually believed and had a stake in the views they were trying to support. If in 1941 someone had had the task of proving the view that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor, the govern- ment might have been less surprised by the attack. And only a person who was out to show that Rus- sia would take objectively great risks would have been apt to note that several ships with especially large hatches going to Cuba were riding high in the water, indicating the presence of a bulky but light cargo that was not likely to be anything other than strategic missiles. And many people who doubt the wisdom of the administration's Vietnam policy would be somewhat reassured if there were people in the government who searched the statements and actions of both sides in an effort to prove that North Vietnam was willing to negotiate and that the official interpretation of such moves as the Communist activities during the Tet truce of 1967 was incorrect.

Of course all these safeguards involve costs. They would divert resources from other tasks and would increase internal dissension. Determining whether these costs would be worth the gains would depend on a detailed analysis of how the suggested safeguards might be implemented. Even if they were adopted by a government, of course, they would not eliminate the chance of mispercep- tion. However, the safeguards would make it more likely that national decision-makers would make conscious choices about the way data were inter- preted rather than merely assuming that they can be seen in only one way and can mean only one thing. Statesmen would thus be reminded of alter- native images of others just as they are constantly reminded of alternative policies.

These safeguards are partly based on Hypothe- sis 3: actors can more easily assimilate into their established image of another actor information contradicting that image if the information is transmitted and considered bit by bit than if it comes all at once. In the former case, each piece of discrepant data can be coped with as it arrives and each of the conflicts with the prevailing view will be small enough to go unnoticed, to be dismissed as unimportant, or to necessitate at most a slight

modification of the image (e.g., addition of excep- tions to the rule). When the information arrives in a block, the contradiction between it and the pre- vailing view is apt to be much clearer and the prob- ability of major cognitive reorganization will be higher.

Sources of Concepts

An actor's perceptual thresholds—and thus the images that ambiguous information is apt to pro- duce—are influenced by what he has experienced and learned about," If one actor is to perceive that another fits in a given category he must first have, or develop, a concept for that category. We can usefully distinguish three levels at which a concept can be present or absent. First, the concept can be completely missing. The actor's cognitive structure may not include anything corresponding to the phenomenon he is encountering. This situation can occur not only in science fiction, but also in a world of rapid change or in the meeting of two dissimilar systems. Thus China's image of the Western world was extremely inaccurate in the mid-nineteenth century, her learning was very slow, and her responses were woefully inadequate. The West was spared a similar struggle only be- cause it had the power to reshape the system it en- countered. Once the actor clearly sees one instance of the new phenomenon, he is apt to recognize it much more quickly in the future.14 Second, the ac- tor can know about a concept but not believe that it reflects an actual phenomenon. Thus Commu- nist and Western decision-makers are each aware of the other's explanation of how his system func- tions, but do not think that the concept corre- sponds to reality. Communist elites, furthermore, deny that anything could correspond to the democ- racies' description of themselves. Third, the actor may hold a concept, but not believe that another actor fills it at the present moment. Thus the British and French statesmen of the 1930's held a concept of states with unlimited ambitions. They realized that Napoleons were possible, but they did not think Hitler belonged in that category. Hy-

pothesis 4 distinguishes these three cases: misper- ception is most difficult to correct in the case of a missing concept and least difficult to correct in the case of a recognized but presumably unfilled con- cept. Al l other things being equal (e.g., the degree to which the concept is central to the actor's cogni- tive structure), the first case requires more cogni- tive reorganization than does the second, and the second requires more reorganization than the third.

However, this hypothesis does not mean that learning will necessarily be slowest in the first case, for if the phenomena are totally new the actor may make such grossly inappropriate responses that he will quickly acquire information clearly indicating that he is faced with something he does not under- stand. And the sooner the actor realizes that things are not—or may not be—what they seem, the sooner he is apt to correct his image.15

Three main sources contribute to decision- makers' concepts of international relations and of other states and influence the level of their percep- tual thresholds for various phenomena. First, an actor's beliefs about his own domestic political sys- tem are apt to be important. In some cases, like that of the USSR, the decision-makers' concepts are tied to an ideology that explicitly provides a frame of reference for viewing foreign affairs. Even where this is not the case, experience with his own system will partly determine what the actor is fa- miliar with and what he is apt to perceive in others. Louis Hartz claims, "It is the absence of the experi- ence of social revolution which is at the heart of

the whole American dilemma In a whole series of specific ways it enters into our difficulty of com- munication with the rest of the world. We find it difficult to understand Europe's 'social question". . . . We are not familiar with the deeper social struggles of Asia and hence tend to interpret even reactionary regimes as 'democratic' "16 Similarly, George Kennan argues that in World War I the Al- lied powers, and especially America, could not un- derstand the bitterness and violence of others' internal conflicts: ". . . The inability of the Allied statesmen to picture to themselves the passions of the Russian civil war [was partly caused by the fact

that] we represent... a society in which the mani- festations of evil have been carefully buried and sublimated in the social behavior of people, as in their very consciousness. For this reason, probably, despite our widely traveled and outwardly cos- mopolitan lives, the mainsprings of political be- havior in such a country as Russia tend to remain concealed from our vision." 1 7

Second, concepts will be supplied by the actor's previous experiences. An experiment from another field illustrates this. Dearborn and Simon pre- sented business executives from various divisions (e.g., sales, accounting, production) with the same hypothetical data and asked them for an analysis and recommendations from the standpoint of what would be best for the company as a whole. The executives' views heavily reflected their de- partmental perspectives.18 William W. Kauffmann shows how the perceptions of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy were affected by his past: "As befitted a former chairman of the Securities Exchange and Maritime Commissions, his primary interest lay in economic matters. . .. The revolutionary character of the Nazi regime was not a phenomenon that he could easily grasp.. . . It was far simpler, and more in accord with his own premises, to explain Ger- man aggressiveness in economic terms. The Third Reich was dissatisfied, authoritarian, and expansive largely because her economy was unsound."1 9 Sim- ilarly it has been argued that Chamberlain was slow to recognize Hider's intentions partly because of the limiting nature of his personal background and business experiences. The impact of training and experience seems to be demonstrated when the background of the appeasers is compared to that of their opponents. One difference stands out: "A substantially higher percentage of the anti- appeasers (irrespective of class origins) had the kind of knowledge which comes from close ac- quaintance, mainly professional, with foreign af- fairs."2 0 Since members of the diplomatic corps are responsible for meeting threats to the nation's se- curity before these grow to major proportions and since they have learned about cases in which ag- gressive states were not recognized as such until very late, they may be prone to interpret ambigu-

ous data as showing that others are aggressive should be stressed that we cannot say that the p fessionals of the 1930's were more apt to make- curate judgments of other states. Rather, they have been more sensitive to the chance that oth were aggressive. They would then rarely take an gressor for a status-quo power, but would morel ten make the opposite error. Thus in the ye before World War I the permanent officials in British Foreign Office overestimated German gressiveness.21

A parallel demonstration in psychology of impact of training on perception is presented by experiment in which ambiguous pictures shown to both advanced and beginning poll administration students. The advanced group f ceived more violence in the pictures than did beginners. The probable explanation is that law enforcer may come to accept crime as a far iar personal experience, one which he himsel not surprised to encounter. The acceptance crime as a familiar experience in turn increases ability or readiness to perceive violence w| clues to it are potentially available."22 This esp ment lends weight to the view that the Bri diplomats' sensitivity to aggressive states was totally a product of personnel selection pri dures.

A third source of concepts, which freque will be the most directly relevant to a decisi maker's perception of international relations, ii ternational history. As Henry Kissinger points one reason why statesmen were so slow to rei nize the threat posed by Napoleon was that pre ous events had accustomed them only to te who wanted to modify the existing system, overthrow it. 2 3 The other side of the coin is more striking: historical traumas can heavily ir ence future perceptions. They can either establi state's image of the other state involved or (..al used as analogies. An example of the former ca provided by the fact that for at least ten years i the Franco-Prussian War most of Europe's st men felt that Bismarck had aggressive plans w in fact his main goal was to protect the status Of course the evidence was ambiguous. The

1871 Bismarckian maneuvers, which were de- signed to keep peace, looked not unlike the pre- 1871 maneuvers designed to set the stage for war. But that the post-1871 maneuvers were seen as in- dicating aggressive plans is largely attributable to the impact of Bismarck's earlier actions on the statesmen's image of him.

A state's previous unfortunate experience with a type of danger can sensitize it to other examples of that danger. While this sensitivity may lead the state to avoid the mistake it committed in the past, it may also lead it mistakenly to believe that the present situation is like the past one. Santayana's maxim could be turned around: "Those who re- member the past are condemned to make the op- posite mistakes." As Paul Kecskemeti shows, both defenders and critics of the unconditional surren der plan of the Second World War thought in terms of the conditions of World War I.2 4 Annette Baker Fox found that the Scandinavian countries" neutrality policies in World War II were strongly influenced by their experiences in the previous war, even though vital aspects of the two situations were different. Thus "Norway's success (during the First World War in remaining non-belligerent though pro-Allied gave the Norwegians confidence that their country could again stay out of war."25

And the lesson drawn from the unfortunate results of this policy was an important factor in Norway's decision to join N A T O .

The application of the Munich analogy to vari ous contemporary events has been much com- mented on, and I do not wish to argue the substantive points at stake. But it seems clear that the probabilities that any state is facing an aggres- sor who has to be met by force are not altered by the career of Hitter and the history of the 1930's Similarly the probability of an aggressor's an- nouncing his plans is not increased (if anything, it is decreased) by the fact that Hitter wrote Mein Kampf. Yet decision-makers are more sensitive to these possibilities, and thus more apt to perceive ambiguous evidence as indicating they apply to a given case, than they would have been had there been no Nazi Germany.

Historical analogies often precede, rather than

follow, a careful analysis of a situation (e.g., Tru- man's initial reaction to the news of the invasion of South Korea was to think of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria). Noting this precedence, however, does not show us which of many analogies will come to a decision-maker's mind. Truman could have thought of nineteenth-century European wars that were of no interest to the United States, Several factors having nothing to do with the event under consideration influence what analogies a de- cision-maker is apt to make. One factor is the number of cases similar to the analogy with which the decision-maker is familiar. Another is the im- portance of the past event to the political system of which the decision maker is a part. The more times such an event occurred and the greater its consequences were, the more a decision-maker will be sensitive to the particular danger involved and the more he will be apt to see ambiguous stimuli as indicating another instance of this kind of event, A third factor is the degree of the decision-maker's personal involvement in the past case—in time, energy, ego, and position. The last-mentioned variable will affect not only the event's impact on the decision-maker's cognitive structure, but also the way he perceives the event and the lesson he draws. Someone who was involved in getting troops into South Korea after the attack will re- member the Korean War differently from someone who was involved in considering the possible use of nuclear weapons or in deciding what messages should be sent to the Chinese, Greater personal in- volvement will usually give the event greater im- pact, especially if the decision-maker's own views were validated by the event. One need not accept a total application of learning theory to nations to believe that "nothing fails like success."26 It also seems likely that if many critics argued at the time that the decision-maker was wrong, he will be even more apt to see other situations in terms of the original event. For example, because Anthony Eden left the government on account of his views and was later shown to have been correct, he prob- ably was more apt to see as Hitlers other leaders with whom he had conflicts (e.g., Nasser). A fourth factor is the degree to which the analogy is

compatible with the rest of his belief system. A fifth is the absence of alternative concepts and analo- gies. Individuals and states vary in the amount of direct or indirect political experience they have had which can provide different ways of interpret- ing data. Decision-makers who are aware of multi- ple possibilities of states' intentions may be less likely to seize on an analogy prematurely. The per- ception of citizens of nations like the United States which have relatively little history of international politics may be more apt to be heavily influenced by the few major international events that have been important to their country.

The first three factors indicate that an event is more apt to shape present perceptions if it oc- curred in the recent rather than the remote past. If it occurred recently, the statesman will then know about it at first hand even if he was not involved in the making of policy at the time. Thus if generals are prepared to fight the last war, diplomats may be prepared to avoid the last war. Part of the Anglo-French reaction to Hitler can be explained by the prevailing beliefs that the First World War was to a large extent caused by misunderstandings and could have been avoided by farsighted and nonbelligerent diplomacy. And part of the Western perception of Russia and China can be explained by the view that appeasement was an inappropriate response to Hitler. 2 7

The Evoked Set

The way people perceive data is influenced not only by their cognitive structure and theories about other actors but also by what they are con- cerned with at the time they receive the informa- tion. Information is evaluated in light of the small part of the person's memory that is presently ac- tive—the "evoked set." My perceptions of the dark streets I pass walking home from the movies will be different if the film I saw had dealt with spies than if it had been a comedy. If I am working on aiding a country's education system and I hear someone talk about the need for economic devel- opment in that state, I am apt to think he is con-

cerned with education, whereas if I had been work- ing on, say, trying to achieve political stability in that country, I would have placed his remarks in that framework.28

Thus Hypothesis 5 states that when messages are sent from a different background of concerns and information than is possessed by the receiver, misunderstanding is likely. Person A and person B will read the same message quite differently if A has seen several related messages that B does not know about, This difference will be compounded if, as is frequently the case, A and B each assume that the other has the same background he does. This means that misperception can occur even when deception is neither intended nor expected, Thus Roberta Wohlstetter found not only that dif- ferent parts of the United States government had different perceptions of data about Japan's inten- tions and messages partly because they saw the in- coming information in very different contexts, but also that officers in the field misunderstood warn- ings from Washington: "Washington advised Gen- eral Short [in Pearl Harbor] on November 27 to expect 'hostile action' at any moment, by which it meant 'attack on American possessions from with- out,' but General Short understood this phrase to mean 'sabotage.' "29 Washington did not realize the extent to which Pearl Harbor considered the danger of sabotage to be primary, and furthermore it incorrectly believed that General Short had re- ceived the intercepts of the secret Japanese diplo- matic messages available in Washington which indicated that surprise attack was a distinct possi- bility. Another implication of this hypothesis is that if important information is known to only part of the government of state A and part of the government of state B, international messages may be misunderstood by those parts of the receiver's government that do not match, in the information they have, the part of the sender's government that dispatched the message.30

Two additional hypotheses can be drawn from the problems of those sending messages. Hypothe- sis 6 states that when people spend a great deal of time drawing up a plan or making a decision, they tend to think that the message about it they wish to

convey will be clear to the receiver.31 Since they are aware of what is to them the important pattern in their actions, they often feel that the pattern will be equally obvious to others, and they overlook the degree to which the message is apparent to them only because they know what to look for. Those who have not participated in the endless meetings may not understand what information the sender is trying to convey. George Quester has shown how the German and, to a lesser extent, the British de- sire to maintain target limits on bombing in the first eighteen months of World War II was under- mined partly by the fact that each side knew the limits it was seeking and its own reasons for any apparent "exceptions" (e.g., the German attack on Rotterdam) and incorrectly felt that these limits and reasons were equally clear to the other side.32

Hypothesis 7 holds that actors often do not re- alize that actions intended to project a given image may not have the desired effect because the actions themselves do not turn out as planned. Thus even without appreciable impact of different cognitive structures and backgrounds, an action may convey an unwanted message. For example, a country's representatives may not follow instructions and so may give others impressions contrary to those the home government wished to convey. The efforts of Washington and Berlin to settle their dispute over Samoa in the late 1880's were complicated by the provocative behavior of their agents on the spot. These agents not only increased the intensity of the local conflict, but led the decision-makers to be- come more suspicious of the other state because they tended to assume that their agents were obey- ing instructions and that the actions of the other side represented official policy. In such cases both sides will believe that the other is reading hostility into a policy of theirs which is friendly. Similarly, Quester's study shows that the attempt to limit bombing referred to above failed pardy because neither side was able to bomb as accurately as it thought it could and thus did not realize the phys- ical effects of its actions. 3 3

Further Hypotheses From the Perspective of the Perceiver

From the perspective of the perceiver several other hypotheses seem to hold. Hypothesis 8 is that there is an overall tendency for decision-makers to see other states as more hostile than they are.34 There seem to be more cases of statesmen incorrectly be- lieving others are planning major acts against their interest than of statesmen being lulled by a poten- tial aggressor. There are many reasons for this which are too complex to be treated here (e.g., some parts of the bureaucracy feel it is their re- sponsibility to be suspicious of all other states; decision-makers often feel they are "playing it safe" to believe and act as though the other state were hostile in questionable cases; and often, when peo- ple do not feel they are a threat to others, they find it difficult to believe that others may see them as a threat). It should be noted, however, that decision- makers whose perceptions are described by this hypothesis would not necessarily further their own values by trying to correct for this tendency. The values of possible outcomes as well as their proba- bilities must be considered, and it may be that the probability of an unnecessary arms-tension cycle arising out of misperceptions, multiplied by the costs of such a cycle, may seem less to decision- makers than the probability of incorrectly believ- ing another state is friendly, multiplied by the costs of this eventuality.

Hypothesis 9 states that actors tend to see the behavior of others as more centralized, disciplined, and coordinated than it is. This hypothesis holds true in related ways. Frequently, too many com- plex events are squeezed into a perceived pattern. Actors are hesitant to admit or even see that partic- ular incidents cannot be explained by their theo- ries.3 5 Those events not caused by factors that are important parts of the perceiver's image are often seen as though they were. Further, actors see others as more internally united than they in fact are and generally overestimate the degree to which others are following a coherent policy. The degree to which the other side's policies are the product of

internal bargaining,3 6 internal misunderstandings, or subordinates' not following instructions is un- derestimated. This is the case partly because actors tend to be unfamiliar with the details of another state's policy-making processes. Seeing only the finished product, they find it simpler to try to con- struct a rational explanation for the policies, even though they know that such an analysis could not explain their own policies.3 7

Familiarity also accounts for Hypothesis 10: because a state gets most of its information about the other state's policies from the other's foreign office, it tends to take the foreign office's position for the stand of the other government as a whole. In many cases this perception will be an accurate one, but when the other government is divided or when the other foreign office is acting without spe- cific authorization, misperception may result. For example, part of the reason why in 1918 Allied governments incorrecdy thought "that the Japa- nese were preparing to take action [in Siberia], if need be, with agreement with the British and French alone, disregarding the absence of Ameri- can consent,"38 was that Allied ambassadors had talked mostly with Foreign Minister Motono, who was among the minority of the Japanese favoring this policy. Similarly, America's N A T O allies may have gained an inaccurate picture of the degree to which the American government was committed to the M L F because they had greatest contact with parts of the government that strongly favored the M L F . And states that tried to get information about Nazi foreign policy from German diplomats were often misled because these officials were gen- erally ignorant of or out of sympathy with Hitler's plans. The Germans and the Japanese sometimes purposely misinformed their own ambassadors in order to deceive their enemies more effectively.

Hypothesis 11 states that actors tend to overes- timate the degree to which others are acting in re- sponse to what they themselves do when the others behave in accordance with the actor's desires; but when the behavior of the other is undesired, it is usually seen as derived from internal forces. If the effect of another's action is to injure or threaten the first side, the first side is apt to believe that such

was the other's purpose. An example of the first part of the hypothesis is provided by Kennan's ac- count of the activities of official and unofficial American representatives who protested to the new Bolshevik government against several of its ac- tions. When the Soviets changed their position, these representatives felt it was largely because of their influence.39 This sort of interpretation can be explained not only by the fact that it is gratifying to the individual making it, but also, taking the other side of the coin mentioned in Hypothesis 9, by the fact that the actor is most familiar with his own in- put into the other's decision and has less knowl- edge of other influences, The second part of Hypothesis 11 is illustrated by the tendency of ac- tors to believe that the hostile behavior of others is to be explained by the other side's motives and not by its reaction to the first side. Thus Chamberlain did not see that Hitler's behavior was related in part to his belief that the British were weak. More common is the failure to see that the other side is reacting out of fear of the first side, which can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and spirals of misper- ception and hostility.

This difficulty is often compounded by an im- plication of Hypothesis 12: when actors have intentions that they do not try to conceal from others, they tend to assume that others accurately perceive these intentions. Only rarely do they be- lieve that others may be reacting to a much less fa- vorable image of themselves than they think they are projecting.40

For state A to understand how state B perceives A's policy is often difficult because such under- standing may involve a conflict with A's image of itself. Raymond Sontag argues that Anglo-German relations before World War I deteriorated partly because "the British did not like to think of them- selves as selfish, or unwilling to tolerate 'legitimate' German expansion. The Germans did not like to think of themselves as aggressive, or unwilling to recognize 'legitimate' British vested interest."41

Hypothesis 13 suggests that if it is hard for an actor to believe that the other can see him as a menace, it is often even harder for him to see that issues important to him are not important to oth-

ers. While he may know that another actor is on an opposing team, it may be more difficult for him to realize that the other is playing an entirely different game. This is especially true when the game he is playing seems vital to him.4 2

The final hypothesis, Hypothesis 14, is as fol- lows: actors tend to overlook the fact that evidence consistent with their theories may also be consis- tent with other views. When choosing between two theories we have to pay attention only to data that cannot be accounted for by one of the theories. But it is common to find people claiming as proof of their theories data that could also support alterna- tive views. This phenomenon is related to the point made earlier that any single bit of information can be interpreted only within a framework of hypothe- ses and theories. And while it is true that "we may without a vicious circularity accept some datum as a fact because it conforms to the very law for which it counts as another confirming instance, and reject an allegation of fact because it is already excluded by law,"4 3 we should be careful lest we forget that a piece of information seems in many cases to con- firm a certain hypothesis only because we already believe that hypothesis to be correct and that the information can with as much validity support a different hypothesis. For example, one of the rea- sons why the German attack on Norway took both that country and England by surprise, even though they had detected German ships moving toward Norway, was that they expected not an attack but an attempt by the Germans to break through the British blockade and reach the Atlantic. The initial course of the ships was consistent with either plan, but the British and Norwegians took this course to mean that their predictions were being borne out.44

This is not to imply that the interpretation made was foolish, but only that the decision-makers should have been aware that the evidence was also consistent with an invasion and should have had a bit less confidence in their views.

The longer the ships would have to travel the same route whether they were going to one or an- other of two destinations, the more information would be needed to determine their plans. Taken as a metaphor, this incident applies generally to the

treatment of evidence. Thus as long as Hitler made demands for control only of ethnically German ar- eas, his actions could be explained either by the hy- pothesis that he had unlimited ambitions or by the hypothesis that he wanted to unite all the Ger- mans. But actions against non-Germans (e.g., the takeover of Czechoslovakia in March 1938) could not be accounted for by the latter hypothesis. And it was this action that convinced the appeasers that Hider had to be stopped. It is interesting to specu- late on what the British reaction would have been had Hitler left Czechoslovakia alone for a while and instead made demands on Poland similar to those he eventually made in the summer of 1939. The two paths would then still not have diverged, and further misperception could have occurred.

NOTES 1. Floyd Allport, Theories of Perception and the

Concept of Structure (New York 1955), 382; Ole Holsti, "Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy," in David Finlay, Ole Holsti, and Richard Fagen, Enemies in Politics (Chi- cago 1967), 70.

2. For a use of this concept in political communi- cation, see Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor (Stanford 1962).

3. See, for example, Donald Campbell, "System- atic Error on the Part of Human Links in Communications Systems," Information and Control, I (1958), 346-50; and Leo Postman, "The Experimental Analysis of Motivational Factors in Perception," in Judson S. Brown, ed., Current Theory and Research in Motivation (Lincoln, Neb., 1953), 59-108.

4. Dale Wyatt and Donald Campbell, "A Study of Interviewer Bias as Related to Interviewer's Expectations and Own Opinions," Interna- tional Journal of Opinion and Attitude Re- search, iv (Spring 1950), 77-83.

5. Max Jacobson, The Diplomacy of the Winter War (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 136-39.

6. Raymond Aron, Peace and War (Garden City 1966), 29.

7. Cf. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 65. A fairly high degree of knowledge is needed before one can state precise expectations. One indication of the lack of international relations theory is that most of us are not sure what "naturally" flows from our theories and what constitutes either "puzzles" to be further ex- plored with the paradigm or "anomalies" that cast doubt on the basic theories.

8. See Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administra- tion (Evanston 1957).

9. Ashley Schiff, Fire and Water: Scientific Heresy in the Forest Service (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). Despite its title, this book is a fascinating and valuable study.

10. The Craft of Intelligence (New York 1963), 53. 11. P. 302. See Beveridge, 93, for a discussion of

the idea that the scientist should keep in mind as many hypotheses as possible when conduct- ing and analyzing experiments.

12. Presidential Power (New York 1960). 13. Most psychologists argue that this influence

also holds for perception of shapes. For data showing that people in different societies differ in respect to their predisposition to experience certain optical illusions and for a convincing argument that this difference can be explained by the societies' different physical environ- ments, which have led their people to develop different patterns of drawing inferences from ambiguous visual cues, see Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perceptions (Indianapolis 1966).

14. Thus when Bruner and Postman's subjects first were presented with incongruous playing cards (i.e., cards in which symbols and colors of the suits were not matching, producing red spades or black diamonds), long exposure times were necessary for correct identification. But once a subject correctly perceived the card and added this type of card to his repertoire of categories, he was able to identify other incon- gruous cards much more quickly. For an anal- ogous example—in this case, changes in the

analysis of aerial reconnaissance photographs of an enemy's secret weapons-testing facilities produced by the belief that a previously un- known object may be present—see David Ir- ving, The Mare's Nest (Boston 1964), 66-67, 274-75.

15. Bruner and Postman, 220. 16. The Liberal Tradition in America (New York

1955), 306. 17. Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin

(New York 1962), 142-43. 18. DeWitt Dearborn and Herbert Simon, "Selec-

tive Perception: A Note on the Departmental Identification of Executives," Sociometry, xxi (June 1958), 140-44,

19. "Two American Ambassadors: Bullitt and Kennedy," in Craig and Gilbert, 358-59.

20. Donald Lammer, Explaining Munich (Stanford 1966), 15.

21. George Monger, The End of Isolation (London 1963). I am also indebted to Frederick Col- lignon for his unpublished manuscript and several conversations on this point.

22. Hans Toch and Richard Schulte, "Readiness to Perceive Violence as a Result of Police Train- ing," British Journal of Psychology, III (Novem- ber 1961), 392 (original italics omitted). It should be stressed that one cannot say whether or not the advanced police students perceived the pictures "accurately." The point is that their training predisposed them to see violence in ambiguous situations, Whether on balance they would make fewer perceptual errors and better decisions is very hard to determine. For an experiment showing that training can lead people to "recognize" an expected stimulus even when that stimulus is in fact not shown, see Israel Goldiamond and William F. Hawkins, "Vexierversuch: The Log Relation- ship Between Word-Frequency and Recogni- tion Obtained in the Absence of Stimulus Words," Journal of Experimental Psychology, LVI (December 1958), 457-63.

23. A World Restored (New York 1964), 2-3. 24. Strategic Surrender (New York 1964), 215-41.

25. The Power of Small States (Chicago 1959), 81. 26. William Inge, Outspoken Essays, First Series

(London 1923), 88. 27. Of course, analogies themselves are not "un-

moved movers." The interpretation of past events is not automatic and is informed by general views of international relations and complex judgments. And just as beliefs about the past influence the present, views about the present influence interpretations of history. It is difficult to determine the degree to which the United States' interpretation of the reasons it went to war in 1917 influenced American foreign policy in the 1920's and 1930's and how much the isolationism of that period in- fluenced the histories of the war.

28. For some psychological experiments on this subject, see Jerome Bruner and A, Leigh Minturn, "Perceptual Identification and Per- ceptual Organization" Journal of General Psy- chology, IIII (July 1955), 22-28; Seymour Feshbach and Robert Singer, "The Effects of Fear Arousal and Suppression of Fear Upon Social Perception," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, I.v (November 1957), 283-88; and Elsa Sippoal, "A Group Study of Some Effects of Preparatory Sets," Psychology Monographs, Xl.vi, No. 210 (1935), 27-28. For a general discussion of the importance of the perceiver's evoked set, see Postman, 87.

29. Pp. 73-74. 30. For example, Roger Hilsman points out,

"Those who knew of the peripheral reconnais- sance flights that probed Soviet air defenses during the Eisenhower administration and the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union itself . . . were better able to understand some of the things the Soviets were saying and doing than people who did not know of these activities" (To Move a Nation [Garden City 1967], 66). But it is also possible that those who knew about the U-2 flights at times misinterpreted Soviet messages by incorrectly believing that the sender was influenced by, or at least knew of, these flights.

31. I am grateful to Thomas Schelling for discus- sion on this point.

32. Deterrence Before Hiroshima (New York 1966), 105-22.

33. Ibid. 34. For a slightly different formulation of this

view, see Holsti, 27. 35. The Soviets consciously hold an extreme ver-

sion of this view and seem to believe that nothing is accidental. See the discussion in Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe 1953), 67-73.

36. A. W. Marshall criticizes Western explanations of Soviet military posture for failing to take this into account. See his "Problems of Esti- mating Military Power," a paper presented at the 1966 Annual Meeting of the American Po- litical Science Association, 16.

37. It has also been noted that in labor- management disputes both sides may be apt to believe incorrectly that the other is controlled from above, either from the international union office or from the company's central headquarters (Robert Blake, Herbert Shepard, and Jane Mouton, Managing Intergroup Con- flict in Industry [Houston 1964], 182). It has been further noted that both Democratic and Republican members of the House tend to see the other party as the one that is more disci- plined and united (Charles Clapp, The Con- gressman [Washington 1963], 17-19).

38. George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (New York 1967), 484.

39. Ibid., 404, 408, 500. 40. Herbert Butterfield notes that these assump-

tions can contribute to the spiral of "Hobbes- ian fear. . . , You yourself may vividly feel the terrible fear that you have of the other party, but you cannot enter into the other man's counter-fear, or even understand why he should be particularly nervous. For you know that you yourself mean him no harm, and that you want nothing from him save guarantees for your own safety, and it is never possible for you to realize or remember properly that since

he cannot see the inside of your mind, he can never have the same assurance of your inten- tions that you have" (History and Human Con- flict [London 1951], 20).

41. European Diplomatic History 1871-1932 (New York 1933), 125. It takes great mental effort to realize that actions which seem only the nat- ural consequence of defending your vital inter- ests can look to others as though you are refusing them any chance of increasing their influence. In rebutting the famous Crowe "balance of power" memorandum of 1907, which justified a policy of "containing" Ger- many on the grounds that she was a threat to British national security, Sanderson, a former permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Of- fice, wrote, "It has sometimes seemed to me that to a foreigner reading our press the British Empire must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling all over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction, which cannot be approached without eliciting a scream" (quoted in Monger, 315). But few other Englishmen could be convinced that others might see them this way.

42. George Kennan makes clear that in 1918 this

kind of difficulty was partly responsible for the inability of either the Allies or the new Bolshe- vik government to understand the motivations of the other side: "There is . . . nothing in na- ture more egocentrical than the embattled democracy.... I t . . . tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision of everything else. . . . It will readily be seen that people who have got themselves into this frame of mind have little understanding for the issues of any contest other than the one in which they are involved. The idea of people wasting time and substance on any other issue seems to them preposterous" (Russia and the West, 11-12).

43. Kaplan, 89. 44. fohan Jorgen Hoist, "Surprise, Signals, and Re-

action: The Attack on Norway," Cooperation and Conflict, No. 1 (1966), 34. The Germans made a similar mistake in November 1942 when they interpreted the presence of an Allied convoy in the Mediterranean as confirming their belief that Malta would be resupplied. They thus were taken by surprise when landings took place in North Africa (William Langer, Our Vichy Gamble [New York 1966], 365).

C Y N T H I A E N L O E

The Personal Is International

ne of the simplest and most disturbing feminist insights is that "the personal is political." Disturbing, because it means

that relationships we once imagined were private or merely social are in fact infused with power, usually unequal power backed up by public au- thority. Rape, therefore, is about power more than

From Bananas Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1989), 195-201.

it is about sex, and not only the rapist but the state is culpable. Likewise interior design and doctors' attitudes toward patients are at least as much about publicly wielded power as they are about personal taste or professional behavior.

But the assertion that "the personal is political" is like a palindrome, one of those phrases that can be read backwards as well as forwards. Read as "the political is personal," it suggests that politics is not shaped merely by what happens in legislative de- bates, voting booths or war rooms. While men,

who dominate public life, have told women to stay in the kitchen, they have used their public power to construct private relationships in ways that bol- stered their masculinized political control. With- out these maneuvers, men's hold over political life might be far less secure. Thus to explain why any country has the kind of politics it does, we have to be curious about how public life is constructed out of struggles to define masculinity and femininity. Accepting that the political is personal prompts one to investigate the politics of marriage, venereal disease and homosexuality—not as marginal is- sues, but as matters central to the state. Doing this kind of research becomes just as serious as study- ing military weaponry or taxation policy. In fact, insofar as the political is personal, the latter cannot be fully understood without taking into account the former.

To make sense of international politics we also have to read power backwards and forwards. Power relations between countries and their gov- ernments involve more than gunboat maneuvers and diplomatic telegrams. Read forward, "the per- sonal is international" insofar as ideas about what it means to be a "respectable" woman or an "hon- orable" man have been shaped by colonizing poli- cies, trading strategies and military doctrines. On the eve of the 1990s, it has almost become a cliche to say that the world is shrinking, that state bound- aries are porous. We persist, none the less, in dis- cussing personal power relationships as if they were contained by sovereign states. We treat ideas about violence against women without trying to figure out how the global trade in pornographic videos operates, or how companies offering sex tours and mail-order brides conduct their busi- nesses across national borders. Similarly, we try to explain how women learn to be "feminine" with- out unravelling the legacies of colonial officials who used Victorian ideals of feminine domesticity to sustain their empires; or we trace what shapes children's ideas about femininity or masculinity without looking at governments' foreign invest- ment policies that encourage the world-wide ad- vertising strategies of such giants as McCann Erickson or Saatchi and Saatchi.

Becoming aware that personal relationships have been internationalized, however, may make one only feel guilty for not having paid enough at- tention to international affairs. Start watching what is going on in Brussels. Don't turn off the TV when the conversation moves to trade deficits. Lis- ten to politicians more carefully when they outline their foreign-policy position. While useful, this new international attentiveness by itself isn't suffi- cient. It leaves untouched our presumptions about just what "international politics" is. Accepting that the personal is international multiplies the specta- tors, it especially adds women to the audience, but it fails to transform what is going on on stage.

The implications of a feminist understanding of international politics are thrown into sharper relief when one reads "the personal is interna- tional" the other way round: the international is personal This calls for a radical new imagining of what it takes for governments to ally with each other, compete with and wage war against each other.

"The international is personal" implies that governments depend upon certain kinds of al- legedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs. Governments need more than secrecy and intelligence agencies; they need wives who are willing to provide their diplomatic hus- bands with unpaid services so those men can de- velop trusting relationships with other diplomatic husbands. They need not only military hardware, but a steady supply of women's sexual services to convince their soldiers that they are manly. To op- erate in the international arena, governments seek other governments' recognition of their sover- eignty; but they also depend on ideas about mas- culinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain that sense of autonomous nationhood.

Thus international politics of debt, investment, colonization, decolonization, national security, diplomacy and trade are far more complicated than most experts would have us believe. This may appear paradoxical. Many people, and especially women, are taught that international politics are too complex, too remote and too tough for the feminine mind to comprehend. If a Margaret

Thatcher or a Jeanne Kirkpatrick slips through the cracks, it is presumably because she has learned to "think like a man." But investigations of how international politics rely on manipulations of masculinity and femininity suggest that the conventional approaches to making sense of inter- state relations are superficial. Conventional analy- ses stop short of investigating an entire area of international relations, an area that women have pioneered in exploring: how states depend on par- ticular constructions of the domestic and private spheres. If we take seriously the politics of domes- tic servants or the politics of marketing fashions and global corporate logos, we discover that in- ternational politics is more complicated than non-feminist analysts would have us believe. We especially have to take culture—including com- mercialized culture—far more seriously. The con- sumer and the marketing executive have a relationship that is mediated through their respec- tive understandings of national identity and mas- culinity and femininity. That consumer-marketer relationship not only mirrors changing global power dynamics, it is helping to shape those dynamics.

Women tend to be in a better position than men to conduct such a realistic investigation of international politics simply because so many women have learned to ask about gender when making sense of how public and private power op- erate. This approach also exposes how much power it takes to make the current international political system work. Conventional analyses of inter-state relations talk a lot about power. In fact, because they put power at the center of their un- derstandings, they are presumed to be most natu- rally comprehended by men; women allegedly do not have an innate taste for either wielding or un- derstanding power. However, an exploration of agribusiness prostitution, foreign-service sexism and attempts to tame outspoken nationalist women with homophobic taunts all reveal that in reality it takes much more power to construct and perpetuate international political relations than we have been led to believe. Conventional international-politics commentators have put

power at the center of their analyses—often to the exclusion of culture and ideas—but they have under-estimated the amount and varieties of power at work. It has taken power to deprive women of land titles and leave them little choice but to sexually service soldiers and banana work- ers. It has taken power to keep women out of their countries' diplomatic corps and out of the upper reaches of the World Bank. It has taken power to keep questions of inequity between local men and women off the agendas of many nationalist move- ments in industrialized as well as agrarian societies. It has taken power to construct popular cu l tu re - films, advertisements, books, fairs, fashion—which reinforces, not subverts, global hierarchies.

"The international is personal" is a guide to making sense of NATO, the EEC and the IMF that insists on making women visible. If it is true that friendly as well as hostile relations between govern- ments presuppose constructions of women as sym- bols, as providers of emotional support, as paid and unpaid workers, then it doesn't make sense to continue analyzing international politics as if they were either gender-neutral or carried on only by men. International policy-making circles may look like men's clubs, but international politics as a whole has required women to behave in certain ways. When they haven't, relations between gov- ernments have had to change.

Women need to be made visible in order to understand how and why international power takes the forms it does. But women are not just the objects of that power, not merely passive puppets or victims. As we have seen, women of different classes and different ethnic groups have made their own calculations in order to cope with or benefit from the current struggles between states. These calculations result in whole countries becoming re- lated to one another, often in hierarchical terms.

In search of adventure, that physical and intel- lectual excitement typically reserved for men, some affluent women have helped turn other women into exotic landscapes. In pursuit of meaningful paid careers, some women have settled in colonies or hired women from former colonies. Out of a desire to appear fashionable and bolster their

sometimes shaky self-confidence, many women have become the prime consumers of products made by women working for low wages in other countries. And in an effort to measure the progress they have made towards emancipation in their own societies, women have often helped legitimize international global pyramids of "civilization,"

Al l too often, the only women who are made visible on the international stage are "Third World women," especially those who are underpaid fac- tory workers or entertainment workers around foreign military bases. There are two dangers here. First, the multiple relationships that women in in- dustrialized countries have to international politics are camouflaged. For instance, we do not see the British Asian woman who is organizing anti- deportation campaigns, which can reshape govern- ments' use of marriage to control international flows of people. The American woman on holiday who is helping to "open up" Grenada to tourism is made invisible, as is the Canadian woman who is insisting on pursuing her career rather than fol- lowing her diplomat husband overseas. The Italian woman sewing for Benetton at home is hidden. In the process, the international system is made to look less complicated, less infused with power, less gendered than it really is.

The second danger in this tendency to see only "Third World women" when thinking about women on the international stage is that the im- portant differences between women in less indus- trialized countries will be ignored. By portraying all women in Third World societies as sewing jeans, not buying jeans, as prostitutes, not as social workers and activists, we again under-estimate the complex relationships it takes to sustain the cur- rent international political system, Middle-class women in countries such as Mexico and Sri Lanka have different kinds of stakes in the present system than do working-class and peasant women. This is compounded by societies' ethnic and racial barri- ers—between Hispanicized and Indian Mexican women, and between Tamil and Singhalese Sri Lankan women, for instance. International debt may affect all women in Mexico, but not to the same degree or in the same ways. National dignity

may be appealing to all Sri Lankan women, but which nation one feels part of may be problematic. Sexuality may also divide women in a Third Wor ld country. Heterosexual women, for instance, may feel ashamed or contemptuous of lesbian women and thus not be able to confront nationalist men who use homophobic innuendos to delegitimize arguments for women's rights.

The international establishment has needed many women in Third Wor ld countries to feel more at ease with women from Europe or North America than with women living in a shanty town a mile from their front door. Therefore, efforts to transcend internationally and locally devised barri- ers between women of Third Wor ld countries have had the most significant impact on foreign military bases, multinational corporations and investment bankers.

While women have not been mere pawns in global politics, governments and companies with government backing have made explicit attempts to try to control and channel women's actions in order to achieve their own ends. Male officials who make foreign policy might prefer to think of them- selves as dealing with high finance or military strat- egy, but in reality they have self-consciously designed immigration, labor, civil service, propa- ganda and military bases policies so as to control women. They have acted as though their govern- ment's place in world affairs has hinged on how women behaved.

Uncovering these efforts has exposed men as men. International politics has relied not only on the manipulation of femininity's meanings but on the manipulation of masculinity. Ideas about "ad- venture," "civilization," "progress," "risk," "trust," and "security," are all legitimized by certain kinds of masculine values and behavior, which makes them so potent in relations between governments. Frequently the reason behind government offi- cials—usually men—trying to control women has been their need to optimize the control of men: men as migrant workers, soldiers, diplomats, intel- ligence operatives, overseas plantation and factory managers, men as bankers. Thus understanding the international workings of masculinity is im-

portant to making feminist sense of international politics. Men's sense of their own manhood has derived from their perceptions both of other men's masculinity and of the femininity of women of dif- ferent races and social classes. Much of what we have uncovered about the problematic character of masculinity in the armed forces can be applied to other spheres of international politics.

There is much discussion today about funda- mental changes occurring in international politics. Japan has become the world's largest aid donor and its largest creditor. The United States no longer has the resources or the status to play global policeman, even if its leaders still try. The twelve countries of the European Community are moving steadily to- ward not only economic, but also social and politi- cal integration. If Mikhail Gorbachev survives, the Soviet Union's international priorities are likely to undergo radical change, with military demands be- ing subordinated to economic needs. At the same time, the "Third World" is becoming more inter- nally unequal each year, as countries such as South Korea, Brazil, Taiwan and Chile start to produce not only steel and automobiles, but also weapons, while countries such as Vietnam and Ethiopia struggle simply to feed their peoples. A l l the while, capital, drugs and AIDS are becoming globalized; debt stubbornly spirals; and governments persist in sharing coercive formulas for suppressing dissi- dents in the name of national security.

It is all too easy to plunge into the discussion of any or all of these contemporary trends without asking, "Where are the women?" What these chap- ters suggest is that these seemingly new trends are likely to be gendered, just as past international pat- terns were. The international trends of the 1990s are as likely to depend on particular relations be- tween women and men, relations fostered by the deliberate use of political power. One of the best ways to start making sense of those gendered poli- tics is to take seriously the analyses of women already engaged in international campaigns to in- fluence these trends. Some of the most cogent in- ternational analysis is being generated by women meeting in Japan to discuss migrant workers and proxy brides, women meeting in New York to trace the patterns of the global prostitution industry, women meeting in Finland to discuss militariza- tion, women meeting in Mexico City to discuss la- bor unions, women meeting in Brussels to discuss 1992. Making feminist sense of international poli- tics, therefore, may compel us to dismantle the wall that often separates theory from practice. We don't need to wait for a "feminist Henry Kissinger" before we can start articulating a fresh, more realis- tic approach to international politics. Every time a woman explains how her government is trying to control her fears, her hopes and her labor such a theory is being made.

IGOS, NGOS, AND

INTERNATIONAL LAW

International organizations such as the United Nations are undisputed actors in international relations. Since the 1990s, the U.N. has taken on more peace and se- curity missions, some successful and some not. These undertakings, along with the prolonged debate in the Security Council over what should be done about Iraq, have resulted in a very public debate about the U.N. Law professor Michael I. Glennon of Tufts University argues that the legalist institution has not survived geopolitical forces, stating that in the winter of 2003, "that entire edifice came crashing down." Not all commentators agree, as shown in subsequent responses published in Foreign Affairs which take contrary positions.

In addition to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), research on non- governmental organizations (NGOs), social movements, and transnational advo- cacy networks has expanded since the 1990s. Using a constructivist approach in an excerpt from their award-winning book Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Net- works in International Politics (1998), Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink show how such networks develop and operate by "building new links among actors in civil societies, states, and international organizations,.. ".

One particularly controversial issue in international relations is humanitarian intervention, which involves the application of international law for intergovern- mental and nongovernmental organizations, and state actors. In a selection from the Atlantic Monthly, Samantha Power examines why the United States did not do more to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. According to Power, not only are American decisionmakers to blame, but so is the United Nations and its bureau- cracy.

In the international legal community and among policymakers, the issue of universal jurisdiction has gained considerable attention, particularly since the es- tablishment of the International Criminal Court. Henry Kissinger, an academician

207

and former Secretary of State and National Security adviser who is himself ru- mored to be under indictment by national courts, argues against the practice. Tyranny of judges replaces that of governments, he contends, and political dis- agreements should not be resolved by legal means. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch disagrees.

The United States is a key actor in international organizations and in the multilateral system which it helped establish following World War II. Yet over the years, the United States has taken unilateral stances, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or join the International Criminal Court, and choosing to intervene in Iraq in 2003 without United Nations authorization. G. John Ikenberry explores this seeming contradiction. The United States is unlikely to lose its multilateral ori- entation, he argues, since the tradition is embedded in the international system, institutions, and domestic structures.

John Mearsheimer, the quintessential realist, is openly skeptical about the im- pact of international institutions. In this excerpt, he carefully delineates the flaws of liberal institutionalist theory and concludes that policies based on such theories are bound to fail.

M I C H A E L J . G L E N N O N

Why the Security Council Failed

Showdown At Turtle Bay

"The tents have been struck," declared South Africa's prime minister, Jan Christian Smuts, about the League of Nations' founding. "The great caravan of humanity is again on the march." A generation later, this mass movement toward the international rule of law still seemed very much in progress. In 1945, the League was replaced with a more robust United Nations, and no less a person- age than U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull hailed it as the key to "the fulfillment of humanity's high- est aspirations." The world was once more on the move.

From Foreign Affairs 82 no. 3 (May/June 2003): 16-35.

Earlier this year, however, the caravan finally ground to a halt. With the dramatic rupture of the UN Security Council, it became clear that the grand attempt to subject the use of force to the rule of law had failed.

In truth, there had been no progress for years. The UN's rules governing the use of force, laid out in the charter and managed by the Security Coun- cil, had fallen victim to geopolitical forces too strong for a legalist institution to withstand. By 2003, the main question racing countries consider- ing whether to use force was not whether it was lawful. Instead, as in the nineteenth century, they simply questioned whether it was wise.

The beginning of the end of the international security system had actually come slightly earlier,

on September 12, 2002, when President George W. Bush, to the surprise of many, brought his case against Iraq to the General Assembly and chal- lenged the UN to take action against Baghdad for failing to disarm. "We will work with the UN Secu- rity Council for the necessary resolutions," Bush said. But he warned that he would act alone if the UN failed to cooperate.

Washington's threat was reaffirmed a month later by Congress, when it gave Bush the authority to use force against Iraq without getting approval from the UN first. The American message seemed clear: as a senior administration official put it at the time, "we don't need the Security Council."

Two weeks later, on October 25, the United States formally proposed a resolution that would have implicitly authorized war against Iraq. But Bush again warned that he would not be deterred if the Security Council rejected the measure. "If the United Nations doesn't have the will or the courage to disarm Saddam Hussein and if Saddam Hussein will not disarm," he said, "the United States will lead a coalition to disarm [him]." After intensive, behind-the-scenes haggling, the council responded to Bush's challenge on November 7 by unanimously adopting Resolution 1441, which found Iraq in "material breach" of prior resolu- tions, set up a new inspections regime, and warned once again of "serious consequences" if Iraq again failed to disarm. The resolution did not explicitly authorize force, however, and Washington pledged to return to the council for another discussion be- fore resorting to arms.

The vote for Resolution 1441 was a huge per- sonal victory for Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had spent much political capital urging his government to go the UN route in the first place and had fought hard diplomatically to win interna- tional backing. Nonetheless, doubts soon emerged concerning the effectiveness of the new inspections regime and the extent of Iraq's cooperation. On January 21, 2003, Powell himself declared that the "inspections will not work." He returned to the UN on February 5 and made the case that Iraq was still hiding its weapons of mass destruction

(WMD) , France and Germany responded by press- ing for more time. Tensions between the allies, already high, began to mount and divisions deepened still further when 18 European countries signed letters in support of the American position.

On February 14, the inspectors returned to the Security Counci l to report that, after 11 weeks of investigation in Iraq, they had discovered no evi- dence of W M D (although many items remained unaccounted for). Ten days later, on February 24, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain introduced a resolution that would have had the council simply declare, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter (the section dealing with threats to the peace), that "Iraq has failed to take the final op- portunity afforded to it in Resolution 1441." France, Germany, and Russia once more proposed giving Iraq still more time. On February 28, the White House, increasingly frustrated, upped the ante: Press Secretary A r i Fleischer announced that the American goal was no longer simply Iraq's dis- armament but now included "regime change."

A period of intense lobbying followed. Then, on March 5, France and Russia announced they would block any subsequent resolution authoriz- ing the use of force against Saddam. The next day, China declared that it was taking the same posi- tion. The United Kingdom floated a compromise proposal, but the council's five permanent mem- bers could not agree. In the face of a serious threat to international peace and stability, the Security Council fatally deadlocked.

Power Polit ics

At this point it was easy to conclude, as did Presi- dent Bush, that the UN's failure to confront Iraq would cause the world body to "fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society." In reality, however, the council's fate had long since been sealed. The problem was not the second Per- sian Gulf War, but rather an earlier shift in world power toward a configuration that was simply in- compatible with the way the UN was meant to

function. It was the rise in American unipolarity— not the Iraq crisis—that, along with cultural clashes and different attitudes toward the use of force, gradually eroded the council's credibility. Although the body had managed to limp along and function adequately in more tranquil times, it proved incapable of performing under periods of great stress. The fault for this failure did not lie with any one country; rather, it was the largely in- exorable upshot of the development and evolution of the international system.

Consider first the changes in power politics. Reactions to the United States' gradual ascent to towering preeminence have been predictable: coalitions of competitors have emerged. Since the end of the Cold War, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians have sought to return the world to a more balanced system. France's former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine openly confessed this goal in 1998: "We cannot accept . . . a politically unipolar world," he said, and "that is why we are fighting for a multipolar" one. French President Jacques Chirac has battled tirelessly to achieve this end. According to Pierre Lellouche, who was Chirac's foreign policy adviser in the early 1990s, his boss wants "a multipolar world in which Eu- rope is the counter-weight to American political and military power." Explained Chirac himself, "any community with only one dominant power is always a dangerous one and provokes reactions."

In recent years, Russia and China have dis- played a similar preoccupation; indeed, this objec- rive was formalized in a treaty the two countries signed in July 2001, explicitly confirming their commitment to "a multipolar world." President Vladimir Putin has declared that Russia will not tolerate a unipolar system, and China's former president Jiang Zemin has said the same. Germany, although it joined the cause late, has recendy be- come a highly visible partner in the effort to confront American hegemony. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said in 2000 that the "core concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of . . . the hegemonic ambitions of individual states." Even Germany's former chancellor Helmut

Schmidt recendy weighed in, opining that Ger- many and France "share a common interest in not delivering ourselves into the hegemony of our mighty ally, the United States."

In the face of such opposition, Washington has made it clear that it intends to do all it can to maintain its preeminence. The Bush administra- tion released a paper detailing its national security strategy in September 2002 that left no doubt- about its plans to ensure that no other nation could rival its military strength. More controver- sially, the now infamous document also pro- claimed a doctrine of preemption—one that, incidentally, flatly contradicts the precepts of the UN Charter. Article 51 of the charter permits the use of force only in self-defense, and only " i f an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations." The American policy, on the other hand, proceeds from the premise that Amer- icans "cannot let our enemies strike first." There- fore, "to forestall or prevent . . . hostile acts by our adversaries," the statement announced, "the United States will, if necessary, act preemp- tively"—that is, strike first.

Apart from the power divide, a second fault line, one deeper and longer, has also separated the United States from other countries at the U N . This split is cultural. It divides nations of the North and West from those of the South and East on the most fundamental of issues: namely, when armed inter- vention is appropriate. On September 20, 1999, Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke in historic terms about the need to "forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights—wherever they take place—should never be allowed to stand." This speech led to weeks of debate among UN members. Of the na- tions that spoke out in public, roughly a third ap- peared to favor humanitarian intervention under some circumstances. Another third opposed it across the board, and the remaining third were equivocal or noncommittal. The proponents, it is important to note, were primarily Western democ- racies. The opponents, meanwhile, were mostly Latin American, African, and Arab states.

The disagreement was not, it soon became clear, confined merely to humanitarian interven- tion. On February 22 of this year [2003], foreign ministers from the Nonaligned Movement, meet- ing in Kuala Lumpur, signed a declaration oppos- ing the use of force against Iraq. This faction, composed of 114 states (primarily from the devel- oping world), represents 55 percent of the planet's population and nearly two-thirds of the UN's membership.

As all of this suggests, although the UN's rules purport to represent a single global view—indeed, universal law—on when and whether force can be justified, the UN's members (not to mention their populations) are clearly not in agreement.

Moreover, cultural divisions concerning the use of force do not merely separate the West from the rest. Increasingly, they also separate the United States from the rest of the West. On one key sub- ject in particular, European and American atti- tudes diverge and are moving further apart by the day. That subject is the role of law in international relations. There are two sources for this disagree- ment. The first concerns who should make the rules: namely, should it be the states themselves, or supranational institutions?

Americans largely reject supranationalism. It is hard to imagine any circumstance in which Wash- ington would permit an international regime to limit the size of the U.S. budget deficit, control its currency and coinage, or settle the issue of gays in the military. Yet these and a host of other similar questions are now regularly decided for European states by the supranational institutions (such as the European Union and the European Court of Hu- man Rights) of which they are members. "Ameri- cans," Francis Fukuyama has written, "tend not to see any source of democratic legitimacy higher than the nation-state." But Europeans see demo- cratic legitimacy as flowing from the will of the in- ternational community. Thus they comfortably submit to impingements on their sovereignty that Americans would find anathema. Security Council decisions limiting the use of force are but one example.

Death of a Law

Another general source of disagreement that has undermined the UN concerns when international rules should be made. Americans prefer after-the- fact, corrective laws. They tend to favor leaving the field open to competition as long as possible and view regulations as a last resort, to be employed only after free markets have failed. Europeans, in contrast, prefer preventive rules aimed at averting crises and market failures before they take place. Europeans tend to identify ultimate goals, try to anticipate future difficulties, and then strive to regulate in advance, before problems develop. This approach suggests a preference for stability and predictability; Americans, on the other hand, seem more comfortable with innovation and occasional chaos. Contrasting responses across the Atlantic to emerging high-technology and telecommunica- tions industries are a prime example of these dif- ferences in spirit. So are divergent transatlantic reactions to the use of force.

More than anything else, however, it has been still another underlying difference in attitude— over the need to comply with the UN's rules on the use of force—that has proved most disabling to the UN system. Since 1945, so many states have used armed force on so many occasions, in flagrant vio- lation of the charter, that the regime can only be said to have collapsed. In framing the charter, the international community failed to anticipate accu- rately when force would be deemed unacceptable. Nor did it apply sufficient disincentives to in- stances when it would be so deemed. Given that the UN's is a voluntary system that depends for compliance on state consent, this short-sightedness proved fatal.

This conclusion can be expressed a number of different ways under traditional international legal doctrine. Massive violation of a treaty by numer- ous states over a prolonged period can be seen as casting that treaty into desuetude—that is, reduc- ing it to a paper rule that is no longer binding. The violations can also be regarded as subsequent cus- tom that creates new law, supplanting old treaty

norms and permitting conduct that was once a vi- olation. Finally, contrary state practice can also be considered to have created a non liquet, to have thrown the law into a state of confusion such that legal rules are no longer clear and no authoritative answer is possible. In effect, however, it makes no practical difference which analytic framework is applied. The default position of international law has long been that when no restriction can be au- thoritatively established, a country is considered free to act. Whatever doctrinal formula is chosen to describe the current crisis, therefore, the conclu- sion is the same. "If you want to know whether a man is religious," Wittgenstein said, "don't ask him, observe him." And so it is if you want to know what law a state accepts. If countries had ever truly intended to make the UN's use-of-force rules binding, they would have made the costs of violation greater than the costs of compliance.

But they did not. Anyone who doubts this ob- servation might consider precisely why North Ko- rea now so insistently seeks a non-aggression pact with the United States. Such a provision, after all, is supposedly the centerpiece of the UN Charter. But no one could seriously expect that assurance to comfort Pyongyang. The charter has gone the way of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the 1928 treaty by which every major country that would go on to fight in World War II solemnly committed itself not to resort to war as an instrument of national policy. The pact, as the diplomatic historian Thomas Bailey has written, "proved a monument to illusion. It was not only delusive but dangerous, for i t . . . lulled the public . . . into a false sense of security." These days, on the other hand, no ratio- nal state will be deluded into believing that the U N Charter protects its security.

Surprisingly, despite the manifest warning signs, some international lawyers have insisted in the face of the Iraq crisis that there is no reason for alarm about the state of the UN, On March 2, just days before France, Russia, and China declared their intention to cast a veto that the United States had announced it would ignore, Anne-Marie Slaughter (president of the American Society of In- ternational Law and dean of Princeton's Woodrow

Wilson School) wrote, "What is happening today is exacdy what the UN founders envisaged." Other experts contend that, because countries have not openly declared that the charter's use-of-force rules are no longer binding, those rules must still be regarded as obligatory. But state practice itself often provides the best evidence of what states re- gard as binding. The truth is that no state—surely not the United States—has ever accepted a rule saying, in effect, that rules can be changed only by openly declaring the old rules to be dead. States simply do not behave that way. They avoid need- less confrontation. After all, states have not openiy declared that the Kellogg-Briand Pact is no longer good law, but few would seriously contend that it is.

Still other analysts worry that admitting to the death of the UN's rules on the use of force would be tantamount to giving up completely on the in- ternational rule of law. The fact that public opin- ion forced President Bush to go to Congress and the U N , such experts further argue, shows that in- ternational law still shapes power politics. But dis- tinguishing working rules from paper rules is not the same as giving up on the rule of law. Although the effort to subject the use of force to the rule of law was the monumental internationalist experi- ment of the twentieth century, the fact is that that experiment has failed. Refusing to recognize that failure will not enhance prospects for another such experiment in the future.

Indeed, it should have come as no surprise that, in September 2002, the United States felt free to announce in its national security document that it would no longer be bound by the charter's rules governing the use of force. Those rules have col- lapsed. "Lawful" and "unlawful" have ceased to be meaningful terms as applied to the use of force. As Powell said on October 20, "the president believes he now has the authority [to intervene in Iraq] .. . just as we did in Kosovo." There was, of course, no Security Council authorization for the use of force by NATO against Yugoslavia. That action blatantly violated the UN Charter, which does not permit humanitarian intervention any more than it does preventive war. But Powell was nonetheless right:

the United States did indeed have all the authority it needed to attack Iraq—not because the Security Council authorized it, but because there was no in- ternational law forbidding it. It was therefore im- possible to act unlawfully.

Hot Air

These, then, were the principal forces that dis- masted the Security Council. Other international institutions also snapped in the gale, including NATO—when France, Germany, and Belgium tried to block it from helping to defend Turkey's borders in the event of a war in Iraq. ("Welcome to the end of the Atlantic alliance," said Francois Heis- bourg, an adviser to the French foreign ministry).

Why did the winds of power, culture, and secu- rity overturn the legalist bulwarks that had been designed to weather the fiercest geopolitical gusts? To help answer this question, consider the follow- ing sentence: "We have to keep defending our vital interests just as before; we can say no, alone, to anything that may be unacceptable." It may come as a surprise that those were not the words of ad- ministration hawks such as Paul Wolfowitz, Don- ald Rumsfeld, or John Bolton. In fact, they were written in 2001 by Vedrine, then France's foreign minister. Similarly, critics of American "hyper- power" might guess that the statement, "I do not feel obliged to other governments," must surely have been uttered by an American. It was in fact made by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder on February 10, 2003. The first and last geopolitical truth is that states pursue security by pursuing power. Legalist institutions that manage that pur- suit maladroitly are ultimately swept away.

A corollary of this principle is that, in pursuing power, states use those institutional tools that are available to them. For France, Russia, and China, one of those tools is the Security Council and the veto that the charter affords them. It was therefore entirely predictable that these three countries would wield their veto to snub the United States and advance the project that they had undertaken: to return the world to a multipolar system. During

the Security Council debate on Iraq, the French were candid about their objective. The goal was never to disarm Iraq. Instead, "the main and con- stant objective for France throughout the negotia- tions," according to its UN ambassador, was to "strengthen the role and authority of the Security Council" (and, he might have added, of France). France's interest lay in forcing the United States to back down, thus appearing to capitulate in the face of French diplomacy. The United States, similarly, could reasonably have been expected to use the council—or to ignore it—to advance Washing- ton's own project: the maintenance of a unipolar system. "The course of this nation," President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union speech, "does not depend on the decisions of others."

The likelihood is that had France, Russia, or China found itself in the position of the United States during the Iraq crisis, each of these countries would have used the council—or threatened to ig- nore it—just as the United States did. Similarly, had Washington found itself in the position of Paris, Moscow, or Beijing, it would likely have used its veto in the same way they did. States act to enhance their own power—not that of potential competitors. That is no novel insight; it traces at least to Thucydides, who had his Athenian generals tell the hapless Melians, "You and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do." This insight involves no normative judgment; it simply describes how nations behave.

The truth, therefore, is that the Security Coun- cil's fate never turned on what it did or did not do on Iraq. American unipolarity had already debili- tated the council, just as bipolarity paralyzed it during the Cold War. The old power structure gave the Soviet Union an incentive to deadlock the council; the current power structure encourages the United States to bypass it. Meanwhile, the council itself had no good option. Approve an American attack, and it would have seemed to rubber-stamp what it could not stop. Express dis- approval of a war, and the United States would have vetoed the attempt. Decline to take any ac- tion, and the council would again have been ig- nored. Disagreement over Iraq did not doom the

tion of the security council. Its vague terms were directed at attracting maximal support but at the price of juridical vapidity. The resolution's broad wording lent itself, as intended, to any possible in- terpretation. A legal instrument that means every- thing, however, also means nothing. In its death throes, it had become more important that the council say something than that it say something important. The proposed compromise would have allowed states to claim, once again, that private, collateral understandings gave meaning to the council's empty words, as they had when Resolu- tion 1441 was adopted. Eighty-live years after Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, international law's most solemn obligations had come to be memorialized in winks and nods, in secret cov- enants, secretly arrived at.

council; geopolitical reality did. That was the mes- sage of Powell's extraordinary, seemingly contra- dictory declaration on November 10, 2002, that the United States would not consider itself bound by the council's decision—even though it expected Iraq to be declared in "material breach."

It has been argued that Resolution 1441 and its acceptance by Iraq somehow represented a victory for the UN and a triumph of the rule of law. But it did not. Had the United States not threatened Iraq with the use of force, the Iraqis almost surely would have rejected the new inspections regime. Yet such threats of force violate the charter. The Security Council never authorized the United States to an- nounce a policy of regime change in Iraq or to take military steps in that direction. Thus the council's "victory," such as it was, was a victory of diplomacy backed by force—or more accurately, of diplomacy backed by the threat of unilateral force in violation of the charter. The unlawful threat of unilateralism enabled the "legitimate" exercise of multilateralism. The Security Council reaped the benefit of the charter's violation.

As surely as Resolution 1441 represented a tri- umph of American diplomacy, it represented a de- feat for the international rule of law. Once the measure was passed after eight weeks of debate, the French, Chinese, and Russian diplomats left the council chamber claiming that they had not authorized the United States to strike Iraq—that 1441 contained no element of "automaticity." American diplomats, meanwhile, claimed that the council had done precisely that. As for the lan- guage of the resolution itself, it can accurately be said to lend support to both claims. This is not the hallmark of great legislation. The first task of any lawgiver is to speak intelligibly, to lay down clear rules in words that all can understand and that have the same meaning for everyone. The UN's members have an obligation under the charter to comply with Security Council decisions. They therefore have a right to expect the council to ren- der its decisions clearly. Shrinking from that task in the face of threats undermines the rule of law.

The second, February 24 resolution, whatever its diplomatic utility, confirmed this marginaliza-

Apologies for Impotence

States and commentators, intent on returning the world to a multipolar structure, have devised vari- ous strategies for responding to the council's de- cline. Some European countries, such as France, believed that the council could overcome power im- balances and disparities of culture and security by acting as a supranational check on American action. To be more precise, the French hoped to use the battering ram of the Security Council to check American power, Had it worked, this strategy would have returned the world to multipolarity through supranationalism. But this approach involved an in- escapable dilemma; what would have constituted success for the European supranationalists?

The French could, of course, have vetoed Amer- ica's Iraq project. But to succeed in this way would be to fail, because the declared American intent was to proceed anyway—and in the process break the only institutional chain with which France could hold the United States back. Their inability to re- solve this dilemma reduced the French to diplo- matic ankle-biting. France's foreign minister could wave his finger in the face of the American secretary of state as the cameras rolled, or ambush him by raising the subject of Iraq at a meeting called on an.

other subject. But the inability of the Security Coun- cil to actually stop a war that France had clam- orously opposed underscored French weakness as much as it did the impotence of the council.

Commentators, meanwhile, developed verbal strategies to forestall perceived American threats to the rule of law. Some argued in a communitarian spirit that countries should act in the common in- terest, rather than, in the words of V^drine, "mak- ing decisions under [their] own interpretations and for [their] own interests." The United States should remain engaged in the United Nations, ar- gued Slaughter, because other nations "need a fo- rum . . . in which to . . . restrain the United States." "Whatever became," asked The New Yorker's Hen- drik Hertzberg, "of the conservative suspicion of untrammeled power . . . ? Where is the conserva- tive belief in limited government, in checks and balances? Burke spins in his grave. Madison and Hamilton torque it up, too." Washington, Hertz- berg argued, should voluntarily relinquish its power and forgo hegemony in favor of a multipolar world in which the United States would be equal with and balanced by other powers.

No one can doubt the utility of checks and bal- ances, deployed domestically, to curb the exercise of arbitrary power. Setting ambition against ambi- tion was the framers' formula for preserving lib- erty. The problem with applying this approach in the international arena, however, is that it would require the United States to act against its own in- terests, to advance the cause of its power competi- tors—and, indeed, of power competitors whose values are vety different from its own. Hertzberg and others seem not to recognize that it simply is not realistic to expect the United States to per- mit itself to be checked by China or Russia. After all, would China, France, or Russia—or any other country—voluntarily abandon preeminent power if it found itself in the position of the United States? Remember too that France now aims to narrow the disparity between itself and the United States—but not the imbalance between itself and lesser powers (some of which Chirac has chided for acting as though "not well brought-up") that might check France's own strength.

There is, moreover, little reason to believe that some new and untried locus of power, possibly un- der tire influence of states with a long history of re- pression, would be more trustworthy than would the exercise of hegemonic power by the United States. Those who would entrust the planet's destiny to some nebulous guardian of global pluralism seem strangely oblivious of the age-old question: Who guards that guardian? And how will that guardian preserve international peace—by asking dictators to legislate prohibitions against weapons of mass de- struction (as the French did with Saddam)?

In one respect fames Madison is on point, al- though the communitarians have failed to note it. In drafting the U.S. Constitution, Madison and the other founders confronted very much the same dilemma that the world community confronts today in dealing with American hegemony. The question, as the framers posed it, was why the powerful should have any incentive to obey the law, Madison's answer, in the Federalist Papers, was that the incentive lies in an assessment of fu- ture circumstances-—-in the unnerving possibility that the strong may one day become weak and then need the protection of the law. It is the "un- certainty of their condition," Madison wrote, that prompts the strong to play by the rules today. But if the future were certain, or if the strong believed it to be certain, and if that future forecast a contin- ued reign of power, then the incentive on the pow- erful to obey the law would fall away. Hegemony thus sits in tension with the principle of equality. Hegemons have ever resisted subjecting their power to legal constraint. When Britannia ruled the waves, Whitehall opposed limits on the use of force to execute its naval blockades—limits that were vigorously supported by the new United States and other weaker states. Any system domi- nated by a "hyperpower" wil l have great difficulty maintaining or establishing an authentic rule of law. That is the great Madisonian dilemma con- fronted by the international community today. And that is the dilemma that played out so dra- matically at the Security Council in the fateful clash this winter.

Back to the Drawing Board

The high duty of the Security Council, assigned it by the charter, was the maintenance of interna- tional peace and security. The charter laid out a blueprint for managing this task under the coun- cil's auspices. The UN's founders constructed a Gothic edifice of multiple levels, with grand porti- cos, ponderous buttresses, and lofty spires—and with convincing facades and scary gargoyles to keep away evil spirits.

In the winter of 2003, that entire edifice came crashing down. It is tempting, in searching for rea- sons, to return to the blueprints and blame the archi- tects. The fact is, however, that the fault for the council's collapse lies elsewhere: in the shifting ground beneath the construct. As became painfully clear this year, the terrain on which the UN's temple rested was shot through with fissures. The ground was unable to support humanity's lofty legalist shrine. Power disparities, cultural disparities, and dif- fering views on the use of force toppled the temple.

Law normally influences conduct; that is, of course, its purpose. At their best, however, inter- national legalist institutions, regimes, and rules relating to international security are largely epiphe- nomenal—that is, reflections of underlying causes. They are not autonomous, independent determi- nants of state behavior but are the effects of larger forces that shape that behavior. As the deeper cur- rents shift and as new realities and new relations (new "phenomena") emerge, states reposition them- selves to take advantage of new opportunities for enhancing their power. Violations of security rules occur when that repositioning leaves states out of sync with fixed institutions that cannot adapt. What were once working rules become paper rules.

This process occurs even with the best-drafted rules to maintain international security, those that once reflected underlying geopolitical dynamics. As for the worst rules—those drafted without re- gard to the dynamics—they last even less time and often are discarded as soon as compliance is re- quired. In either case, validity ultimately proves ephemeral, as the UN's decline has illustrated. Its

Military Staff Committee died almost immediately. The charter's use-of-force regime, on the other hand, petered out over a period of years. The Secu- rity Council itself hobbled along during the Cold War, underwent a brief resurgence in the 1990s, and then flamed out with Kosovo and Iraq.

Some day policymakers will return to the drawing board. When they do, the first lesson of the Security Council's breakdown should become the first principle of institutional engineering: what the design should look like must be a function of what it can look like. A new international legal order, if it is to function effectively, must reflect the underlying dynamics of power, culture, and se- curity. If it does not—if its norms are again unreal- istic and do not reflect the way states actually behave and the real forces to which they respond— the community of nations will again end up with mere paper rules. The UN system's dysfunctional- ity was not, at bottom, a legal problem. It was a geopolitical one. The juridical distortions that proved debilitating were effects, not causes. "The UN was founded on the premise," Slaughter has observed in its defense, "that some truths tran- scend politics." Precisely—and therein lay the problem. If they are to comprise working rules rather than paper ones, legalist institutions—and the "truths" on which they act—-must flow from political commitments, not vice versa.

A second, related lesson from the UN's failure is thus that rules must flow from the way states ac- tually behave, not how they ought to behave. "The first requirement of a sound body of law," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, "is that it should corre- spond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong." This insight will be anathema to continuing believers in natural law, the armchair philosophers who "know" what principles must control states, whether states ac- cept those principles or not. But these idealists might remind themselves that the international le- gal system is, again, voluntarist. for better or worse, its rules are based on state consent. States are not bound by rules to which they do not agree. Like it or not, that is the Westphalian system, and it is still very much with us. Pretending that the

system can be based on idealists' own subjective notions of morality won't make it so.

Architects of an authentic new world order must therefore move beyond casdes in the air—be- yond imaginary truths that transcend politics— such as, for example, just war theory and the notion of the sovereign equality of states. These and other stale dogmas rest on archaic notions of universal truth, justice, and morality. The planet today is fractured as seldom before by competing ideas of transcendent truth, by true believers on all continents who think, with Shaw's Caesar, "that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." Medieval ideas about natural law and nat- ural rights ("nonsense on stilts," Bentham called them) do little more than provide convenient la- bels for enculturated preferences—yet serve as ral- lying cries for belligerents everywhere.

As the world moves into a new, transitional era, the old moralist vocabulary should be cleared away so that decision-makers can focus pragmati- cally on what is really at stake. The real questions for achieving international peace and security are clear-cut: What are our objectives? What means have we chosen to meet those objectives? Are those means working? If not, why not? Are better alter- natives available? If so, what tradeoffs are required? Are we willing to make those tradeoffs? What are the costs and benefits of competing alternatives? What support would they command?

Answering those questions does not require an overarching legalist metaphysic. There is no need for grand theory and no place for self- righteousness. The life of the law, Holmes said, is not logic but experience. Humanity need not achieve an ultimate consensus on good and evil. The task before it is empirical, not theoretical. Getting to a consensus will be accelerated by drop- ping abstractions, moving beyond the polemical rhetoric of "right" and "wrong," and focusing pragmatically on the concrete needs and prefer- ences of real people who endure suffering that may be unnecessary. Policymakers may not yet be able to answer these questions. The forces that brought down the Security Council—the "deeper sources of international instability," in George Kennan's

words—will not go away. But at least policymakers can get the questions right.

One particularly pernicious outgrowth of nat- ural law is the idea that states are sovereign equals. As Kennan pointed out, the notion of sovereign equality is a myth; disparities among states "make a mockery" of the concept. Applied to states, the proposition that all are equal is belied by evidence everywhere that they are not—neither in their power, nor in their wealth, nor in their respect for international order or for human rights. Yet the principle of sovereign equality animates the entire structure of the United Nations—and disables it from effectively addressing emerging crises, such as access to W M D , that derive precisely from the pre- supposition of sovereign equality. Treating states as equals prevents treating individuals as equals: if Yugoslavia truly enjoyed a right to noninterven- tion equal to that of every other state, its citizens would have been denied human rights equal to those of individuals in other states, because their human rights could be vindicated only by inter- vention. This year, the irrationality of treating states as equals was brought home as never before when it emerged that the will of the Security Coun- cil could be determined by Angola, Guinea, or Cameroon—nations whose representatives sat side by side and exercised an equal voice and vote with those of Spain, Pakistan, and Germany. The equal- ity principle permitted any rotating council mem- ber to cast a de facto veto (by denying a majority the critical ninth vote necessary for potential vic- tory). Granting a de jure veto to the permanent five was, of course, the charter's intended antidote to unbridled egalitarianism. But it didn't work: the de jure veto simultaneously undercorrected and overcorrected for the problem, lowering the United States to the level of France and raising France above India, which did not even hold a ro- tating seat on the council during the Iraq debate. Yet the de jure veto did nothing to dilute the rotat- ing members' de facto veto. The upshot was a Se- curity Council that reflected the real world's power structure with the accuracy of a fun-house mir- ror—and performed accordingly. Hence the third great lesson of last winter: institutions cannot be

expected to correct distortions that are embedded in their own structures.

Staying Alive?

There is little reason to believe, then, that the Secu- rity Council will soon be resuscitated to tackle nerve-center security issues, however the war against Iraq turns out. If the war is swift and suc- cessful, if the United States uncovers Iraqi W M D that supposedly did not exist, and if nation- building in Iraq goes well, there likely will be little impulse to revive the council. In that event, the council will have gone the way of the League of Nations. American decision-makers will thereafter react to the council much as they did to NATO fol- lowing Kosovo: Never again. Ad hoc coalitions of the willing will effectively succeed it.

If, on the other hand, the war is long and bloody, if the United States does not uncover Iraqi W M D , and if nation-building in Iraq falters, the war's opponents will benefit, claiming that the United States would not have run aground if only it had abided by the charter. But the Security Council will not profit from America's ill fortune. Coalitions of adversaries will emerge and harden, lying in wait in the council and making it, para- doxically, all the more difficult for the United States to participate dutifully in a forum in which an increasingly ready veto awaits it.

The Security Council will still on occasion prove useful for dealing with matters that do not bear directly on the upper hierarchy of world power. Every major country faces imminent dan- ger from terrorism, for example, and from the new surge in W M D proliferation. None will gain by permitting these threats to reach fruition, Yet even when the required remedy is nonmilitary, endur- ing suspicions among the council's permanent members and the body's loss of credibility will im- pair its effectiveness in dealing with these issues.

However the war turns out, the United States will likely confront pressures to curb its use of force. These it must resist. Chirac's admonitions notwithstanding, war is not "always, always, the

worst solution." The use of force was a better op- tion than diplomacy in dealing with numerous tyrants, from Milosevic to Hitler. It may, regret- tably, sometimes emerge as the only and therefore the best way to deal with W M D proliferation. If judged by the suffering of non-combatants, the use of force can often be more humane than economic sanctions, which starve more children than sol- diers (as their application to Iraq demonstrated). The greater danger after the second Persian Gulf War is not that the United States will use force when it should not, but that, chastened by the war's horror, the public's opposition, and the economy's gyrations, it will not use force when it should. That the world is at risk of cascading disor- der places a greater rather than a lesser responsibil- ity on the United States to use its power assertively to halt or slow the pace of disintegration.

Al l who believe in the rule of law are eager to see the great caravan of humanity resume its march. In moving against the centers of disorder, the United States could profit from a beneficent sharing of its power to construct new international mechanisms directed at maintaining global peace and security. American hegemony will not last for- ever. Prudence therefore counsels creating realisti- cally structured institutions capable of protecting or advancing U.S. national interests even when military power is unavailable or unsuitable, Such institutions could enhance American preeminence, potentially prolonging the period of unipolarity.

Yet legalists must be hard-headed about the possi- bility of devising a new institutional framework any- time soon to replace the battered structure of the Security Council. The forces that led to the council's undoing will not disappear. Neither a triumphant nor a chastened United States will have sufficient incentive to resubmit to old constraints in new contexts. Nei- ther vindicated nor humbled competitors will have sufficient disincentives to forgo efforts to impose those constraints. Nations will continue to seek greater power and security at the expense of others. Nations will continue to disagree on when force should be used. Like it or not, that is the way of the world. In resuming humanity's march toward the rule of law, recognizing that reality will be the first step.

Responses

The End of an Illusion Edward C. Luck

In "Why the Security Council Failed" (May/ June 2003), Michael J. Glennon provides a singular service by insisting that our understanding of in- ternational law should take historical practice and prevailing security and power The End of an reali- ties fully into account. His commonsense approach offers a refreshing contrast to the tendentious claim (too often heard during the Iraq debate) that the proper role of the UN Security Council is to pass judgment on when member states can or can- not use force in defense of their national security.

Such a definition of the council's job is based on an overly narrow and selective reading of the UN Charter. The charter's provisions limiting the use of force were adopted as part of a larger system of collective security that the Security Council was meant to enforce. By repeatedly failing over the past decade to take effective action against Iraq, those permanent members now claiming to be the guardians of international law have, in fact, done the most to undermine it.

Up to this point, Glennon's analysis is right on track. But his commendable effort to apply the cold logic of political realism goes too far: what we are witnessing today is not the death of the actual Security Council, as he suggests, but of the illusion that it is meant to function like a court. Glennon takes three wrong turns in reaching the overly dra- matic conclusion that the council is finished.

First, to conclude as he does that the council's failure to act as a global legal arbiter will leave the body unemployed and irrelevant requires adopting the absolutist standards of the legal purists, stan- dards that Glennon elsewhere rejects. In fact, aban- doning a maximalist view of what the council is

From Foreign Affairs 82 no. 4 (July/August 2003): 201-205.

meant to do will have a positive impact, allowing its members to refocus their energies on seeking common ground and on identifying joint projects for maintaining international peace and security. There are plenty of these missions to go around: the successful completion of the UN's 14 existing peacekeeping operations and the amelioration of the continuing violence in western Africa, Congo, and Sudan should provide the council with ample challenges in the months ahead.

No doubt the council faces an acute identity crisis. As Glennon aptly points out, the efforts of medium powers to employ it to counterbalance American primacy have debilitated the already weakened body. Neither Paris, Moscow, nor Washington, however, is ready to drop the council from its political tool kit. France wants its help in Cdte d'lvoire, the United States wants to use it for North Korea and the larger war on terrorism, and the whole council recendy embarked on a fact- finding trip to western Africa. Chances are that a wounded, and hopefully chastened, Security Council will find a way to muddle through, as it has so often in the past.

Second, in seeking to draw a sharp distinction between the normative and political dimensions of world affairs, Glennon fails to take account of the critical ways in which the two interact. The fact that power politics predominates does not mean that norms, values, and even legal rules arc not also relevant in shaping both the ends to which the powerful give priority and the means by which they choose to pursue them. Power gives a state ca- pacity, but these other factors help determine what the state will do with that capacity. It is hardly co- incidental that both sides in the Security Council debate on Iraq sought to invoke legal as well as po- litical symbolism. They recognized the pull that such claims, however cynical or superficial, have on both domestic and international constituencies.

Third, Glennon, again like the legal purists, as-

serts that one must choose between realism and multilateralism, between power and the council. They argue for the latter, he for the former. But this is a false dichotomy, one that has been pro- moted by those most resistant to invoking the muscular enforcement provisions of Chapter VII of the charter. The UN's founders had quite the opposite worry: that U.S. power, already predomi- nant in 1945, would not be sufficiently integrated into the UN's structures and capacities. This fear was based on a stark realism forged by world war, not on vague pieties or abstract ideals.

Glennon's trenchant arguments, although they ultimately miss the mark, serve as a pointed re- minder of just how far the UN community has drifted from that founding calculus. Rebuilding the bridges between power and law could prove to be a daunting task, but it beats a premature burial for such a promising partnership.

Misreading the Record Anne-Marie Slaughter

Michael J. Glennon makes four fallacious argu- ments to support his claim that the Security Coun- cil has failed. First is his historical claim that the establishment of the UN represented a triumph of legalism in foreign policy. As early as 1945, Time magazine, reporting from the UN's founding con- ference in San Francisco, concluded that the UN Charter is "written for a world of power, tempered by a little reason." Or as Arthur Vandenberg, the Michigan senator whose switch from isolationism to internationalism was indispensable to U.S. rati- fication of the UN Charter, described it, "this is anything but a wild-eyed internationalist dream of a world state, . . . It is based virtually on a four- power alliance." Such comments make clear that the UN always was, and remains today, a legal framework for political bargaining. Glennon's cen- tral insight—that the UN's effectiveness depends on the power and will of its members—was in fact the world body's point of departure.

Second, Glennon argues that the political con- text in which the UN operates has changed funda- mentally and permanently. The United States has

become a hyperpower and is determined to pre- serve that status; therefore, the other permanent members of the Security Council will inevitably try to use the body to thwart the United States. Glen- non concludes that for Washington to use the UN today will thus only "advance the cause of its power competitors." But while Glennon is right about the power shift and the incentives of some other powers (although he ignores the role of the United Kingdom), his definition of U.S. self- interest is too crude. The United States has long had a strong interest in allowing itself to be con- strained—to the extent of playing by rules that of- fer predictability and reassurance to its allies and potential adversaries. As Harvard's foseph Nye has pointed out, such behavior maximizes America's "soft power" (to persuade) as well as its "hard power" (to coerce).

Third, Glennon offers legal analysis, asserting that the charter should no longer be thought of as law because it has been violated so many times. It is certainly true that states have often used force without Security Council authorization since 1945. But in any legal system, international or domestic, breaking the law does not make the law disappear. We all must live with imperfect compliance, and that is as true at the World Trade Organization as it is at the U N . Furthermore, even during the Iraq crisis, the United States acknowledged the force of the charter as law by relying on it as justification for its actions.

Finally, Glennon dismisses any moral claims for upholding the framework of the charter, dis- missing "archaic notions of universal truth, justice, and morality" and insisting that "medieval ideas about natural law and natural rights . . . do little more than provide convenient labels for encultur- ated preferences." But such ideals are not "imagi- nary truths"; they are goals that can never be fully achieved but that exist in all the world's countries, cultures, and religions. And the debate over their proper role in legal practice remains very much alive today.

Equally surprising is that Glennon is so eager to pronounce a death sentence on the Security Council today. As he admits, states routinely used

force without UN authorization during the Cold War, when the U.S.-Soviet conflict froze the world body. But by lumping together the Security Coun- cil's stalemate this past March with its Cold War paralysis, Glennon completely ignores the UN's ac- tions throughout the 1990s—in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, and, after the fact, Kosovo. Some of these crises were indeed shameful failures for the entire inter- national community and particularly for its most powerful states, But in all save Kosovo, those states used the Security Council to frame their common response.

And consider the nearly two years since Sep- tember 11, during which we witnessed the re- payment of American UN dues and unanimous Security Council resolutions condemning terror- ism, supporting the reconstruction of Afghanistan, and demanding the disarmament of Saddam Hus- sein. From November to March, Americans from Wall Street to Main Street actively watched the Se- curity Council's every move—the same people who, ten years ago, would not have known what the council was. Even today, the principal point of debate among the council's permanent members has become whether the UN will play a "vital" or merely a "central" role in Iraq. On the ground, meanwhile, the UN presence there increases daily through myriad agencies.

Glennon argues that looking at what Washing- ton tried to achieve during the Iraq crisis rather than what it did achieve is naive—that the Bush administration was determined from the begin- ning to go to war regardless of what the UN said or did. That is a fashionable view in many circles, and one that can never be disproved. But it requires be- lieving, among other things, that the adminis- tration would have preferred sending possibly hundreds of young Americans and thousands of Iraqis to their deaths rather than genuinely trying to oust Saddam through coercive diplomacy. It requires overlooking French President Jacques Chirac's decision, for his own political reasons, to focus the world on the threat of U.S. power. And it requires listening to Richard Perle, former chair of the Defense Policy Board, who has written openly

of his hope that the war in Iraq will indeed be "the end of the U N " but ignoring Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has written and spoken of U.S. determination to continue working with and through it.

I agree with Glennon that we are once again in an era in which threats to international peace and security may increasingly require the use of force. But if so, genuinely recommitting the United States to a multilateral decision-making frame- work is America's only hope of ensuring that its fellow nations—including its closest allies—do not form coalitions to balance against it, as if the United States were the real problem. Pursuing such a strategy requires a blueprint for reforming the U N , not one for abandoning it.

Too Legit to Quit Ian Hurd

Michael J. Glennon's article is a useful introduc- tion to the politics of the second Gulf War. But his analysis of the Security Council rests on a faulty reading of its original powers and purposes.

Glennon is right to suggest that the Security Council lies at the core of the UN's international security system, but he mischaracterizes its pur- pose. The council was never intended as a "grand attempt to subject the use of force to the rule of law," nor as a "legalist institution" in opposition to "geopolitical forces." It did not, as he claims, en- shrine faith in "a single global view."

Instead, the council represents a political com- promise to manage the competing interests of the great powers. The UN Charter clearly grants the council power to intervene in the domestic affairs of states, but its five permanent members can each block any such intervention using their veto. There was no expectation at San Francisco that the coun- cil's contribution to world order would be to regu- late the foreign adventures of the permanent members. The veto meant that these states were deliberately shielded from all accountability to the council; and without such protection, they would never have agreed to the UN in the first place. The council compromise was not primarily intended to

protect the security of the small states; it was in- tended to avoid great-power war. At this, it has succeeded quite well.

The power that the council wields over the strong comes not from its ability to block their military adventures (which it is not empowered to do) but rather from the fact that the council is gen- erally seen as legitimate. This legitimacy functions by raising the costs of unilateral action in the eyes of many countries and their citizens.

The legitimacy granted by the council helps ex- plain the pattern of recent U.S. diplomacy, charted by Glennon. Washington clearly would have pre- ferred to act with council approval rather than

without it, as was demonstrated by the first round of talks, which resulted in Resolution 1441. The impact of the council's ability to convey legitimacy is also demonstrated by the fact that many coun- tries, including Turkey, waited to see which way it would turn before deciding whether to support the U.S. action in Iraq.

In ultimately rebuffing the United States, the Security Council signaled its view that a military solution to the crisis was the wrong approach. This disapproval was not enough to stop the American operation, but that isn't the point. It raised the costs of unilateralism, and this is the most that the council can do when the great powers clash.

M A R G A R E T E . K E C K A N D K A T H RYN S lKK INK

Transnational Advocacy Networks in

International Politics: Introduction

orld politics at the end of the twentieth century involves, alongside states, many nonstate actors that interact with each

other, with states, and with international organiza- tions. These interactions are structured in terms of networks, and transnational networks are increas- ingly visible in international politics, [Networks are forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communica- tion and exchange.] Some involve economic actors and firms. Some are networks of scientists and ex- perts whose professional ties and shared causal ideas underpin their efforts to influence policy.1

From Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), chaps. 1,3.

Others are networks of activists, distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values in motivating their formation.2 We will call these transnational advocacy networks, [A transnational advocacy network includes those relevant actors working internationally on an issue who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services. |

Advocacy networks are significant transna- tionally and domestically. By building new links among actors in civil societies, states, and interna- tional organizations, they multiply the channels of access to the international system. In such issue areas as the environment and human rights, they also make international resources available to new actors in domestic political and social struggles. By thus blurring the boundaries between a state's rela-

tions with its own nationals and the recourse both citizens and states have to the international system, advocacy networks are helping to transform the practice of national sovereignty.

+ * it-

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.3 Network actors bring new ideas, norms, and discourses into policy debates, and serve as sources of information and testimony. * * *

They also promote norm implementation, by pressuring target actors to adopt new policies, and by monitoring compliance with international stan- dards. Insofar as is possible, they seek to maximize their influence or leverage over the target of their actions. In doing so they contribute to changing perceptions that both state and societal actors may have of their identities, interests, and preferences, to transforming their discursive positions, and ul- timately to changing procedures, policies, and be- havior.4

Networks are communicative structures. To influence discourse, procedures, and policy, ac- tivists may engage and become part of larger policy communities that group actors working on an is- sue from a variety of institutional and value per- spectives. Transnational advocacy networks must also be understood as political spaces, in which differently situated actors negotiate—formally or informally—the social, cultural, and political mean- ings of their joint enterprise.

* * *

Major actors in advocacy networks may include the following: (1) international and domestic non- governmental research and advocacy organiza- tions; (2) local social movements; (3) foundations; (4) the media; (5) churches, trade unions, con- sumer organizations, and intellectuals; (6) parts of regional and international intergovernmental or-

ganizations; and (7) parts of the executive and/or parliamentary branches of governments. Not all these will be present in each advocacy network. Initial research suggests, however, that interna- tional and domestic NGOs play a central role in all advocacy networks, usually initiating actions and pressuring more powerful actors to take positions. NGOs introduce new ideas, provide information, and lobby for policy changes.

Groups in a network share values and fre- quendy exchange information and services. The flow of information among actors in the network reveals a dense web of connections among these groups, both formal and informal. The movement of funds and services is especially notable between foundations and NGOs, and some NGOs provide services such as training for other NGOs in the same and sometimes other advocacy networks. Personnel also circulate within and among net- works, as relevant players move from one to an- other in a version of the "revolving door."

We cannot accurately count transnational advo- cacy networks to measure their growth over time, but one proxy is the increase in the number of in- ternational NGOs committed to social change. Be- cause international NGOs are key components of any advocacy network, this increase suggests broader trends in the number, size, and density of advocacy networks generally. Table 1 suggests that the number of international nongovernmental so- cial change groups has increased across all issues, though to varying degrees in different issue areas. There are five times as many organizations work- ing primarily on human rights as there were in 1950, but proportionally human rights groups have remained roughly a quarter of all such groups. Similarly, groups working on women's rights accounted for 9 percent of all groups in 1953 and in 1993. Transnational environmental organi- zations have grown most dramatically in absolute and relative terms, increasing from two groups in 1953 to ninety in 1993, and from 1.8 percent of to- tal groups in 1953 to 14.3 percent in 1993. The percentage share of groups in such issue areas

Table 1. International Nongovernmental Social Change Organizations (categorized by the major issue focus of their work)

Issue area (N)

1953 (N=110)

1963 (N=141)

1973 (N=183)

1983 (N=348)

1993 (N=631)

Human rights 33 38 41 79 168 Human rights 30.0% 27.0% 22.4% 22.7% 26.6%

World order 8 4 12 31 48 7.3 2.8 6.6 8.9 7.6

International law 14 19 25 26 26 12.7 13.4 13.7 7.4 4.1

Peace 11 20 14 22 59 10.0 14.2 7.7 6.3 9.4

Women's rights 10 14 16 25 61 Women's rights 9.1 9.9 8.7 7.2 9.7

Environment 2 5 10 26 90 1.8 3.5 5.5 7.5 14.3

Development 3 3 7 13 34 2.7 2.1 3.8 3.7 5.4

Ethnic unity/Group rts. 10 12 18 37 29 9.1 8.5 9.8 10.6 4.6

Esperanto 11 18 28 41 54 10.0 12.8 15.3 11.8 8.6

Source: Union of International Associations, Yearbook of International Organizations (1953, 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993). We areindebted to Jackie Smith, University of Notre Dame, for the use of her data from 1983 and 1993, and the use of her coding form and codebook for our data collection for the period 1953-73.

as international law, peace, ethnic unity, and Es- just reasoning with opponents, but also bringing peranto, has declined.5 pressure, arm-twisting, encouraging sanctions, and

shaming. * * * Our typology of tactics that networks use in

their efforts at persuasion, socialization, and pres- How Do Transnational Advocacy sure includes (1) information politics, or the ability Networks Work? to quickly and credibly generate politically usable

information and move it to where it will have the Transnational advocacy networks seek influence in most impact; (2) symbolic politics, or the ability to many of the same ways that other political groups call upon symbols, actions, or stories that make or social movements do. Since they are not power- sense of a situation for an audience that is fre- fui in a traditional sense of the word, they must use quently far away;6 (3) leverage politics, or the ability the power of their information, ideas, and strate- to call upon powerful actors to affect a situation gies to alter the information and value contexts where weaker members of a network are unlikely within which states make policies. The bulk of to have influence; and (4) accountability politics, or what networks do might be termed persuasion or the effort to hold powerful actors to their previ- socialization, but neither process is devoid of con- ously stated policies or principles, filct. Persuasion and socialization often involve not A single campaign may contain many of these

elements simultaneously. For example, the human rights network disseminated information about human rights abuses in Argentina in the period 1976-83. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marched in circles in the central square in Buenos Aires wearing white handkerchiefs to draw sym- bolic attention to the plight of their missing chil- dren. The network also tried to use both material and moral leverage against the Argentine regime, by pressuring the United States and other govern- ments to cut off military and economic aid, and by efforts to get the UN and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to condemn Ar- gentina's human rights practices. Monitoring is a variation on information politics, in which activists use information strategically to ensure accountability with public statements, existing legislation and international standards.

Network members actively seek ways to bring is- sues to the public agenda by framing them in inno- vative ways and by seeking hospitable venues. Sometimes they create issues by framing old prob- lems in new ways; occasionally they help transform other actors' understanding of their identities and their interests. Land use rights in the Amazon, for example, took on an entirely different character and gained quite different allies viewed in a defor- estation frame than they did in either social justice or regional development frames. In the 1970s and 1980s many states decided for the first time that promotion of human rights in other countries was a legitimate foreign policy goal and an authentic ex- pression of national interest. This decision came in part from interaction with an emerging global hu- man rights network. We argue that this represents not the victory of morality over self-interest, but a transformed understanding of national interest, possible in part because of structured interactions between state components and networks. * * *

* * +

Under What Conditions Do Advocacy Networks Have Influence?

To assess the influence of advocacy networks we must look at goal achievement at several different levels. We identify the following types or stages of network influence: (1) issue creation and agenda setting; (2) influence on discursive positions of states and international organizations; (3) influ- ence on institutional procedures; (4) influence on policy change in "target actors" which may be states, international organizations like the World Bank, or private actors like the Nestle" Corporation; and (5) influence on state behavior.

Networks generate attention to new issues and help set agendas when they provoke media atten- tion, debates, hearings, and meetings on issues that previously had not been a matter of public debate. Because values are the essence of advocacy net- works, this stage of influence may require a modi- fication of the "value context" in which policy debates takes place. The UN's theme years and decades, such as International Women's Decade and the Year of Indigenous Peoples, were interna- tional events promoted by networks that height- ened awareness of issues.

Networks influence discursive positions when they help persuade states and international organi- zations to support international declarations or to change stated domestic policy positions. The role environmental networks played in shaping state positions and conference declarations at the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro is an example of this kind of impact. They may also pressure states to make more binding commitments by signing conventions and codes of conduct.

The targets of network campaigns frequently respond to demands for policy change with changes in procedures (which may affect policies in the future). The multilateral bank campaign is largely responsible for a number of changes in in- ternal bank directives mandating greater N G O and local participation in discussions of projects. It also opened access to formerly restricted information, and led to the establishment of an independent in- spection panel for World Bank projects. Proce-

dural changes can greatly increase the opportunity for advocacy organizations to develop regular con- tact with other key players on an issue, and they sometimes offer the opportunity to move from outside to inside pressure strategies.

A network's activities may produce changes in policies, not only of the target states, but also of other states and/or international institutions. Explicit policy shifts seem to denote success, but even here both their causes and meanings may be elusive. We can point with some confi- dence to network impact where human rights network pressures have achieved cutoffs of mili- tary aid to repressive regimes, or a curtailment of repressive practices. Sometimes human rights ac- tivity even affects regime stability. But we must take care to distinguish between policy change and change in behavior; official policies regard- ing timber extraction in Sarawak, Malaysia, for example, may say little about how timber compa- nies behave on the ground in the absence of en- forcement.

We speak of stages of impact, and not merely types of impact, because we believe that increased attention, followed by changes in discursive posi- tions, make governments more vulnerable to the claims that networks raise. (Discursive changes can also have a powerfully divisive effect on net- works themselves, splitting insiders from out- siders, reformers from radicals.7) A government that claims to be protecting indigenous areas or ecological reserves is potentially more vulner- able to charges that such areas are endangered than one that makes no such claim. At that point the effort is not to make governments change their position but to hold them to their word. Mean- ingful policy change is thus more likely when the first three types or stages of impact have oc- curred.

Both issue characteristics and actor characteris- tics are important parts of our explanation of how networks affect political outcomes and the conditions under which networks can be effec- tive. Issue characteristics such as salience and resonance within existing national or institutional agendas can tell us something about where net-

works are likely to be able to insert new ideas and discourses into policy debates. Success in in- fluencing policy also depends on the strength and density of the network and its ability to achieve leverage. * * *

Toward a Global Civil Society?

Many other scholars now recognize that "the state does not monopolize the public sphere,"8 and are seeking, as we are, ways to describe the sphere of international interactions under a variety of names: transnational relations, international civil society, and global civil society.9 In these views, states no longer look unitary from the outside. In- creasingly dense interactions among individuals, groups, actors from states, and international insti- tutions appear to involve much more than re- presenting interests on a world stage,

We contend that the advocacy network con- cept cannot be subsumed under notions of transnational social movements or global civil so- ciety. In particular, theorists who suggest that a global civil society will inevitably emerge from economic globalization or from revolutions in communication and transportation technologies ignore the issues of agency and political opportu- nity that we find central for understanding the evolution of new international institutions and re- lationships.

* * *

We lack convincing studies of the sustained and specific processes through which individuals and organizations create (or resist the creation of) something resembling a global civil society. Our research leads us to believe that these interactions involve much more agency than a pure diffusionist perspective suggests. Even though the implications of our findings are much broader than most po- litical scientists would admit, the findings them- selves do not yet support the strong claims about an emerging global civil society. 1 0 We are much more comfortable with a conception of transna-

tional civil society as an arena of struggle, a frag- mented and contested area where "the politics of transnational civil society is centrally about the way in which certain groups emerge and are legit-

imized (by governments, institutions, and other groups)."11

* * *

Human Rights Advocacy Networks

in Latin America

ARGENTINA

Even before the military coup of March 1976, in- ternational human rights pressures had influenced the Argentine military's decision to cause political opponents to "disappear," rather than imprisoning them or executing them publicly. a (The technique led to the widespread use of the verb "to disap- pear" in a transitive sense.) The Argentine military believed they had "learned" from the international reaction to the human rights abuses after the Chilean coup. When the Chilean military executed and imprisoned large numbers of people, the ensu- ing uproar led to the international isolation of the regime of Augusto Pinochet. Hoping to maintain a moderate international image, the Argentine mili- tary decided to secretly kidnap, detain, and execute its victims, while denying any knowledge of their whereabouts.'-'

Although this method did initially mute the in- ternational response to the coup, Amnesty Inter- national and groups staffed by Argentine political exiles eventually were able to document and con- demn the new forms of repressive practices. To counteract the rising tide of criticism, the Ar- gentina junta invited Al for an on-site visit in 1976. In March 1977, on the first anniversary of the mil- itary coup, Al published the report on its visit, a well-documented denunciation of the abuses of the regime with emphasis on the problem of the disappeared. Amnesty estimated that the regime

had taken six thousand political prisoners, most without specifying charges, and had abducted be- tween two and ten thousand people. The report helped demonstrate that the disappearances were part of a deliberate government policy by which the military and the police kidnapped perceived opponents, took them to secret detention centers where they tortured, interrogated, and killed them, then secretly disposed of their bodies.14 Amnesty International's denunciations of the Argentine regime were legitimized when it won the Nobel Peace Prize later that year.

Such information led the Carter administration and the French, Italian, and Swedish governments to denounce rights violations by the junta. France, Italy, and Sweden each had citizens who had been victims of Argentine repression, but their concerns extended beyond their own citizens. Although the Argentine government claimed that such attacks constituted unacceptable intervention in their in- ternal affairs and violated Argentine sovereignty, U.S. and European officials persisted. In 1977 the U.S. government reduced the planned level of mil i - tary aid for Argentina because of human rights abuses. Congress later passed a bill eliminating all military assistance to Argentina, which went into effect on 30 September 1978.15 A number of high- level U.S. delegations met with junta members dur- ing this period to discuss human rights.

Early U.S. action on Argentina was based pri- marily on the human rights documentation pro-

vided by Al and other NGOs, not on information received through official channels at the embassy or the State Department.16 For example, during a 1977 visit, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance carried a list of disappeared people prepared by human rights NGOs to present to members of the junta.1 7

When Patricia Derian met with junta member Ad- miral Emilio Massera during a visit in 1977, she brought up the navy's use of torture. In response to Massera's denial, Derian said she had seen a rudimentary map of a secret detention center in the Navy Mechanical School, where their meeting was being held, and asked whether perhaps under their feet someone was being tortured. Among De- rian's key sources of information were NGOs and especially the families of the disappeared, with whom she met frequently during her visits to Buenos Aires. 1 8

Within a year of the coup, Argentine domestic human rights organizations began to develop sig- nificant external contacts, Their members traveled frequently to the United States and Europe, where they met with human rights organizations, talked to the press, and met with parliamentarians and government officials. These groups sought foreign contacts to publicize the human rights situation, to fund their activities, and to help protect themselves from further repression by their government, and they provided evidence to U.S. and European poli- cymakers. Much of their funding came from Euro- pean and U.S.-based foundations,19

Two key events that served to keep the case of Argentine human rights in the minds of U.S. and European policymakers reflect the impact of transnational linkages on policy. In 1979 the Ar- gentine authorities released Jacobo Timerman, whose memoir describing his disappearance and torture by the Argentine military helped human rights organizations, members of the U.S. Jewish community, and U.S. journalists to make his case a cause ce1ebre in U.S. policy circles.2 0 Then in 1980 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an Argentine human rights activist, Adolfo Perez Esquivel. Peace and human rights groups in the United States and Europe helped sponsor Perez Esquivel's speaking tour to the United States exactly at the time that

the OAS was considering the IACHR report on Ar- gentina and Congress was debating the end of the arms embargo to Argentina,

The Argentine military government wanted to avoid international human rights censure. Scholars have long recognized that even authoritarian regimes depend on a combination of coercion and consent to stay in power. Without the legitimacy conferred by elections, they rely heavily on claims about their political efficancy and on national- ism. 2 1 Although the Argentine military mobilized nationalist rhetoric against foreign criticism, a sticking point was that Argentines, especially the groups that most supported the military regime, thought of themselves as the most European of Latin American countries. The military junta claimed to be carrying out the repression in the name of "our Western and Christian civiliza- tion." 2 2 But the military's intent to integrate Ar- gentina more fully into the liberal global economic order was being jeopardized by deteriorating rela- tions with countries most identified with that eco- nomic order, and with "Western and Christian civilization."

The junta adopted a sequence of responses to international pressures. From 1976 to 1978 the military pursued an initial strategy of denying the legitimacy of international concern over human rights in Argentina. At the same time it took ac- tions that appear to have contradicted this strategy, such as permitting the visit of the Amnesty Inter- national mission to Argentina in 1976. The "fail- ure" of the Amnesty visit, from the military point of view, appeared to reaffirm the junta's resistance to human rights pressures. This strategy was most obvious at the U N , where the Argentine govern- ment worked to silence international condemna- tion in the UN Commission on Human Rights, Ironically, the rabidly anticommunist Argentine regime found a diplomatic ally in the Soviet Union, an importer of Argentine wheat, and the two countries collaborated to block UN considera- tion of the Argentine human rights situation.23

Concerned states circumvented this blockage by creating the UN Working Group on Disappear- ances in 1980. Human rights NGOs provided in-

formation, lobbied government delegations, and pursued joint strategies with sympathetic UN dele- gations.

By 1978 the Argentine government recognized that something had to be done to improve its in- ternational image in the United States and Europe, and to restore the flow of military and economic aid. 2 4 To these ends the junta invited the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights for an on-site visit, in exchange for a U.S. commitment to release Export-Import Bank funds and otherwise improve U.S.-Argentine relations.25 During 1978 the human rights situation in Argentina improved significantly. [T]he practice of disappearance as a tool of state policy was curtailed only after 1978, when the government began to take the "interna- tional variable" seriously.26

The value of the network perspective in the Ar- gentine case is in highlighting the fact that interna- tional pressures did not work independently, but rather in coordination with national actors. Rapid change occurred because strong domestic human rights organizations documented abuses and protested against repression, and international pressures helped protect domestic monitors and open spaces for their protest. International groups amplified both information and symbolic politics of domestic groups and projected them onto an in- ternational stage, from which they echoed back into Argentina. This classic boomerang process was executed nowhere more skillfully than in Ar- gentina, in large part due to the courage and ability of domestic human rights organizations,

Some argue that repression stopped because the military had finally killed all the people that they thought they needed to kill. This argument disregards disagreements within the regime about the size and nature of the "enemy." International pressures affected particular factions within the military regime that had differing ideas about how much repression was "necessary." Although by the military's admission 90 percent of the armed oppo- sition had been eliminated by April 1977, this did not lead to an immediate change in human rights practices.27 By 1978 there were splits within the military about what it should do in the future. One

faction was led by Admiral Massera, a right-wing populist, another by Generals Carlos Suarez Ma- son and Luciano Menendez, who supported indef- inite military dictatorship and unrelenting war against the left, and a third by Generals Jorge Videla and Roberto Viola, who hoped for eventual political liberalization under a military president. Over time, the Videla-Viola faction won out, and by late 1978 Videla had gained increased control over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, previously un- der the influence of the navy.28 Videla's ascendancy in the fall of 1978, combined with U.S. pressure, helps explain his ability to deliver on his promise to allow the Inter-American Commission on Hu- man Rights visit in December.

The Argentine military government thus moved from initial refusal to accept international human rights interventions, to cosmetic coopera- tion with the human rights network, and eventu- ally to concrete improvements in response to increased international pressures. Once it had in- vited IACHR and discovered that the commission could not be co-opted or confused, the govern- ment ended the practice of disappearance, released political prisoners, and restored some semblance of political participation. Full restoration of hu- man rights in Argentina did not come until after the Malvinas War and the transition to democracy in 1983, but after 1980 the worst abuses had been curtailed.

In 1985, after democratization, Argentina tried the top military leaders of the juntas for human rights abuses, and a number of key network mem- bers testified: Theo Van Boven and Patricia Derian spoke about international awareness of the Argen- tine human rights situation, and a member of the IACHR delegation to Argentina discussed the OAS report. Clyde Snow and Eric Stover provided in- formation about the exhumation of cadavers from mass graves. Snow's testimony, corroborated by witnesses, was a key part of the prosecutor's suc- cess in establishing that top military officers were guilty of murder. 2 9 A public opinion poll taken during the trials showed that 92 percent of Argen- tines were in favor of the trials of the military juntas.30 The tribunal convicted five of the nine

defendants, though only two—ex-president Vi- dela, and Admiral Massera—were given life sen- tences. The trials were the first of their kind in Latin America, and among the very few in the world ever to try former leaders for human rights abuses during their rule. In 1990 President Carlos Menem pardoned the former officers. By the mid- 1990s, however, democratic rule in Argentina was firmly entrenched, civilian authority over the mili- tary was well established, and the military had been weakened by internal disputes and severe cuts in funding."3 1

The Argentine case set important precedents for other international and regional human rights action, and shows the intricate interactions of groups and individuals within the network and the repercussions of these interactions. The story of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo is an ex- emplar of network interaction and unanticipated effects. The persistence of the Grandmothers helped create a new profession—what one might call "human rights forensic science." (The scien- tific skills existed before, but they had never been put to the service of human rights.) Once the Ar- gentine case had demonstrated that forensic sci- ence could illuminate mass murder and lead to convictions, these skills were diffused and legit- imized. Eric Stover, Clyde Snow, and the Argentine forensic anthropology team they helped create were the prime agents of international diffusion. The team later carried out exhumations and train- ing in Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Guatemala.3 2 Forensic science is being used to prosecute mass murderers in El Salvador, Hon- duras, Rwanda, and Bosnia. By 1996 the UN In- ternational Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had contracted with two veterans of the Argentine forensic experiment, Stover and Dr. Robert Kirschner, to do forensic investigations for its war crimes tribunal. " 'A war crime creates a crime scene,' said Dr. Kirschner, 'That's how we treat it. We recover forensic evidence for prosecu- tion and create a record which cannot be success- fully challenged in court.' " 3 3

[Conclusions]

A realist approach to international relations would have trouble attributing significance either to the network's activities or to the adoption and imple- mentation of state human rights policies. Realism offers no convincing explanation for why relatively weak nonstate actors could affect state policy, or why states would concern themselves with the in- ternal human rights practices of other states even when doing so interferes with the pursuit of other goals. For example, the U.S. government's pressure on Argentina on human rights led Argentina to de- fect from the grain embargo of the Soviet Union. Raising human rights issues with Mexico could have undermined the successful completion of the free trade agreement and cooperation with Mexico on antidrug operations. Human rights pressures have costs, even in strategically less important countries of Latin America.

In liberal versions of international relations theory, states and nonstate actors cooperate to re- alize joint gains or avoid mutually undesirable out- comes when they face problems they cannot resolve alone. These situations have been charac- terized as cooperation or coordination games with particular payoff structures.34 But human rights is- sues are not easily modeled as such. Usually states can ignore the internal human rights practices of other states without incurring undesirable eco- nomic or security costs.

In the issue of human rights it is primarily principled ideas that drive change and coopera- tion. We cannot understand why countries, orga- nizations, and individuals are concerned about human rights or why countries respond to human rights pressures without taking into account the role of norms and ideas in international life. Jack Donnelly has argued that such moral interests are as real as material interests, and that a sense of moral interdependence has led to the emergence of human rights regimes.35 For human rights * * * the primary movers behind this form of principled international action are international networks.

NOTES 1. Peter Haas has called these "knowledge-based"

or "epistemic communities." See Peter Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination," Knowl- edge, Power and International Policy Coordina- tion, special issue, International Organization 46 (Winter 1992), pp. 1-36.

2, Ideas that specify criteria for determining whether actions are right and wrong and whether outcomes are just or unjust are shared principled beliefs or values. Reliefs about cause-effect relationships are shared casual be- liefs. Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institu- tions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 8-10.

3. David Snow and his colleagues have adapted Erving Goffman's concept of framing. We use it to mean "conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared under- standings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action." Definition from Doug McAdam, John D, McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, "Introduc- tion," Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobiliz- ing Structures, and Cultural Framings, ed. McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 6, See also Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, "Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems," Journal of Politics 53:4 (1991): 1044-74.

4. With the "constructivists" in international re- lations theory, we take actors and interests to be constituted in interaction. See Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), who argues that "states are embedded in dense networks of transnational and inter- national social relations that shape their per- ceptions of the world and their role in that world. States are socialized to want certain things by the international society in which they and the people in them live" (p. 2).

5. Data from a collaborative research project with Jackie G. Smith. We thank her for the use of her data from the period 1983-93, whose results are presented in Jackie G. Smith, "Characteristics of the Modern Transnational Social Movement Sector," in Jackie G. Smith, et al., eds. Transnational Social Movements and World Politics: Solidarity beyond the State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, forth- coming 1997), and for permission to use her coding form and codebook for our data collec- tion for the period 1953-73. A l l data were coded from Union of International Associa- tions, The Yearbook of International Organiza- tions, 1948-95 (published annually).

6. Alison Brysk uses the categories "information politics" and "symbolic politics" to discuss strategies of transnational actors, especially networks around Indian rights. See "Acting Globally: Indian Rights and International Politics in Latin America," in Indigenous Peo- ples and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Donna Lee Van Cott (New York: St. Martin's Press/Inter-American Dialogue, 1994), pp. 29- 51; and "Hearts and Minds: Bringing Symbolic Politics Back In," Polity 27 (Summer 1995): 559-85.

7. We thank Jonathan Fox for reminding us of this point.

8. M, J. Peterson, "Transnational Activity, Inter- national Society, and World Politics," Millen- nium 21:3 (1992): 375-76.

9. See, for example, Ronnie Lipschutz, "Recon- structing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civi l Society," Millennium 21:3 (1992): 389-420; Paul Wapner, "Politics beyond the State: Environmental Activism and Wor ld Civic Politics," World Politics 47 (April 1995): 311-40; and the special issue of Millennium on social movements and world politics, 23:3 (Winter 1994).

10. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1998), Chapter 11. An earlier version appeared as "Fishnets, Internets and

Catnets: Globalization and Transnational Collective Action," Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigaciones, Madrid: Working Papers 1996/78, March 1996; and Peterson, "Transnational Activity."

11. Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods, "Globali- sation and Inequality," Millennium 24:3 (1995), p. 468.

12. This section draws upon some material from an earlier co-authored work: Lisa L. Martin and Kathryn Sikkink, "U.S. Policy and Hu- man Rights in Argentina and Guatemala, 1973-1980," in Double-Edged Diplomacy: In- ternational Bargaining and Domestic Politics, ed., Peter B. Evans, Harold K. Jacobson, and Robert D. Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 330-62.

13. See Emilio Mignone, Derechos humanos y so- ciedad: el caso argentino (Buenos Aires: Edi- ciones del Pensamiento Nacional and Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, 1991), p. 66; Claudio Uriarte, Almirante Cera: Biografia No Autorizacla de Emilio Eduardo Massera (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992), p. 97; and Car- los H. Acuna and Catalina Smulovitz, "Ad- justing the Armed Forces to Democracy: Successes, Failures, and Ambiguities in the Southern Cone," in Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship, and Society in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Eric Hersh- berg (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), p. 15.

14. Amnesty International, Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina (London: Amnesty International, 1977).

15. Congressional Research Service, Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division, Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Assistance: Experiences and Is- sues in Policy Implementation (1977-1978), re- port prepared for U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, November 1979, p. 106.

16. After the 1976 coup, Argentine political exiles set up branches of the Argentine Human Rights Commission (CADHU) in Paris, Mex- ico, Rome, Geneva, and Washington, D.C. In October two of its members testified on human rights abuses before the U.S. House

Subcommittee on Human Rights and Inter- national Organization. Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances: Argentina's Dirty War against Human Rights and the United Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 66-67.

17. Interview with Robert Pastor, Wianno, Massa- chusetts, 28 June 1990.

18. Testimony given by Patricia Derian to the Na- tional Criminal Appeals Court in Buenos Aires during the trials of junta members. "Massera sonrio y me dijo: Sabe que pas6 con Poncio Pi- latos., . ?" Diario del luicio, 18 June 1985, p. 3; Guest, Behind the Disappearances, pp. 161-63. Later it was confirmed that the Navy Mechan- ical School was one of the most notorious se- cret torture and detention centers. Nunca Mds: The Report of the Argentine National Commis- sion for the Disappeared (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986), pp. 79-84.

19. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo received grants from Dutch churches and the Norwe- gian Parliament, and the Ford Foundation provided funds for the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

20. Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (New York: Random House, 1981).

21. See Guillermo O'Donnell, "Tensions in the Bureaucratic Authoritarian State and the Question of Democracy," in The New Authori- tarianism in Latin America, ed. David Collier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 288, 292-94.

22. Daniel Frontalini and Maria Cristina Caiati, El Mito de la Guerra Sucia (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, 1984), p. 24.

23. Guest, Behind the Disappearances, pp. 118-19, 182-83.

24. Carta Politico, a news magazine considered to reflect the junta's views concluded in 1978 that "the principal problem facing the Argentine State has now become the international siege (cerco internacional)." "Cuadro de Situacion," Carta Politica 57 (August 1978):8.

25. Interviews with Walter Mondale, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 20 June 1989, and Ricardo Yofre, Buenos Aires, 1 August 1990.

26. See Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos, Las Cifras de la Guerra Sucia (Bue- nos Aires, 1988), pp. 26-32.

27. According to a memorandum signed by Gen- eral Jorge Videla, the objectives of the military government "go well beyond the simple defeat of subversion." The memorandum called for a continuation and intensification of the "gen- eral offensive against subversion," including "intense military action." "Directivo 504," 20 April 1977, in "La orden secreta de Videla," Diario del Juicio 28 (3 December 1985): 5-8.

28. David Rock, Argentina, 1516-1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 370- 71; Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, p. 163.

29. Diario del Juicio 1 (27 May 1985), and 9 (23 July 1985).

30. Diario del Juicio 25 (12 November 1985). 31. Acuna and Smulovitz, "Adjusting the Armed

Forces to Democracy," pp. 20-21. 32. Cohen Salama, Tumbas andnimas [informe so-

bre la identificacion de restos de victimas de la represion (Buenos Aires: Catalogos Editora, 1992)], p. 275.

33. Mike O'Connor, "Harvesting Evidence in Bosnia's Kill ing Fields," New York Times, 7 April 1996, p. E3.

34. See, e.g., Arthur A. Stein, "Coordination and Collaboration: Regimes in an Anar- chic World," International Organization 36:2 (Spring 1982): 299-324.

35. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights [in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)], pp. 211-12.

S A M A N T H A P O W E R

Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United

States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen

I. People Sitting in Offices

In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

From The Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 2001), 84-108.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Goure- vitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's ur- gency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror

in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown vir- tually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the Pres- ident really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death deci- sions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they de- cide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?

So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happen- ing, that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a three- year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Coun- cil officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also reflects dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and non- governmental workers in Rwanda. Thanks to the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a nonprofit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S. documents, this account also draws on hun- dreds of pages of newly available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events. It reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the geno- cide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.

In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, Presi- dent Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a care- fully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the

fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what oc- curred" in Rwanda.

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent au- thorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpet- uation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what oc- curred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

With the grace of one grown practiced at pub- lic remorse, the President gripped the lectern with both hands and looked across the dais at the Rwandan officials and survivors who surrounded him. Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, "It may seem strange to you here, espe- cially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

Clinton chose his words with characteristic care. It was true that although top U.S. officials could not help knowing the basic facts—thousands of Rwandans were dying every day—that were be- ing reported in the morning papers, many did not "fully appreciate" the meaning. In the first three weeks of the genocide the most influential Ameri- can policymakers portrayed (and, they insist, perceived) the deaths not as astrocities or the com- ponents and symptoms of genocide but as wartime "casualties"—the deaths of combatants or those caught between them in a civil war.

Yet this formulation avoids the critical issue of whether Clinton and his close advisers might rea-

sonably have been expected to "fully appreciate" the true dimensions and nature of the massacres. During the first three days of the killings U.S. diplomats in Rwanda reported back to Washing- ton that well-armed extremists were intent on eliminating the Tutsi. And the American press spoke of the door-to-door hunting of unarmed civilians. By the end of the second week informed nongovernmental groups had already begun to call on the Administration to use the term "genocide," causing diplomats and lawyers at the State Depart- ment to begin debating the word's applicability soon thereafter. In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and in- ternal intelligence and debate.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen. But whatever their convictions about "never again," many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow geno- cide to happen. In examining how and why the United States failed Rwanda, we see that without strong leadership the system will incline toward risk-averse policy choices. We also see that with the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to Rwanda taken off the table early on—and with crises else- where in the world unfolding—-the slaughter never received the top-level attention it deserved. Do- mestic political forces that might have pressed for action were absent. And most U.S. officials op- posed to American involvement in Rwanda were firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was "possi- ble" for the United States to do.

One of the most thoughtful analyses of how the American system can remain predicated on the no- blest of values while allowing the vilest of crimes was offered in 1971 by a brilliant and earnest young foreign-service officer who had just resigned from the National Security Council to protest the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia. In an article in Foreign Policy, "The Human Reality of Real-

politik," he and a colleague analyzed the pro- cess whereby American policymakers with moral sensibilities could have waged a war of such im- moral consequence as the one in Vietnam. They wrote,

The answer to that question begins with a basic in- tellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions. "Nations," "in- terests," "influence," "prestige"—all are disembod- ied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our deci- sions affect or even end.

Policy analysis excluded discussion of human consequences. "It simply is not done," the authors wrote. "Policy—good, steady policy—is made by the 'tough-minded.' To talk of suffering is to lose 'effectiveness,' almost to lose one's grip. It is seen as a sign that one's 'rational' arguments are weak."

In 1994, fifty years after the Holocaust and twenty years after America's retreat from Vietnam, it was possible to believe that the system had changed and that talk of human consequences had become admissible. Indeed, when the machetes were raised in Central Africa, the White House of- ficial primarily responsible for the shaping of U.S. foreign policy was one of the authors of that 1971 critique: Anthony Lake, President Clinton's first- term national-security adviser. The genocide in Rwanda presented Lake and the rest of the Clinton team with an opportunity to prove that "good, steady policy" could be made in the interest of sav- ing lives.

II. The Peacekeepers

Rwanda was a test for another man as well: Romeo Dallaire, then a major general in the Canadian army who at the time of the genocide was the com- mander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda. If ever there was a peacekeeper who believed wholeheartedly in the promise of humanitarian ac- tion, it was Dallaire. A broad-shouldered French- Canadian with deep-set sky-blue eyes, Dallaire has the thick, calloused hands of one brought up in a culture that prizes soldiering, service, and sacrifice.

Me saw the United Nations as the embodiment of all three.

Before his posting to Rwanda Dallaire had served as the commandant of an army brigade that sent peacekeeping battalions to Cambodia and Bosnia, but he had never seen actual combat him- self. "I was like a fireman who has never been to a fire, but has dreamed for years about how he would fare when the fire came," the fifty-five-year- old Dallaire recalls. When, in the summer of 1993, he received the phone call from UN headquarters offering him the Rwanda posting, he was ecstatic. "It was answering the aim of my life," he says. "It's all you've been waiting for."

Dallaire was sent to command a UN force that would help to keep the peace in Rwanda, a nation the size of Vermont, which was known as "the land of a thousand hills" for its rolling terrain. Before Rwanda achieved independence from Belgium, in 1962, the Tutsi, who made up 15 percent of the populace, had enjoyed a privileged status. But in- dependence ushered in three decades of Hutu rule, under which Tutsi were systematically discrimi- nated against and periodically subjected to waves of killing and ethnic cleansing. In 1990 a group of armed exiles, mainly Tutsi, who had been clustered on the Ugandan border, invaded Rwanda. Over the next several years the rebels, known as the Rwan- dan Patriotic Front, gained ground against Hutu government forces. In 1993 Tanzania brokered peace talks, which resulted in a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords. Under its terms the Rwandan government agreed to share power with Hutu opposition parties and the Tutsi minority. UN peacekeepers would be deployed to patrol a cease-fire and assist in demilitarization and demobilization as well as to help provide a se- cure environment, so that exiled Tutsi could re- turn. The hope among moderate Rwandans and Western observers was that Hutu and Tutsi would at last be able to coexist in harmony.

Hutu extremists rejected these terms and set out to terrorize Tutsi and also those Hutu politi- cians supportive of the peace process. In 1993 sev- eral thousand Rwandans were killed, and some 9,000 were detained. Guns, grenades, and ma-

chetes began arriving by the planeload. A pair of international commissions—one sent by the United Nations, the other by an independent col- lection of human-rights organizations—warned explicitly of a possible genocide.

But Dallaire knew nothing of the precarious- ness of the Arusha Accords. When he made a pre- liminary reconnaissance trip to Rwanda, in August of 1993, he was told that the country was commit- ted to peace and that a UN presence was essential. A visit with extremists, who preferred to eradicate Tutsi rather than cede power, was not on Dallaire's itinerary. Remarkably, no UN officials in New York thought to give Dallaire copies of the alarm- ing reports from the international investigators.

The sum total of Dallaire's intelligence data before that first trip to Rwanda consisted of one en- cyclopedia's summary of Rwandan history, which Major Brent Beardsley, Dallaire's executive assis- tant, had snatched at the last minute from his local public library. Beardsley says, "We flew to Rwanda with a Michelin road map, a copy of the Arusha agreement, and that was it. We were under the im- pression that the situation was quite straightfor- ward: there was one cohesive government side and one cohesive rebel side, and they had come together to sign the peace agreement and had then requested that we come in to help them implement it."

Though Dallaire gravely underestimated the tensions brewing in Rwanda, he still felt that he would need a force of 5,000 to help the parties im- plement the terms of the Arusha Accords. But when his superiors warned him that the United States would never agree to pay for such a large de- ployment, Dallaire reluctantly trimmed his writ- ten request to 2,500. He remembers, "I was told, 'Don't ask for a brigade, because it ain't there.' "

Once he was actually posted to Rwanda, in Oc- tober of 1993, Dallaire lacked not merely intelli- gence data and manpower but also institutional support. The small Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York, run by the Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan, now the UN secretary gen- eral, was overwhelmed. Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the U N , recalls, "The global nine-one-one was always either busy or no-

body was there," At the time of the Rwanda de- ployment, with a staff of a few hundred, the UN was posting 70,000 peacekeepers on seventeen mis- sions around the world. Amid these widespread crises and logistical headaches the Rwanda mission had a very low status.

Life was not made easier for Dallaire or the UN peacekeeping office by the fact that American pa- tience for peacekeeping was thinning. Congress owed half a billion dollars in UN dues and peace- keeping costs. It had tired of its obligation to foot a third of the bill for what had come to feel like an insatiable global appetite for mischief and an equally insatiable UN appetite for missions. The Clinton Administration had taken office better dis- posed toward peacekeeping than any other Ad- ministration in U.S. history. But it felt that the Department of Peacekeeping Operations needed fixing and demanded that the UN "learn to say no" to chancy or costly missions.

Every aspect of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda was run on a shoestring. U N A M I R (the acronym by which it was known) was equipped with hand-me-down vehicles from the UN's Cam- bodia mission, and only eighty of the 300 that turned up were usable. When the medical supplies ran out, in March of 1994, New York said there was no cash for resupply. Very little could be pro- cured locally, given that Rwanda was one of Africa's poorest nations. Replacement spare parts, batteries, and even ammunition could rarely be found. Dallaire spent some 70 percent of his time battling UN logistics.

Dallaire had major problems with his person- nel, as well. He commanded troops, military ob- servers, and civilian personnel from twenty-six countries. Though multinationality is meant to be a virtue of UN missions, the diversity yielded grave discrepancies in resources. Whereas Belgian troops turned up well armed and ready to perform the tasks assigned to them, the poorer contingents showed up "bare-assed," in Dallaire's words, and demanded that the United Nations suit them up. "Since nobody else was offering to send troops, we had to take what we could get," he says. When Dal- laire expressed concern, he was instructed by a

senior UN official to lower his expectations. He re- calls, "I was told, 'Listen, General, you are N A T O - trained. This is not N A T O . ' " Although some 2,500 U N A M I R personnel had arrived by early April of 1994, few of the soldiers had the kit they needed to perform even basic tasks.

The signs of militarization in Rwanda were so widespread that even without much of an intelligence-gathering capacity, Dallaire was able to learn of the extremists' sinister intentions. In Janu- ary of 1994 an anonymous Hutu informant, said to be high up in the inner circles of the Rwandan gov- ernment, had come forward to describe the rapid arming and training of local militias. In what is now referred to as the "Dallaire fax," Dallaire re- layed to New York the informant's claim that Hutu extremists "had been ordered to register all the Tutsi in Kigali," "He suspects it is for their exter- mination," Dallaire wrote. "Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis." "Jean-Pierre," as the informant be- came known, had said that the militia planned first to provoke and murder a number of Belgian peacekeepers, to "thus guarantee Belgian with- drawal from Rwanda." When Dallaire notified Kofi Annan's office that U N A M I R was poised to raid Hutu arms caches, Annan's deputy forbade him to do so. Instead Dallaire was instructed to notify the Rwandan President, Juvenal Habyarimana, and the Western ambassadors of the informant's claims. Though Dallaire battled by phone with New York, and confirmed the reliability of the informant, his political masters told him plainly and consistently that the United States in particular would not support aggressive peacekeeping. (A request by the Belgians for reinforcements was also turned down.) In Washington, Dallaire's alarm was dis- counted. Lieutenant Colonel Tony Marley, the U.S. military liaison to the Arusha process, re- spected Dallaire but knew he was operating in Africa for the first time. "I thought that the neo- phyte meant well, but I questioned whether he knew what he was talking about," Marley recalls.

III. The Early Killings

On the evening of April 6, 1994, Romeo Dallaire was sitting on the couch in his bungalow residence in Kigali, watching C N N with Brent Beardsley. Beardsley was preparing plans for a national Sports Day that would match Tutsi rebel soldiers against Hutu government soldiers in a soccer game. Dal- laire said, "You know, Brent, if the shit ever hit the fan here, none of this stuff would really matter, would it?" The next instant the phone rang. Rwan- dan President Habyarimana's Mystere Falcon jet, a gift from French President Francois Mitterrand, had just been shot down, with Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira aboard. Dallaire and Beardsley raced in their UN jeep to Rwandan army headquarters, where a crisis meet- ing was under way.

Back in Washington, Kevin Aiston, the Rwanda desk officer, knocked on the door of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell and told her that the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi had gone down in a plane crash, "Oh, shit," she said. "Are you sure?" In fact nobody was sure at first, but Dallaire's forces sup- plied confirmation within the hour. The Rwandan authorities quickly announced a curfew, and Hutu militias and government soldiers erected road- blocks around the capital.

Bushnell drafted an urgent memo to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, She was concerned about a probable outbreak of killing in both Rwanda and its neighbor Burundi. The memo read,

If, as it appears, both Presidents have been killed, there is a strong likelihood that widespread violence could break out in either or both countries, particu- larly if it is confirmed that the plane was shot down. Our strategy is to appeal for calm in both countries, both through public statements and in other ways.

A few public statements proved to be virtually the only strategy that Washington would muster in the weeks ahead.

Lieutenant General Wesley Clark, who later

commanded the NATO air war in Kosovo, was the director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. On learning of the crash, Clark remembers, staff officers asked, "Is it Hutu and Tutsi or Tutu and Hutsi?" He frantically called for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington's most influential planners.

America's best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government official but a private citizen, A l i - son Des Forges, a historian and a board member of Human Rights Watch, who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history, specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language, Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya, Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks, because the Hutu extremist radio sta- tion, Radio Mille Collines, had branded her "a bad patriot who deserves to die." Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: "For the last two weeks, all of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President Habyarimana."

Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawa- mariya knew instantly that the hard-line Hutu would use the crash as a pretext to begin mass killing. "This is it," she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next twenty-four hours Des Forges called her friend's home every half hour, With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's home. "I don't want you to hear this," Mujawamariya said softly. "Take care of my children." She hung up the phone,

Mujawamariya's instincts were correct. Within hours of the plane crash Hutu militiamen took command of the streets of Kigali, Dallaire quickly grasped that supporters of the Arusha peace pro- cess were being targeted. His phone at U N A M I R

headquarters rang constantly as Rwandans around the capital pleaded for help. Dallaire was especially concerned about Prime Minister Agathe Uwil- ingiyimana, a reformer who with the President's death had become the titular head of state, fust after dawn on April 7 five Ghanaian and ten Bel- gian peacekeepers arrived at the Prime Min - ister's home in order to deliver her to Radio Rwanda, so that she could broadcast an emergency appeal for calm.

Joyce Leader, the second-in-command at the U.S. embassy, lived next door to Uwilingiyimana. She spent the early hours of the morning behind the steel-barred gates of her embassy-owned house as Hutu killers hunted and dispatched their first victims. Leader's phone rang. Uwilingiyimana was on the other end, "Please hide me," she begged.

Minutes after the phone call a UN peacekeeper attempted to hike the Prime Minister over the wall separating their compounds. When Leader heard shots fired, she urged the peacekeeper to aban- don the effort. "They can see you!" she shouted. Uwilingiyimana managed to slip with her husband and children into another compound, which was occupied by the UN Development Program. But the militiamen hunted them down in the yard, where the couple surrendered. There were more shots. Leader recalls, "We heard her screaming and then, suddenly, after the gunfire the screaming stopped, and we heard people cheering." Hutu gunmen in the Presidential Guard that day system- atically tracked down and eliminated Rwanda's moderate leadership.

The raid on Uwilingiyimana's compound not only cost Rwanda a prominent supporter of the Arusha Accords; it also triggered the collapse of Dallaire's mission, In keeping with the plan to tar- get the Belgians which the informant Jean-Pierre had relayed to U N A M I R in January, Hutu soldiers rounded up the peacekeepers at Uwilingiyimana's home, took them to a military camp, led the Ghanaians to safety, and then killed and savagely mutilated the ten Belgians. In Belgium the cry for either expanding UNAMIR's mandate or immedi- ately withdrawing was prompt and loud.

In response to the initial killings by the Hutu

government, Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front—stationed in Kigali under the terms of the Arusha Accords—surged out of their barracks and resumed their civil war against the Hutu regime. But under the cover of that war were early and strong indications that systematic genocide was taking place. From April 7 onward the Hutu- controlled army, the gendarmerie, and the militias worked together to wipe out Rwanda's Tutsi. Many of the early Tutsi victims found themselves specifically, not spontaneously, pursued: lists of targets had been prepared in advance, and Radio Mille Collines broadcast names, addresses, and even license-plate numbers. Killers often carried a machete in one hand and a transistor radio in the other. Tens of thousands of Tutsi fled their homes in panic and were snared and butchered at check- points. Little care was given to their disposal. Some were shoveled into landfills. Human flesh rotted in the sunshine. In churches bodies mingled with scattered hosts. If the killers had taken the time to tend to sanitation, it would have slowed their "san- itization" campaign.

IV. The ' 'Last W a r "

The two tracks of events in Rwanda—simultane- ous war and genocide—confused policymakers who had scant prior understanding of the country. Atrocities are often carried out in places that are not commonly visited, where outside expertise is limited. When country-specific knowledge is lack- ing, foreign governments become all the more likely to employ faulty analogies and to "fight the last war." The analogy employed by many of those who confronted the outbreak of killing in Rwanda was a peacekeeping intervention that had gone horribly wrong in Somalia.

On October 3, 1993, ten months after President Bush had sent U.S. troops to Somalia as part of what had seemed a low-risk humanitarian mission, U.S. Army Rangers and Delta special forces in Somalia attempted to seize several top advisers to the war- lord Mohammed Farah Aideed. Aideed's faction had ambushed and killed two dozen Pakistani

peacekeepers, and the United States was striking back. But in the firefight that ensued the Somali militia killed eighteen Americans, wounded seventy- three, and captured one Black Hawk helicopter pilot. Somali television broadcast both a video interview with the trembling, disoriented pilot and a gory procession in which the corpse of a U.S. Ranger was dragged through a Mogadishu street.

On receiving word of these events, President Clinton cut short a trip to California and convened an urgent crisis-management meeting at the White House. When an aide began recapping the situa- tion, an angry President interrupted him. "Cut the bullshit," Clinton snapped. "Let's work this out." "Work it out" meant walk out. Republican Con- gressional pressure was intense. Clinton appeared on American television the next day, called off the manhunt for Aideed, temporarily reinforced the troop presence, and announced that all U.S. forces would be home within six months. The Pentagon leadership concluded that peacekeeping in Africa meant trouble and that neither the White House nor Congress would stand by it when the chips were down.

Even before the deadly blowup in Somalia the United States had resisted deploying a UN mission to Rwanda. "Anytime you mentioned peacekeep- ing in Africa," one U.S. official remembers, "the crucifixes and garlic would come up on every door." Having lost much of its early enthusiasm for peacekeeping and for the United Nations itself, Washington was nervous that the Rwanda mission would sour like so many others. But President Habyarimana had traveled to Washington in 1993 to offer assurances that his government was com- mitted to carrying out the terms of the Arusha Ac- cords. In the end, after strenuous lobbying by France (Rwanda's chief diplomatic and military patron), U.S. officials accepted the proposition that U N A M I R could be the rare " U N winner." On October 5, 1993, two days after the Somalia fire- fight, the United States reluctandy voted in the Se- curity Council to authorize Dallaire's mission. Even so, U.S. officials made it clear that Washing- ton would give no consideration to sending U.S. troops to Rwanda. Somalia and another recent em-

barrassment in Haiti indicated that multilateral initiatives for humanitarian purposes would likely bring the United States all loss and no gain.

Against this backdrop, and under the leader- ship of Anthony Lake, the national-security ad- viser, the Clinton Administration accelerated the development of a formal U.S. peacekeeping doc- trine. The job was given to Richard Clarke, of the National Security Council, a special assistant to the President who was known as one of the most effec- tive bureaucrats in Washington. In an interagency process that lasted more than a year, Clarke man- aged the production of a presidential decision di- rective, PDD-25, which listed sixteen factors that policymakers needed to consider when deciding whether to support peacekeeping activities: seven factors if the United States was to vote in the UN Security Council on peace operations carried out by non-American soldiers, six additional and more stringent factors if U.S. forces were to participate in UN peacekeeping missions, and three final fac- tors if U.S. troops were likely to engage in actual combat. In the words of Representative David Obey, of Wisconsin, the restrictive checklist tried to satisfy the American desire for "zero degree of involvement, and zero degree of risk, and zero degree of pain and confusion." The architects of the doctrine remain its strongest defenders. "Many say PDD-25 was some evil thing designed to kill peacekeeping, when in fact it was there to save peacekeeping," Clarke says. "Peacekeeping was al- most dead. There was no support for it in the U.S. government, and the peacekeepers were not effec- tive in the field." Although the directive was not publicly released until May 3, 1994, a month into the genocide, the considerations encapsulated in the doctrine and the Administration's frustra- tion with peacekeeping greatly influenced the thinking of U.S. officials involved in shaping Rwanda policy.

V. The Peace Processors

Each of the American actors dealing with Rwanda brought particular institutional interests and biases

to his or her handling of the crisis. Secretary of State Warren Christopher knew little about Africa. At one meeting with his top advisers, several weeks after the plane crash, he pulled an atlas off his shelf to help him locate the country, Belgian Foreign Minister Willie Claes recalls trying to discuss Rwanda with his American counterpart and being told, "I have other responsibilities." Officials in the State Department's Africa Bureau were, of course, better informed. Prudence Bushnell, the deputy as- sistant secretary, was one of them. The daughter of a diplomat, Bushnell had joined the foreign service in 1981, at the age of thirty-five. With her agile mind and sharp tongue, she had earned the atten- tion of George Moose when she served under him at the U.S. embassy in Senegal. When Moose was named the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, in 1993, he made Bushnell his deputy. Just two weeks before the plane crash the State Depart- ment had dispatched Bushnell and a colleague to Rwanda in an effort to contain the escalating violence and to spur the stalled peace process.

Unfortunately, for all the concern of the Amer- icans familiar with Rwanda, their diplomacy suf- fered from three weaknesses. First, ahead of the plane crash diplomats had repeatedly threatened to pull out UN peacekeepers in retaliation for the parties' failure to implement Arusha, These threats were of course counterproductive, because the very Hutu who opposed power-sharing wanted nothing more than a UN withdrawal. One senior U.S. offi- cial remembers, "The first response to trouble is 'Let's yank the peacekeepers.' But that is like believing that when children are misbehaving, the proper response is 'Let's send the baby-sitter home.'"

Second, before and during the massacres U.S. diplomacy revealed its natural bias toward states and toward negotiations. Because most official contact occurs between representatives of states, U.S. officials were predisposed to trust the assur- ances of Rwandan officials, several of whom were plotting genocide behind the scenes. Those in the U.S. government who knew Rwanda best viewed the escalating violence with a diplomatic prejudice that left them both institutionally oriented toward

the Rwandan government and reluctant to do any- thing to disrupt the peace process. An examination of the cable traffic from the U.S. embassy in Kigali to Washington between the signing of the Arusha agreement and the downing of the presidential plane reveals that setbacks were perceived as "dan- gers to the peace process" more than as "dangers to Rwandans." American criticisms were deliberately and steadfastly leveled at "both sides," though Hutu government and militia forces were usually responsible.

The U.S. ambassador in Kigali, David Rawson, proved especially vulnerable to such bias. Rawson had grown up in Burundi, where his father, an American missionary, had set up a Quaker hospi- tal. He entered the foreign service in 1971. When, in 1993, at age fifty-two, he was given the embassy in Rwanda, his first, he could not have been more intimate with the region, the culture, or the peril. He spoke the local languagt—almost unprece- dented for an ambassador in Central Africa. But Rawson found it difficult to imagine the Rwandans who surrounded the President as conspirators in genocide. He issued pro forma demarches over Habyarimana's obstruction of power-sharing, but the cable traffic shows that he accepted the Presi- dent's assurances that he was doing all he could. The U.S. investment in the peace process gave rise to a wishful tendency to see peace "around the cor- ner." Rawson remembers, "We were naive policy optimists, I suppose. The fact that negotiations can't work is almost not one of the options open to people who care about peace. We were looking for the hopeful signs, not the dark signs. In fact, we were looking away from the dark s igns. . . One of the things I learned and should have already known is that once you launch a process, it takes on its own momentum. I had said, 'Let's try this, and then if it doesn't work, we can back away.' But bureaucracies don't allow that. Once the Washing- ton side buys into a process, it gets pursued, almost blindly." Even after the Hutu government began exterminating Tutsi, U.S. diplomats focused most of their efforts on "re-establishing a cease-fire" and "getting Arusha back on track."

The third problematic feature of U.S. diplo-

macy before and during the genocide was a ten- dency toward blindness bred by familiarity: the few people in Washington who were paying attention to Rwanda before Habyarimana's plane was shot down were those who had been tracking Rwanda for some time and had thus come to expect a cer- tain level of ethnic violence from the region. And because the U.S. government had done little when some 40,000 people had been killed in Hutu-Tutsi violence in Burundi in October of 1993, these offi- cials also knew that Washington was prepared to tolerate substantial bloodshed. When the mas- sacres began in April, some U.S. regional specialists initially suspected that Rwanda was undergoing "another flare-up" that would involve another "ac- ceptable" (if tragic) round of ethnic murder.

Rawson had read up on genocide before his posting to Rwanda, surveying what had become a relatively extensive scholarly literature on its causes. But although he expected internecine killing, he did not anticipate the scale at which it occurred. "Nothing in Rwandan culture or history could have led a person to that forecast," he says. "Most of us thought that if a war broke out, it would be quick, that these poor people didn't have the resources, the means, to fight a sophisticated war. I couldn't have known that they would do each other in with the most economic means." George Moose agrees: "We were psychologically and imaginatively too limited."

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VII. Genocide? What Genocide?

Just when did Washington know of the sinis- ter Hutu designs on Rwanda's Tutsi? Writing in Foreign Affairs last year [2000], Alan Kuperman argued that President Clinton "could not have known that a nationwide genocide was under way" until about two weeks into the killing. It is true that the precise nature and extent of the slaughter was obscured by the civil war, the withdrawal of U.S. diplomatic sources, some confused press re-

porting, and the lies of the Rwandan government, Nonetheless, both the testimony of U.S. officials who worked the issue day to day and the declassi- fied documents indicate that plenty was known about the killers' intentions.

A determination of genocide turns not on the numbers killed, which is always difficult to ascer- tain at a time of crisis, but on the perpetrators' in- tent: Were Hutu forces attempting to destroy Rwanda's Tutsi? The answer to this question was available early on. "By eight A . M . the morning af- ter the plane crash we knew what was happening, that there was systematic killing of Tutsi," Joyce Leader recalls. "People were calling me and telling me who was getting killed. I knew they were going door to door." Back at the State Department she explained to her colleagues that three kinds of killing were going on: war, politically motivated murder, and genocide. Dallaire's early cables to New York likewise described the armed conflict that had resumed between rebels and government forces, and also stated plainly that savage "ethnic cleansing" of Tutsi was occurring. U.S. analysts warned that mass killings would increase. In an April 11 memo prepared for Frank Wisner, the un- dersecretary of defense for policy, in advance of a dinner with Henry Kissinger, a key talking point was "Unless both sides can be convinced to return to the peace process, a massive (hundreds of thou- sands of deaths) bloodbath will ensue."

Whatever the inevitable imperfections of U.S. intelligence early on, the reports from Rwanda were severe enough to distinguish Hutu killers from ordinary combatants in civil war. And they certainly warranted directing additional U.S. intel- ligence assets toward the region—to snap satellite photos of large gatherings of Rwandan civilians or of mass graves, to intercept military communi- cations, or to infiltrate the country in person. Though there is no evidence that senior policy- makers deployed such assets, routine intelligence continued to pour in. On April 26 an unattributed intelligence memo titled "Responsibility for Mas- sacres in Rwanda" reported that the ringleaders of the genocide, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora and

his crisis committee, were determined to liquidate their opposition and exterminate the Tutsi popu- lace. A May 9 Defense Intelligence Agency report stated plainly that the Rwandan violence was not spontaneous but was directed by the govern- ment, with lists of victims prepared well in ad- vance. The DIA observed that an "organized parallel effort of genocide [was] being implemented by the army to destroy the leadership of the Tutsi community."

From April 8 onward media coverage featured eyewitness accounts describing the widespread tar- geting of Tutsi and the corpses piling up on Ki- gali's streets. American reporters relayed stories of missionaries and embassy officials who had been unable to save their Rwandan friends and neigh- bors from death. On Apri l 9 a front-page Washing- ton Post story quoted reports that the Rwandan employees of the major international relief agen- cies had been executed " in front of horrified expa- triate staffers." O n Apri l 10 a New York Times front-page article quoted the Red Cross claim that "tens of thousands" were dead, 8,000 in Kigali alone, and that corpses were "in the houses, in the streets, everywhere." The Post the same day led its front-page story with a description of "a pile of corpses six feet high" outside the main hospital. On Apr i l 14 The New York Times reported the shooting and hacking to death of nearly 1,200 men, women, and children in the church where they had sought refuge. On April 19 Human Rights Watch, which had excellent sources on the ground in Rwanda, estimated the number of dead at 100,000 and called for use of the term "genocide." The 100,000 figure (which proved to be a gross un- derestimate) was picked up immediately by the Western media, endorsed by the Red Cross, and featured on the front page of The Washington Post. On Apr i l 24 the Post reported how "the heads and limbs of victims were sorted and piled neatly, a bone-chilling order in the midst of chaos that harked back to the Holocaust." President Clinton certainly could have known that a genocide was under way, if he had wanted to know.

Even after the reality of genocide in Rwanda

had become irrefutable, when bodies were shown choking the Kagera River on the nightly news, the brute fact of the slaughter failed to influence U.S. policy except in a negative way. American officials, for a variety of reasons, shunned the use of what became known as "the g-word." They felt that us- ing it would have obliged the United States to act, under the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention. They also believed, understandably, that it would harm U.S. credibility to name the crime and then do nothing to stop it, A discussion paper on Rwanda, prepared by an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and dated May 1, testifies to the nature of official thinking. Regarding issues that might be brought up at the next interagency working group, it stated,

1. Genocide Investigation: Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention. Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yes- terday—Genocide finding could commit [the U.S. government! to actually "do something." [Emphasis added.]

At an interagency teleconference in late April, Susan Rice, a rising star on the NSC who worked under Richard Clarke, stunned a few of the offi- cials present when she asked, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?" Lieutenant Colonel Tony Marley re- members the incredulity of his colleagues at the State Department. "We could believe that people would wonder that," he says, "but not that they would actually voice it." Rice does not recall the in- cident but concedes, "If 1 said it, it was completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant."

The genocide debate in U.S. government cir- cles began the last week of Apri l , but it was not un- til May 21, six weeks after the killing began, that Secretary Christopher gave his diplomats permis- sion to use the term "genocide"—sort of. The UN Human Rights Commission was about to meet in special session, and the U.S. representative, Geral- dine Ferraro, needed guidance on whether to join a

resolution stating that genocide had occurred. The stubborn U.S. stand had become untenable inter- nationally.

The case for a label of genocide was straightfor- ward, according to a May 18 confidential analysis prepared by the State Department's assistant secre- tary for intelligence and research, Toby Gati: lists of Tutsi victims' names and addresses had reportedly been prepared; Rwandan government troops and Hutu militia and youth squads were the main per- petrators; massacres were reported all over the country; humanitarian agencies were now "claim- ing from 200,000 to 500,000 lives" lost. Gati offered the intelligence bureau's view: "We believe 500,000 may be an exaggerated estimate, but no accurate fig- ures are available. Systematic killings began within hours of Habyarimana's death. Most of those killed have been Tutsi civilians, including women and children." The terms of the Genocide Convention had been met. "We weren't quibbling about these numbers," Gati says. "We can never know precise figures, but our analysts had been reporting huge numbers of deaths for weeks. We were basically say- ing, 'A rose by any other name . . . ' "

Despite this straightforward assessment, Chris- topher remained reluctant to speak the obvious truth. When he issued his guidance, on May 21, fully a month after Human Rights Watch had put a name to the tragedy, Christopher's instructions were hopelessly muddied.

The delegation is authorized to agree to a resolution that states that "acts of genocide" have occurred in Rwanda or that "genocide has occurred in Rwanda." Other formulations that suggest that some, but not all of the killings in Rwanda are genocide . . . e.g. "genocide is taking place in Rwanda"—are autho- rized. Delegation is not authorized to agree to the characterization of any specific incident as genocide or to agree to any formulation that indicates that all killings in Rwanda are genocide.

Notably, Christopher confined permission to ac- knowledge full-fledged genocide to the upcoming session of the Human Rights Commission. Outside that venue State Department officials were autho- rized to state publicly only that acts of genocide had occurred.

Christine Shelly, a State Department spokes- person, had long been charged with publicly artic- ulating the U.S. position on whether events in Rwanda counted as genocide. For two months she had avoided the term, and as her June 10 exchange with the Reuters correspondent Alan Eisner re- veals, her semantic dance continued.

Eisner: How would you describe the events taking place in Rwanda?

Shelly: Based on the evidence we have seen from ob- servations on the ground, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred in Rwanda.

Eisner. What's the difference between "acts of geno- cide" and "genocide"?

Shelly: Well, I think the—as you know, there's a le- gal definition of this . . . clearly not all of the killings that have taken place in Rwanda are killings to which you might apply that label. .. But as to the distinctions between the words, we're trying to call what we have seen so far as best as we can; and based, again, on the evidence, we have every reason to believe that acts of geno- cide have occurred.

Eisner: How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?

Shelly: Alan, that's just not a question that I'm in position to answer.

The same day, in Istanbul, Warren Christo- pher, by then under severe internal and external pressure, relented: "If there is any particular magic in calling it genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that."

VIII. " N o t Even a S ideshow"

Once the Americans had been evacuated, Rwanda largely dropped off the radar of most senior Clin- ton Administration officials. In the situation room on the seventh floor of the State Department a map of Rwanda had been hurriedly pinned to the wall in the aftermath of the plane crash, and eight banks of phones had rung off the hook. Now, with U.S. citizens safely home, the State Department chaired a daily interagency meeting, often by

teleconference, designed to coordinate mid-level diplomatic and humanitarian responses. Cabinet- level officials focused on crises elsewhere. Anthony Lake recalls, "I was obsessed with Haiti and Bosnia during that period, so Rwanda was, in William Shawcross's words, a 'sideshow,' but not even a sideshow—a no-show." At the NSC the person who managed Rwanda policy was not Lake, the national-security adviser, who happened to know Africa, but Richard Clarke, who oversaw peace- keeping policy, and for whom the news from Rwanda only confirmed a deep skepticism about the viability of UN deployments. Clarke believed that another UN failure could doom relations be- tween Congress and the United Nations. He also sought to shield the President from congressional and public criticism. Donald Steinberg managed the Africa portfolio at the NSC and tried to look out for the dying Rwandans, but he was not an ex- perienced in fighter and, colleagues say, he "never w o n a single argument" with Clarke.

During the entire three months of the genocide Clinton never assembled his top policy advisers to discuss the killings. Anthony Lake likewise never gathered the "principals"—-the Cabinet-level mem- bers of the foreign-policy team. Rwanda was never thought to warrant its own top-level meeting. When the subject came up, it did so along with, and subordinate to, discussions of Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. Whereas these crises involved U.S. person- nel and stirred some public interest, Rwanda gener- ated no sense of urgency and could safely be avoided by Clinton at no political cost. The editor- ia l boards of the major American newspapers dis- couraged U.S. intervention during the genocide. They, Like the Administration, lamented the killings but believed, in the words of an April 17 Washing- ton Past editorial, "The United States has no recog- nizable national interest in taking a role, certainly not a leading role." Capitol Hi l l was quiet. Some in Congress were glad to be free of the expense of an- other flawed UN mission. Others, including a few members of the Africa subcommittees and the Congressional Black Caucus, eventually appealed

tamely for the United States to play a role in ending the violence—but again, they did not dare urge U.S. involvement on the ground, and they did not kick up a public fuss. Members of Congress weren't hearing from their constituents. Pat Schroeder, of Colorado, said on April 30, "There are some groups terribly concerned about the gorillas . . . But—it sounds terrible—people just don't know what can be done about the people." Randall Robinson, of the nongovernmental organization TransAfrica, was preoccupied, staging a hunger strike to protest the U.S. repatriation of Haitian refugees. Human Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence and established important one-on-one contacts in the Administration, but the organization lacks a grass- roots base from which to mobilize a broader seg- ment of American society.

IX. The UN Withdrawal

When the killing began, Romeo Dallaire expected and appealed for reinforcements. Within hours of the plane crash he had cabled UN headquarters in New York: "Give me the means and I can do more." He was sending peacekeepers on rescue missions around the city, and he felt it was essen- tial to increase the size and improve the quality of the UN's presence. But the United States opposed the idea of sending reinforcements, no matter where they were from. The fear, articulated mainly at the Pentagon but felt throughout the bureau- cracy, was that what would start as a small engage- ment by foreign troops would end as a large and costly one by Americans. This was the lesson of So- malia, where U.S. troops had gotten into trouble in an effort to bail out the beleaguered Pakistanis. The logical outgrowth of this fear was an effort to steer clear of Rwanda entirely and be sure others did the same. Only by yanking Dallaire's entire peacekeeping force could the United States protect itself from involvement down the road.

One senior U.S. official remembers, "When the reports of the deaths of the ten Belgians came in, it was clear that it was Somalia redux, and the sense was that there would be an expectation everywhere

that the U.S. would get involved. We thought leav- ing the peacekeepers in Rwanda and having them confront the violence would take us where we'd been before. It was a foregone conclusion that the United States wouldn't intervene and that the con- cept of UN peacekeeping could not be sacrificed again."

A foregone conclusion. What is most remarkable about the American response to the Rwandan genocide is not so much the absence of U.S. mili- tary action as that during the entire genocide the possibility of U.S. military intervention was never even debated. Indeed, the United States resisted in- tervention of any kind.

The bodies of the slain Belgian soldiers were re- turned to Brussels on April 14. One of the pivotal conversations in the course of the genocide took place around that time, when Willie Claes, the Bel- gian Foreign Minister, called the State Department to request "cover." "We are pulling out, but we don't want to be seen to be doing it alone," Claes said, asking the Americans to support a full UN withdrawal. Dallaire had not anticipated that Bel- gium would extract its soldiers, removing the backbone of his mission and stranding Rwandans in their hour of greatest need. "I expected the ex- colonial white countries would stick it out even if they took casualties," he remembers. "I thought their pride would have led them to stay to try to sort the place out. The Belgian decision caught me totally off guard. I was truly stunned."

Belgium did not want to leave ignominiously, by itself. Warren Christopher agreed to back Bel- gian requests for a full UN exit. Policy over the next month or so can be described simply; no U.S. military intervention, robust demands for a with- drawal of all of Dallaire's forces, and no support for a new UN mission that would challenge the killers. Belgium had the cover it needed.

On Apri l 15 Christopher sent one of the most forceful documents to be produced in the entire three months of the genocide to Madeleine Al- bright at the U N — a cable instructing her to de- mand a full UN withdrawal. The cable, which was heavily influenced by Richard Clarke at the NSC, and which bypassed Donald Steinberg and was

never seen by Anthony Lake, was unequivocal about the next steps. Saying that he had "fully" taken into account the "humanitarian reasons put forth for retention of U N A M I R elements in Rwanda," Christopher wrote that there was "insuf- ficient justification" to retain a UN presence.

The international community must give highest pri- ority to full, orderly withdrawal of all UNAMIR per- sonnel as soon as possible . . . We will oppose any effort at this time to preserve a UNAMIR presence in Rwanda , . . Our opposition to retaining a UN- AMIR presence in Rwanda is firm. It is based on our conviction that the Security Council has an obliga- tion to ensure that peacekeeping operations are vi- able, that they are capable of fulfilling their mandates, and that UN peacekeeping personnel are not placed or retained, knowingly, in an untenable situation.

"Once we knew the Belgians were leaving, we were left with a rump mission incapable of doing any- thing to help people," Clarke remembers. "They were doing nothing to stop the killings."

But Clarke underestimated the deterrent effect that Dallaire's very few peacekeepers were having, Although some soldiers hunkered down, terrified, others scoured Kigali, rescuing Tutsi, and later es- tablished defensive positions in the city, opening their doors to the fortunate Tutsi who made it through roadblocks to reach them. One Senegalese captain saved a hundred or so lives single

handedly. Some 25,000 Rwandans eventually as sembled at positions manned by U N A M I R personnel. The Hutu were generally reluctant to massacre large groups of Tutsi if foreigners (armed or unarmed) were present. It did not take many UN soldiers to dissuade the Hutu from attacking. At the Hotel des Mille Collines ten peacekeepers and four UN military observers helped to protect the several hundred civilians sheltered there for the duration of the crisis. About 10,000 Rwandans gathered at the Amohoro Stadium under light UN cover. Brent Beardsley, Dallaire's executive assis tant, remembers, "If there was any determined re sistance at close quarters, the government guys tended to back off." Kevin Aiston, the Rwanda desk officer at the State Department, was keeping

1

track of Rwandan civilians under UN protection. When Prudence Bushnell told him of the U.S. decision to demand a UNAMIR withdrawal, he turned pale. "We can't," he said. Bushnell replied, "The train has already left the station."

On April 19 the Belgian Colonel Luc Marchal delivered his final salute and departed with the last of his soldiers. The Belgian withdrawal reduced Dallaire's troop strength to 2,100. More crucially, he lost his best troops. Command and control among Dallaire's remaining forces became tenu- ous. Dallaire soon lost every line of communi- cation to the countryside. He had only a single satellite phone link to the outside world.

The UN Security Council now made a decision that sealed the Tutsi's fate and signaled the militia that it would have free rein. The U.S. demand for a full UN withdrawal had been opposed by some African nations, and even by Madeleine Albright; so the United States lobbied instead for a dramatic drawdown in troop strength. On April 21, amid press reports of some 100,000 dead in Rwanda, the Security Council voted to slash UNAMIR's farces to 270 men. Albright went along, publicly declar- ing that a "small, skeletal" operation would be left in Kigali to "show the will of the international community."

After the UN vote Clarke sent a memorandum to Lake reporting that language about "the safety and security of Rwandans under UN protection had been inserted by US/UN at the end of the day to prevent an otherwise unanimous UNSC from walking away from the at-risk Rwandans under UN protection as the peacekeepers drew down to 270." In other words, the memorandum suggested that the United States was leading efforts to ensure that the Rwandans under UN protection were not abandoned. The opposite was true.

Most of Dallaire's troops were evacuated by April 25. Though he was supposed to reduce the size of his force to 270, he ended up keeping 503 peacekeepers. By this time Dallaire was trying to deal with a bloody frenzy. "My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their

wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies," he later wrote. "I found myself walking through villages where the only sign of life was a goat, or a chicken, or a songbird, as all the people were dead, their bodies being eaten by vora- cious packs of wild dogs."

Dallaire had to work within narrow limits. He attempted simply to keep the positions he held and to protect the 25,000 Rwandans under UN super- vision while hoping that the member states on the Security Council would change their minds and send him some help while it still mattered.

By coincidence Rwanda held one of the rotat- ing seats on the Security Council at the time of the genocide. Neither the United States nor any other UN member state ever suggested that the represen- tative of the genocidal government be expelled from the council. Nor did any Security Council country offer to provide safe haven to Rwandan refugees who escaped the carnage. In one instance Dallaire's forces succeeded in evacuating a group of Rwandans by plane to Kenya. The Nairobi au- thorities allowed the plane to land, sequestered it in a hangar, and, echoing the American decision to turn back the S.S. St. Louis during the Holocaust, then forced the plane to return to Rwanda. The fate of the passengers is unknown.

Throughout this period the Clinton Adminis- tration was largely silent. The closest it came to a public denunciation of the Rwandan government occurred after personal lobbying by Human Rights Watch, when Anthony Lake issued a statement calling on Rwandan military leaders by name to "do everything in their power to end the violence immediately." When I spoke with Lake six years later, and informed him that human-rights groups and U.S. officials point to this statement as the sum total of official public attempts to shame the Rwandan government in this period, he seemed stunned. "You're kidding," he said. "That's truly pathetic."

At the State Department the diplomacy was conducted privately, by telephone. Prudence Bush- nell regularly set her alarm for 2:00 A . M . and phoned Rwandan government officials. She spoke several times with Augustin Bizimungu, the Rwan-

dan military chief of staff. "These were the most bizarre phone calls," she says. "He spoke in per- fectly charming French, 'Oh, it's so nice to hear from you,' he said. I told him, 'I am calling to tell you President Clinton is going to hold you ac- countable for the killings.' He said, 'Oh, how nice it is that your President is thinking of me.' "

X. The Pentagon " C h o p "

The daily meeting of the Rwanda interagency working group was attended, either in person or by teleconference, by representatives from the vari- ous State Department bureaus, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the intelligence community. Any proposal that originated in the working group had to survive the Pentagon "chop." "Hard intervention," meaning U.S. mili- tary action, was obviously out of the question. But Pentagon officials routinely stymied initiatives for "soft intervention" as well.

The Pentagon discussion paper on Rwanda, re- ferred to earlier, ran down a list of the working group's six short-term policy objectives and carped at most of them. The fear of a slippery slope was persuasive. Next to the seemingly innocuous sug- gestion that the United States "support the UN and others in attempts to achieve a cease-fire" the Pen- tagon official responded, "Need to change 'at- tempts' to 'political efforts'—without 'political' there is a danger of signing up to troop contribu- tions."

The one policy move the Defense Department supported was a U.S. effort to achieve an arms em- bargo. But the same discussion paper acknowl- edged the ineffectiveness of this step: "We do not envision it will have a significant impact on the killings because machetes, knives and other hand implements have been the most common weapons."

Dallaire never spoke to Bushnell or to Tony Marley, the U.S. military liaison to the Arusha process, during the genocide, but they all reached the same conclusions. Seeing that no troops were forthcoming, they turned their attention to mea-

sures short of full-scale deployment which might alleviate the suffering. Dallaire pleaded with New York, and Bushnell and her team recommended in Washington, that something be done to "neutral- ize" Radio Mille Collines.

The country best equipped to prevent the genocide planners from broadcasting murderous instructions directly to the population was the United States. Marley offered three possibilities. The United States could destroy the antenna. It could transmit "counter-broadcasts" urging perpe- trators to stop the genocide. Or it could jam the hate radio station's broadcasts. This could have been done from an airborne platform such as the Air Force's Commando Solo airplane. Anthony Lake raised the matter with Secretary of Defense William Perry at the end of April. Pentagon offi- cials considered all the proposals non-starters. On May 5 Frank Wisner, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepared a memo for Sandy Berger, then the deputy national-security adviser, Wisner's memo testifies to the unwillingness of the U.S. government to make even financial sacrifices to di- minish the killing.

We have looked at options to stop the broadcasts within the Pentagon, discussed them interagency and concluded jamming is an ineffective and expen- sive mechanism that will not accomplish the objec- tive the NSC Advisor seeks.

International legal conventions complicate airborne or ground based jamming and the mountainous ter- rain reduces the effectiveness of either option. Com- mando Solo, an Air National Guard asset, is the only suitable DOD jamming platform. It costs approxi- mately $8500 per flight hour and requires a semi- secure area of operations due to its vulnerability and limited self-protection.

I believe it would be wiser to use air to assist in Rwanda in the [food] relief effort.,.

The plane would have needed to remain in Rwandan airspace while it waited for radio trans- missions to begin. "First we would have had to fig- ure out whether it made sense to use Commando Solo," Wisner recalls. "Then we had to get it from

'here it was already and be sure it could be roved. Then we wotdd have needed flight clear- n c e from all the countries nearby. And then we rou ld need the political go-ahead. By the time we ot all this, weeks would have passed. And it was ot going to solve the fundamental problem, which was one that needed to be addressed militar- y . " Pentagon planners understood that stopping he genocide required a military solution. Neither hey nor the White House wanted any part in a military solution. Yet instead of undertaking other a rms of intervention that might have at least aved some lives, they justified inaction by arguing ha t a military solution was required.

Whatever the limitations of radio jamming, w h i c h clearly would have been no panacea, most of he delays Wisner cites could have been avoided f senior Administration officials had followed through. But Rwanda was not their problem. In- tead justifications for standing by abounded. In e a r l y May the State Department Legal Advisor's Office issued a finding against radio jamming, cit- ng international broadcasting agreements and he American commitment to free speech. When iushnell raised radio jamming yet again at a meet- n g , one Pentagon official chided her for naivete: ' P r u , radios don't kill people. People kill people!"

However significant and obstructionist the role jf the Pentagon in April and May, Defense Depart- ment officials were stepping into a vacuum. As one U.S. official put it, "Look, nobody senior was pay- i n g any attention to this mess. And in the absence

any political leadership from the top, when you have one group that feels pretty strongly about what shouldn't be done, it is extremely likely they i r e going to end up shaping U.S. policy." Lieu- tenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. "The Pentagon is always go- i n g to be the last to want to intervene," he says. "It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it."

* * *

XI. PDD-25 In Act ion

No sooner had most of Dallaire's forces been with- drawn, in late Apri l , than a handful of nonperma- nent members of the Security Council, aghast at the scale of the slaughter, pressed the major powers to send a new, beefed-up force (UNAMIR II) to Rwanda,

When Dallaire's troops had first arrived, in the fall of 1993, they had done so under a fairly tradi- tional peacekeeping mandate known as a Chap- ter VI deployment—a mission that assumes a cease-fire and a desire on both sides to comply with a peace accord. The Security Council now had to decide whether it was prepared to move from peacekeeping to peace enforcement—that is, to a Chapter VII mission in a hostile environment. This would demand more peacekeepers with far greater resources, more-aggressive rules of engagement, and an explicit recognition that the UN soldiers were there to protect civilians.

Two proposals emerged. Dallaire submitted a plan that called for joining his remaining peace- keepers with about 5,000 well-armed soldiers he hoped could be gathered quickly by the Security Council. He wanted to secure Kigali and then fan outward to create safe havens for Rwandans who had gathered in large numbers at churches and schools and on hillsides around the country. The United States was one of the few countries that could supply the rapid airlift and logistic support needed to move reinforcements to the region. In a meeting with UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on May 10, Vice President Al Gore pledged U.S. help with transport.

Richard Clarke, at the NSC, and representa- tives of the Joint Chiefs challenged Dallaire's plan. "How do you plan to take control of the airport in Kigali so that the reinforcements will be able to land?" Clarke asked. He argued instead for an "outside-in" strategy, as opposed to Dallaire's "inside-out" approach. The U.S. proposal would have created protected zones for refugees at Rwanda's borders. It would have kept any U.S. pi- lots involved in airlifting the peacekeepers safely

out of Rwanda. "Our proposal was the most feasi- ble, doable thing that could have been done in the short term," Clarke insists. Dallaire's proposal, in contrast, "could not be done in the short term and could not attract peacekeepers." The U.S. plan— which was modeled on Operation Provide Com- fort, for the Kurds of northern Iraq—seemed to assume that the people in need were refugees flee- ing to the border, but most endangered Tutsi could not make it to the border. The most vulner- able Rwandans were those clustered together, awaiting salvation, deep inside Rwanda. Dallaire's plan would have had UN soldiers move to the Tutsi in hiding. The U.S. plan would have required civilians to move to the safe zones, negotiating murderous roadblocks on the way. "The two plans had very different objectives," Dallaire says. "My mission was to save Rwandans. Their mission was to put on a show at no risk."

America's new peacekeeping doctrine, of which Clarke was the primary architect, was unveiled on May 3, and U.S. officials applied its criteria zeal- ously. PDD-25 did not merely circumscribe U.S. participation in UN missions; it also limited U.S. support for other states that hoped to carry out UN missions. Before such missions could garner U.S. approval, policymakers had to answer certain questions: Were U.S. interests at stake? Was there a threat to world peace? A clear mission goal? Ac- ceptable costs? Congressional, public, and allied support? A working cease-fire? A clear command- and-control arrangement? And, finally, what was the exit strategy?

The United States haggled at the Security Council and with the UN Department of Peace- keeping Operations for the first two weeks of May. U.S. officials pointed to the flaws in Dallaire's pro- posal without offering the resources that would have helped him to overcome them. On May 13 Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott sent Madeleine Albright instructions on how the United States should respond to Dallaire's plan. Noting the logistic hazards of airlifting troops into the capital, Talbott wrote, "The U.S. is not pre- pared at this point to lift heavy equipment and

troops into Kigali." The "more manageable" oper- ation would be to create the protected zones at the border, secure humanitarian-aid deliveries, and "promot[e) restoration of a ceasefire and return to the Arusha Peace Process." Talbott acknowledged that even the minimalist American proposal con- tained "many unanswered questions":

Where will the needed forces come from; how will they be transported... where precisely should these safe zones be created;... would UN forces be autho- rized to move out of the zones to assist affected pop- ulations not in the zones . . . will the fighting parties in Rwanda agree to this arrangement. .. what con- ditions would need to obtain for the operation to end successfully?

Nonetheless, Talbott concluded, "We would urge the UN to explore and refine this alternative and present the Council with a menu of at least two op- tions in a formal report from the [Secretary Gen- eral] along with cost estimates before the Security Council votes on changing UNAMIR's mandate." U.S. policymakers were asking valid questions. Dallaire's plan certainly would have required the intervening troops to take risks in an effort to reach the targeted Rwandans or to confront the Hutu militia and government forces. But the business-as-usual tone of the American inquiry did not seem appropriate to the unprecedented and utterly unconventional crisis that was under way.

On May 17, by which time most of the Tutsi victims of the genocide were already dead, the United States finally acceded to a version of Dal- laire's plan. However, few African countries stepped forward to offer troops. Even if troops had been immediately available, the lethargy of the ma - jor powers would have hindered their use. Though the Administration had committed the United States to provide armored support if the African nations provided soldiers, Pentagon stalling re- sumed. On May 19 the UN formally requested fifty American armored personnel carriers. On May 31 the United States agreed to send the APCs from Germany to Entebbe, Uganda. But squabbles be- tween the Pentagon and UN planners arose. Who

would pay for the vehicles? Should the vehicles be tracked or wheeled? Would the UN buy them or simply lease them? And who would pay the ship- ping costs? Compounding the disputes was the fact that Department of Defense regulations prevented the U.S. Army from preparing the vehicles for transport until contracts had been signed. The De- fense Department demanded that it be reimbursed $15 million for shipping spare parts and equip- ment to and from Rwanda. In mid-June the White House finally intervened. On June 19, a month af- ter the UN request, the United States began trans- porting the APCs, but they were missing the radios and heavy machine guns that would be needed if UN troops came under fire. By the time the APCs arrived, the genocide was over—halted by Rwan- dan Patriotic Front forces under the command of the Tutsi leader, Paul Kagame.

XII. The Stories We Tell

It is not hard to conceive of how the United States might have done things differently. Ahead of the plane crash, as violence escalated, it could have agreed to Belgian pleas for UN reinforcements. Once the killing of thousands of Rwandans a day had begun, the President could have deployed U.S. troops to Rwanda. The United States could have joined Dallaire's beleaguered U N A M I R forces or, if it feared associating with shoddy UN peacekeep- ing, it could have intervened unilaterally with the Security Council's backing, as France eventually d i d in late June. The United States could also have acted without the UN's blessing, as it did five years later in Kosovo. Securing congressional support for U.S. intervention would have been extremely difficult, but by the second week of the killing Clinton could have made the case that something approximating genocide was under way, that a supreme American value was imperiled by its oc- currence, and that U.S. contingents at relatively low risk could stop the extermination of a people.

Alan Kuperman wrote in Foreign Affairs that President Clinton was in the dark for two weeks;

by the time a large U.S. force could deploy, it would not have saved "even half of the ultimate victims." The evidence indicates that the killers' in- tentions were known by mid-level officials and knowable by their bosses within a week of the plane crash. Any failure to fully appreciate the genocide stemmed from political, moral, and imaginative weaknesses, not informational ones. As for what force could have accomplished, Kuper- man's claims are purely speculative. We cannot know how the announcement of a robust or even a limited U.S. deployment would have affected the perpetrators' behavior. It is worth noting that even Kuperman concedes that belated intervention would have saved 75,000 to 125,000—no small achievement. A more serious challenge comes from the U.S. officials who argue that no amount of leadership from the White House would have overcome congressional opposition to sending U.S. troops to Africa. But even if that highly debat- able point was true, the United States still had a va- riety of options. Instead of leaving it to mid-level officials to communicate with the Rwandan leader- ship behind the scenes, senior officials in the Administration could have taken control of the process. They could have publicly and frequently denounced the slaughter. They could have branded the crimes "genocide" at a far earlier stage. They could have called for the expulsion of the Rwandan delegation from the Security Council. On the tele- phone, at the U N , and on the Voice of America they could have threatened to prosecute those complicit in the genocide, naming names when possible. They could have deployed Pentagon as- sets to jam—even temporarily—the crucial, deadly radio broadcasts.

Instead of demanding a UN withdrawal, quib- bling over costs, and coming forward (belatedly) with a plan better suited to caring for refugees than to stopping massacres, U.S. officials could have worked to make U N A M I R a force to contend with. They could have urged their Belgian allies to stay and protect Rwandan civilians. If the Belgians in- sisted on withdrawing, the White House could have done everything within its power to make

sure that Dallaire was immediately reinforced. Se- nior officials could have spent U.S. political capital rallying troops from other nations and could have supplied strategic airlift and logistic support to a coalition that it had helped to create. In short, the United States could have led the world.

Why did none of these things happen? One reason is that all possible sources of pressure—U.S. allies, Congress, editorial boards, and the Ameri- can peopk—were mute when it mattered for Rwanda. American leaders have a circular and de- liberate relationship to public opinion, it is circu- lar because public opinion is rarely if ever aroused by foreign crises, even genocidal ones, in the ab- sence of political leadership, and yet at the same time, American leaders continually cite the absence of public support as grounds for inaction. The re- lationship is deliberate because American leader- ship is not absent in such circumstances: it was present regarding Rwanda, but devoted mainly to suppressing public outrage and thwarting UN ini- tiatives so as to avoid acting.

Strikingly, most officials involved in shaping U.S. policy were able to define the decision not to stop genocide as ethical and moral. The Adminis- tration employed several devices to keep down en- thusiasm for action and to preserve the public's sense—and, more important, its own—that U.S. policy choices were not merely politically astute but also morally acceptable. First, Administration officials exaggerated the extremity of the possible responses. Time and again U.S. leaders posed the choice as between staying out of Rwanda and "get- ting involved everywhere." In addition, they often presented the choice as one between doing nothing and sending in the Marines. On May 25, at the Naval Academy graduation ceremony, Clinton de- scribed America's relationship to ethnic trouble spots: "We cannot turn away from them, but our interests are not sufficiently at stake in so many of them to justify a commitment of our folks."

Second, Administration policymakers appealed to notions of the greater good. They did not simply frame U.S. policy as one contrived in order to ad- vance the national interest or avoid U.S. casualties.

Rather, they often argued against intervention from the standpoint of people committed to pro- tecting human life, Owing to recent failures in UN peacekeeping, many humanitarian interventionists in the U.S. government were concerned about the future of America's relationship with the United Nations generally and peacekeeping specifically. They believed that the UN and humanitarianism could not afford another Somalia. Many internal- ized the belief that the UN had more to lose by sending reinforcements and tailing than by allow- ing tire killings to proceed. Their chief priority, af- ter the evacuation of the Americans, was looking after UN peacekeepers, and they justified the with- drawal of the peacekeepers on the grounds that it would ensure a future for humanitarian interven- tion. In other words, Dallaire's peacekeeping mis- sion in Rwanda had to be destroyed so that peacekeeping might be saved for use elsewhere.

A third feature of the response that helped to console U.S. officials at the time was the sheer flurry of Rwanda-related activity. U.S. officials with a special concern for Rwanda took their so- lace from mini-victories—working on behalf of specific individuals or groups (Monique Mujawa- mariya; the Rwandans gathered at the hotel). Gov- ernment officials involved in policy met constantly and remained "seized of the matter"; they neither appeared nor felt indifferent. Although little in the way of effective intervention emerged from mid- level meetings in Washington or New York, an abundance of memoranda and other documents did.

Finally, the almost willful delusion that what was happening in Rwanda did not amount to genocide created a nurturing ethical framework for inaction. "War" was "tragic" but created no moral imperative.

What is most frightening about this story is that it testifies to a system that in effect worked. President Clinton and his advisers had several aims. First, they wanted to avoid engagement in a conflict that posed little threat to American inter- ests, narrowly defined. Second, they sought to ap- pease a restless Congress by showing that they

were cautious in their approach to peacekeeping. And third, they hoped to contain the political costs and avoid the moral stigma associated with al- lowing genocide. By and large, they achieved all three objectives. The normal operations of the

foreign-policy bureaucracy and the international community permitted an illusion of continual de- liberation, complex activity, and intense concern, even as Rwandans were left to die.

H E N R Y A . K I S S I N G E R

The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction

Risking Judicial Tyranny

in less than a decade, an unprecedented movement has emerged to submit international politics to ju- dicial procedures. It has spread with extraordinary speed and has not been subjected to systematic de- bate, partly because of the intimidating passion of its advocates. To be sure, human rights violations, war crimes, genocide, and torture have so dis- graced the modern age and in such a variety of places that the effort to interpose legal norms to prevent or punish such outrages does credit to its advocates. The danger lies in pushing the effort to extremes that risk substituting the tyranny of judges for that of governments; historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inqui- sitions and even witch-hunts.

The doctrine of universal jurisdiction asserts that some crimes are so heinous that their perpe- trators should not escape justice by invoking doc- trines of sovereign immunity or the sacrosanct nature of national frontiers. Two specific ap- proaches to achieve this goal have emerged re- cently. The first seeks to apply the procedures of domestic criminal justice to violations of universal

From Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Pol- icy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York Simon & Schuster, 2002): 274-82,

standards, some of which are embodied in United Nations conventions, by authorizing national prosecutors to bring offenders into their jurisdic- tions through extradition from third countries. The second approach is the International Criminal Court (ICC), the founding treaty for which was created by a conference in Rome in July 1998 and signed by 95 states, including most European countries. It has already been ratified by 30 nations and will go into effect when the total reaches 60. On December 31, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the ICC treaty with only hours to spare be- fore the cutoff date. But he indicated that he would neither submit it for Senate approval nor recom- mend that his successor do so while the treaty re- mains in its present form.

The very concept of universal jurisdiction is of recent vintage. The sixth edition of Blacks Law Dictionary, published in 1990, does not contain even an entry for the term. The closest analogous concept listed is hastes humani generis ("enemies of the human race"). Until recently, the latter term has been applied to pirates, hijackers, and similar outlaws whose crimes were typically committed outside the territory of any state. The notion that heads of state and senior public officials should have the same standing as outlaws before the bar of justice is quite new.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the

many atrocities committed since, major efforts have been made to find a judicial standard to deal with such catastrophes: the Nuremberg trials of 1945-46, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the genocide convention of 1948, and the antitorture convention of 1988. The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Coopera- tion in Europe, signed in Helsinki in 1975 by Pres- ident Gerald Ford on behalf of the United States, obligated the 35 signatory nations to observe cer- tain stated human rights, subjecting violators to the pressures by which foreign policy commit- ments are generally sustained. In the hands of courageous groups in Eastern Europe, the Final Act became one of several weapons by which com- munist rule was delegitimized and eventually un- dermined. In the 1990s, international tribunals to punish crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, established ad hoc by the U.N. Secu- rity Council, have sought to provide a system of accountability for specific regions ravaged by arbi- trary violence.

But none of these steps was conceived at the time as instituting a "universal jurisdiction." It is unlikely that any of the signatories of either the U . N . conventions or the Helsinki Final Act thought it possible that national judges would use them as a basis for extradition requests regarding alleged crimes committed outside their jurisdic- tions. The drafters almost certainly believed that they were stating general principles, not laws that would be enforced by national courts. For exam- ple, Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, referred to it as a "common standard." As one of the nego- tiators of the Final Act of the Helsinki conference, I can affirm that the administration I represented considered it primarily a diplomatic weapon to use to thwart the communists' attempts to pressure the Soviet and captive peoples. Even with respect to binding undertakings such as the genocide con- vention, it was never thought that they would sub- ject past and future leaders of one nation to prosecution by the national magistrates of another state where the violations had not occurred. Nor, until recently, was it argued that the various U .N .

declarations subjected past and future leaders to the possibility of prosecution by national magis- trates of third countries without either due process safeguards or institutional restraints.

Yet this is in essence the precedent that was set by the 1998 British detention of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet as the result of an extradition request by a Spanish judge seeking to try Pinochet for crimes committed against Span- iards on Chilean soil. For advocates of universal jurisdiction, that detention—lasting more than 16 months—was a landmark establishing a just principle, But any universal system should contain procedures not only to punish the wicked but also to constrain the righteous. It must not allow legal principles to be used as weapons to settle political scores. Questions such as these must therefore be answered: What legal norms are being applied? What are the rules of evidence? What safeguards exist for the defendant? And how will prosecutions affect other fundamental foreign policy objectives and interests?

A Dangerous Precedent

It is decidedly unfashionable to express any degree of skepticism about the way the Pinochet case was handled. For almost all the parties of the European left, Augusto Pinochet is the incarnation of a right- wing assault on democracy because he led a coup d'etat against an elected leader. At the time, others, including the leaders of Chile's democratic parties, viewed Salvador Allende as a radical Marxist ideo- logue bent on imposing a Castro-style dictatorship with the aid of Cuban-trained militias and Cuban weapons. This was why the leaders of Chile's democratic parties publicly welcomed—yes, wel- comed—Allende's overthrow. (They changed their attitude only after the junta brutally maintained its autocratic rule far longer than was warranted by the invocation of an emergency.)

Disapproval of the Allende regime does not ex- onerate those who perpetrated systematic human rights abuses after it was overthrown. But neither should the applicability of universal jurisdiction as

a policy be determined by one's view of the political history of Chile. The appropriate solution was ar- rived at in August 2000 when the Chilean Supreme Court withdrew Pinochet's senatorial immunity, making it possible to deal with the charges against him in the courts of the country most competent to judge this history and to relate its decisions to the stability and vitality of its democratic institutions.

On November 25, 1998, the judiciary com- mittee of the British House of Lords (the United Kingdom's supreme court) concluded that "inter- national law has made it plain that certain types of conduct , . . are not acceptable conduct on the part of anyone." But that principle did not oblige the lords to endow a Spanish magistrate—and presumably other magistrates elsewhere in the world—with the authority to enforce it in a coun- try where the accused had committed no crime, and then to cause the restraint of the accused for 16 months in yet another country in which he was equally a stranger, It could have held that Chile, or an international tribunal specifically established for crimes committed in Chile on the model of the courts set up for heinous crimes in the former Yu- goslavia and Rwanda, was the appropriate forum.

The unprecedented and sweeping interpreta- tion of international law in Ex parte Pinochet would arm any magistrate anywhere in the world with the power to demand extradition, substi- tuting the magistrate's own judgment for the reconciliation procedures of even incontestably democratic societies where alleged violations of human rights may have occurred. It would also subject the accused to the criminal procedures of the magistrate's country, with a legal system that maybe unfamiliar to the defendant and that would force the defendant to bring evidence and wit- nesses from long distances. Such a system goes far beyond the explicit and limited mandates established by the U . N . Security Council for the tribunals covering war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as the one being negotiated for Cambodia.

Perhaps the most important issue is the rela- tionship of universal jurisdiction to national rec- onciliation procedures set up by new democratic

governments to deal with their countries' ques- tionable pasts. One would have thought that a Spanish magistrate would have been sensitive to the incongruity of a request by Spain, itself haunted by transgressions committed during the Spanish Civil War and the regime of General Fran- cisco Franco, to try in Spanish courts alleged crimes against humanity committed elsewhere.

The decision of post-Franco Spain to avoid wholesale criminal trials for the human rights vio- lations of the recent past was designed explicitly to foster a process of national reconciliation that un- doubtedly contributed much to the present vigor of Spanish democracy. Why should Chile's attempt at national reconciliation not have been given the same opportunity? Should any outside group dis- satisfied with the reconciliation procedures of say, South Africa be free to challenge them in their own national courts or those of third countries?

It is an important principle that those who commit war crimes or systematically violate hu- man rights should be held accountable. But the consolidation of law, domestic peace, and repre- sentative government in a nation struggling to come to terms with a brutal past has a claim as well. The instinct to punish must be related, as in every constitutional democratic political structure, to a system of checks and balances that includes other elements critical to the survival and expan- sion of democracy.

Another grave issue is the use in such cases of extradition procedures designed for ordinary crim- inals. If the Pinochet case becomes a precedent, magistrates anywhere will be in a position to put forward an extradition request without warning to the accused and regardless of the policies the ac- cused's country might already have in place for dealing with the charges. The country from which extradition is requested then faces a seemingly technical legal decision that, in fact, amounts to the exercise of political discretion—whether to en- tertain the claim or not.

Once extradition procedures are in train, they develop a momentum of their own, The accused is not allowed to challenge the substantive merit of the case and instead is confined to procedural is-

sues: that there was, say, some technical flaw in the extradition request, that the judicial system of the requesting country is incapable of providing a fair hearing, or that the crime for which the extradition is sought is not treated as a crime in the country from which extradition has been requested— thereby conceding much of the merit of the charge. Meanwhile, while these claims are being consid- ered by the judicial system of the country from which extradition is sought, the accused remains in some form of detention, possibly for years. Such procedures provide an opportunity for political harassment long before the accused is in a position to present any defense. It would be ironic if a doc- trine designed to transcend the political process turns into a means to pursue political enemies rather than universal justice.

The Pinochet precedent, if literally applied, would permit the two sides in the Arab-Israeli con- flict, or those in any other passionate international controversy, to project their battles into the vari- ous national courts by pursuing adversaries with extradition requests. When discretion on what crimes are subject to universal jurisdiction and whom to prosecute is left to national prosecutors, the scope for arbitrariness is wide indeed. So far, universal jurisdiction has involved the prosecution of one fashionably reviled man of the right while scores of East European communist leaders—not to speak of Caribbean, Middle Eastern, or African leaders who inflicted their own full measures of torture and suffering—have not had to face similar prosecutions.

Some will argue that a double standard does not excuse violations of international law and that it is better to bring one malefactor to justice than to grant immunity to all. This is not an argument per- mitted in the domestic jurisdictions of many democracies—in Canada, for example, a charge can be thrown out of court merely by showing that a prosecution has been selective enough to amount to an abuse of process. In any case, a universal stan- dard of justice should not be based on the proposi- tion that a just end warrants unjust means, or that political fashion trumps fair judicial procedures.

An Indiscriminate Court

The ideological supporters of universal jurisdiction also provide much of the intellectual compass for the emerging International Criminal Court. Their goal is to criminalize certain types of military and political actions and thereby bring about a more humane conduct of international relations. To the extent that the ICC replaces the claim of national judges to universal jurisdiction, it greatly improves the state of international law. And, in time, it may be possible to negotiate modifications of the pres- ent statute to make the ICC more compatible with U.S. constitutional practice. But in its present form of assigning the ultimate dilemmas of international politics to unelected jurists—and to an interna- tional judiciary at that—it represents such a funda- mental change in U.S. constitutional practice that a full national debate and the full participation of Congress are imperative. Such a momentous revti - lution should not come about by tacit acquies- cence in the decision of the House of Lords or by dealing with the ICC issue through a strategy of improving specific clauses rather than as a funda- mental issue of principle.

The doctrine of universal jurisdiction is based on the proposition that the individuals or cases subject to it have been clearly identified. In some instances, especially those based on Nuremberg precedents, the definition of who can be prosecuted in an international court and in what circumstances is self-evident. But many issues are much more vague and depend on an understanding of the his - torical and political context. It is this fuzziness that risks arbitrariness on the part of prosecutors and judges years after the event and that became appar- ent with respect to existing tribunals.

For example, can any leader of the United States or of another country be hauled before international tribunals established for other pur- poses? This is precisely what Amnesty Interna- tional implied when, in the summer of 1999, it supported a "complaint" by a group of European and Canadian law professors to Louise Arbour, then the prosecutor of the International Criminal

Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The complaint alleged that crimes against humanity had been committed during the N A T O air cam- paign in Kosovo. Arbour ordered an internal staff review, thereby implying that she did have jurisdic- tion if such violations could, in fact, be demon- strated. Her successor, Carla Del Ponte, in the end declined to indict any N A T O official because of a general inability "to pinpoint individual responsi- bilities," thereby implying anew that the court had jurisdiction over NATO and American leaders in the Balkans and would have issued an indictment had it been able to identify the particular leaders allegedly involved.

Most Americans would be amazed to learn that the ICTY, created at U.S. behest in 1993 to deal with Balkan war criminals, had asserted a right to investigate U.S. political and military leaders for al- legedly criminal conduct—and for the indefinite future, since no statute of limitations applies. Though the ICTY prosecutor chose not to pursue the charge—on the ambiguous ground of an in- ability to collect evidence—some national prosecu- tor may wish later to take up the matter as a valid subject for universal jurisdiction.

The pressures to achieve the widest scope for the doctrine of universal jurisdiction were demon- strated as well by a suit before the European Court of Human Rights in June 2000 by families of Ar- gentine sailors who died in the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgano during the Falk- lands War. The concept of universal jurisdiction has moved from judging alleged political crimes against humanity to second-guessing, 18 years af- ter the event, military operations in which neither civilians nor civilian targets were involved.

Distrusting national governments, many of the advocates of universal jurisdiction seek to place politicians under the supervision of magistrates and the judicial system. But prosecutorial discre- tion without accountability is precisely one of the flaws of the International Criminal Court. Defini- tions of the relevant crimes are vague and highly susceptible to politicized application. Defendants will not enjoy due process as understood in the United States. Any signatory state has the right to

trigger an investigation. As the U.S. experience with the special prosecutors investigating the exec- utive branch shows, such a procedure is likely to develop its own momentum without time limits and can turn into an instrument of political war- tare. And the extraordinary attempt of the ICC to assert jurisdiction over Americans even in the ab- sence of U.S. accession to the treaty has already triggered legislation in Congress to resist it.

The independent prosecutor of the ICC has the power to issue indictments, subject to review only by a panel of three judges. According to the Rome statute, the Security Council has the right to quash any indictment. But since revoking an indictment is subject to the veto of any permanent Security Council member, and since the prosecutor is unlikely to issue an indictment without the back- ing of at least one permanent member of the Secu- rity Council, he or she has virtually unlimited discretion in practice, Another provision permits the country whose citizen is accused to take over the investigation and trial. But the ICC retains the ultimate authority on whether that function has been adequately exercised and, if it finds it has not, the ICC can reassert jurisdiction. While these pro- cedures are taking place, which may take years, the accused will be under some restraint and certainly under grave public shadow.

The advocates of universal jurisdiction argue that the state is the basic cause of war and cannot be trusted to deliver justice. If law replaced politics, peace and justice would prevail. But even a cursory examination of history shows that there is no evi- dence to support such a theory. The role of the statesman is to choose the best option when seek- ing to advance peace and justice, realizing that there is frequently a tension between the two and that any reconciliation is likely to be partial. The choice, however, is not simply between universal and national jurisdictions.

Modest Proposals

The precedents set by international tribunals es- tablished to deal with situations where the enor-

miry of the crime is evident and the local judicial system is clearly incapable of administering justice, as in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, have shown that it is possible to punish without remov- ing from the process all political judgment and ex- perience, In time, it may be possible to renegotiate the ICC statute to avoid its shortcomings and dan- gers. Until then, the United States should go no further toward a more formal system than one containing the following three provisions. First, the U .N . Security Council would create a Human Rights Commission or a special subcommittee to report whenever systematic human rights viola- tions seem to warrant judicial action, Second, when the government under which the alleged crime occurred is not authentically representative, or where the domestic judicial system is incapable of sitting in judgment on the crime, the Security Council would set up an ad hoc international tri-

bunal on the model of those of the former Yu- goslavia or Rwanda. And third, the procedures for these international tribunals as well as the scope of the prosecution should be precisely defined by the Security Council, and the accused should be enti- tled to the due process safeguards accorded in common jurisdictions.

In this manner, internationally agreed proce- dures to deal with war crimes, genocide, or other crimes against humanity could become institu- tionalized. Furthermore, the one-sidedness of the current pursuit of universal jurisdiction would be avoided. This pursuit could threaten the very pur- pose for which the concept has been developed, In the end, an excessive reliance on universal juris- diction may undermine the political will to sustain the humane norms of international behavior so necessary to temper the violent times in which we live.

K E N N E T H R O T H

The Case for Universal Jurisdiction

ehind much of the savagery of modern his- tory lies impunity. Tyrants commit atrocities, including genocide, when they calculate they

can get away with them. Too often, dictators use violence and intimidation to shut down any prospect of domestic prosecution. Over the past decade, however, a slowly emerging system of in- ternational justice has begun to break this pattern of impunity in national courts.

The United Nations Security Council estab- lished international war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and Rwanda in 1994

From Foreign Affairs 80 no. 5 (September/October 2001): 150-154,

and is now negotiating the creation of mixed national-international tribunals for Cambodia and Sierra Leone. In 1998, the world's governments gathered in Rome to adopt a treaty for an Inter- national Criminal Court (ICC) with potentially global jurisdiction over genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

With growing frequency, national courts oper- ating under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction are prosecuting despots in their custody for atroci- ties committed abroad. Impunity may still be the norm in many domestic courts, but international justice is an increasingly viable option, promising a measure of solace to victims and their families and raising the possibility that would-be tyrants will

begin to think twice before embarking on a bar- barous path.

In "The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction" (July/August 2001), former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger catalogues a list of grievances against the juridical concept that people who com- mit the most severe human rights crimes can be tried wherever they are found. But his objections are misplaced, and the alternative he proposes is little better than a return to impunity.

Kissinger begins by suggesting that universal jurisdiction is a new idea, at least as applied to heads of state and senior public officials. However, the exercise by U.S. courts of jurisdiction over cer- tain heinous crimes committed overseas is an ac- cepted part of American jurisprudence, reflected in treaties on terrorism and aircraft hijacking dating from 1970, Universal jurisdiction was also the con- cept that allowed Israel to try Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.

Kissinger says that the drafters of the Helsinki Accords—the basic human rights principles adopted by the Conference on Security and Coop- eration in Europe in 1975-- and the U.N.'s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights never in- tended to authorize universal jurisdiction. But this argument is irrelevant, because these hortatory declarations are not legally binding treaties of the sort that could grant such powers.

As for the many formal treaties on human rights, Kissinger believes it "unlikely" that their signatories "thought it possible that national judges would use them as a basis for extradition re- quests regarding alleged crimes committed outside their jurisdictions." To the contrary, the Torture Convention of 1984, ratified by 124 governments including the United States, requires states either to prosecute any suspected torturer found on their territory, regardless of where the torture took place, or to extradite the suspect to a country that will do so. Similarly, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 on the conduct of war, ratified by 189 coun- tries including the United States, require each par- ticipating state to "search for" persons who have committed grave breaches of the conventions and to "bring such persons, regardless of nationality,

before its own courts." What is new is not the con- cept of extraterritorial jurisdiction but the will- ingness of some governments to fulfill this duty against those in high places.

Order and the Cour t

Kissinger's critique of universal jurisdiction has two principal targets: the soon-to-be-formed In- ternational Criminal Court and the exercise of universal jurisdiction by national courts. (Strictly speaking, the ICC will use not universal jurisdic- tion but, rather, a delegation of states' traditional power to try crimes committed on their own terri- tory.) Kissinger claims that the crimes detailed in the ICC treaty are "vague and highly susceptible to politicized application." But the treaty's definition of war crimes closely resembles that found in the Pentagon's own military manuals and is derived from the widely ratified Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols adopted in 1977. Simi- larly, the ICC treaty's definition of genocide is bor- rowed directly from the Genocide Convention of 1948, which the United States and 131 other gov- ernments have ratified and pledged to uphold, in- cluding by prose-cuting offenders. The definition of crimes against humanity is derived from the Nuremberg Charter, which, as Kissinger acknowl- edges, proscribes conduct that is "self-evident[ly]" wrong.

Kissinger further asserts that the ICC prosecu- tor will have "discretion without accountability," going so far as to raise the specter of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and to decry "the tyranny of judges." In fact, the prosecutor can be removed for misconduct by a simple majority of the govern- ments that ratify the ICC treaty, and a two-thirds vote can remove a judge. Because joining the court means giving it jurisdiction over crimes committed on the signatory's territory, the vast majority of member states will be democracies, not the abusive governments that self-protectively flock to U . N , human rights bodies, where membership bears no cost.

Kissinger criticizes the "extraordinary attempt

of the ICC to assert jurisdiction over Americans even in the absence of U.S. accession to the treaty." But the United States itself asserts such jurisdiction over others' citizens when it prosecutes terrorists or drug traffickers, such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, without the consent of the sus- pect's government. Moreover, the ICC will assert such power only if an American commits a speci- fied atrocity on the territory of a government that has joined the ICC and has thus delegated its pros- ecutorial authority to the court.

Kissinger claims that ICC defendants "will not enjoy due process as understood in the United States"—an apparent allusion to the lack of a jury trial in a court that will blend civil and common law traditions. But U.S. courts martial also do not provide trials by jury. Moreover, U.S. civilian courts routinely approve the constitutionality of extradition to countries that lack jury trials, so long as their courts otherwise observe basic due process. The ICC clearly will provide such due process, since its treaty requires adherence to the full com- plement of international fair-trial standards.

Of course, any court's regard for due process is oidy as good as the quality and temperament of its judges. The ICC's judges will be chosen by the gov- ernments that join the court, most of which, as noted, will be democracies. Even without ratifying the ICC treaty, the U.S. government could help shape a culture of respect for due process by qui- edy working with the court, as it has done success- fully with the international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Regret- tably, ICC opponents in Washington are pushing legislation—the misnamed American Servicemem- bers Protection Act—that would preclude such co- operation,

The experience of the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals, of which Kissinger speaks favorably, sug- gests that international jurists, when forced to de- cide the fate of a particular criminal suspect, do so with scrupulous regard for fair trial standards. Kissinger's only stated objection to these tribunals concerns the decision of the prosecutor of the tri- bunal for the former Yugoslavia to pursue a brief inquiry into how N A T O conducted its air war

against the new Yugoslavia—an inquiry that led her to exonerate NATO.

It should be noted, in addition, that the juris- diction of the Yugoslav tribunal was set not by the prosecutor but by the U .N. Security Council, with U.S. consent. The council chose to grant jurisdic- tion without prospective time limit, over serious human rights crimes within the territory of the former Yugoslavia committed by anyone—not just Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. In light of that mandate, the prosecutor would have been derelict in her duties not to consider NATO's con- duct; according to an extensive field investigation by Human Rights Watch, roughly half of the ap- proximately 500 civilian deaths caused by NATO's bombs could be attributed to NATO's failure, al- beit not criminal, to abide by international hu- manitarian law.

Kissinger claims that the ICC would violate the U.S. Constitution if it asserted jurisdiction over an American. But the court is unlikely to prosecute an American because the Rome treaty deprives the ICC of jurisdiction if, after the court gives required notice of its intention to examine a suspect, the suspect's government conducts its own good-faith investigation and, if appropriate, prosecution. It is the stated policy of the U.S. government to investi- gate and prosecute its own war criminals.

Moreover, the ICC's assertion of jurisdiction over an American for a crime committed abroad poses no greater constitutional problem than the routine practice under status-of-forces agreements of allowing foreign prosecution of American mili- tary personnel for crimes committed overseas, such as Japan's arrest in July of a U.S. A i r Force sergeant for an alleged rape on Okinawa. An un- constitutional delegation of U.S. judicial power would arguably take place only if the United States ratified the ICC treaty, then an American commit- ted genocide, war crimes, or crimes against hu - manity on U.S. soil; and then U.S. authorities did not prosecute the offender. Yet that remote possi - bility would signal a constitutional crisis far graver than one spawned by an ICC prosecution.

No Place To Hide

National courts come under Kissinger's fire for se- lectively applying universal jurisdiction. He char- acterizes the extradition request by a Spanish judge seeking to try former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet for crimes against Spanish citizens on Chilean soil as singling out a "fashionably reviled man of the right." But Pinochet was sought not, as Kissinger writes, "because he led a coup d'etat against an elected leader" who was a favorite of the left. Rather, Pinochet was targeted because security forces under his command murdered and forcibly "disappeared" some 3,000 people and tortured thousands more.

Furthermore, in recent years national courts have exercised universal jurisdiction against a wide range of suspects: Bosnian war criminals, Rwandan genocidaires, Argentine torturers, and Chad's for- mer dictator. It has come to the point where the main limit on national courts empowered to exer- cise universal jurisdiction is the availability of the defendant, not questions of ideology.

Kissinger also cites the Pinochet case to argue that international justice interferes with the choice by democratic governments to forgive rather than prosecute past offenders. In fact, Pinochet's impo- sition of a self-amnesty at the height of his dicta- torship limited Chile's democratic options. Only after 16 months of detention in the United King- dom diminished his power was Chilean democracy able to begin prosecution. Such imposed impunity is far more common than democratically chosen impunity.

Kissinger would have had a better case had prosecutors sought, for example, to overturn the compromise negotiated by South Africa's Nelson Mandela, widely recognized at the time as the legit- imate representative of the victims of apartheid. Mandela agreed to grant abusers immunity from prosecution if they gave detailed testimony about

their crimes. In an appropriate exercise of prosecu- torial discretion, no prosecutor has challenged this arrangement, and no government would likely countenance such a challenge.

Kissinger legitimately worries that the nations exercising universal jurisdiction could include gov- ernments with less-entrenched traditions of due process than the United Kingdom's. But his fear of governments robotically extraditing suspects for sham or counterproductive trials is overblown. Governments regularly deny extradition to courts that are unable to ensure high standards of due process. And foreign ministries, including the U.S. State Department, routinely deny extradition re- quests for reasons of public policy.

If an American faced prosecution by an un- trustworthy foreign court, the United States un- doubtedly would apply pressure for his or her release. If that failed, however, it might prove use- ful to offer the prosecuting government the face- saving alternative of transferring the suspect to the ICC, with its extensive procedural protections, in- cluding deference to good-faith investigations and prosecutions by a suspect's own government. Un- fortunately, the legislation being pushed by ICC opponents in Washington would preclude that option.

Until the ICC treaty is renegotiated to avoid what Kissinger sees as its "short-comings and dan- gers," he recommends that the U.N. Security Council determine which cases warrant an interna- tional tribunal. That option was rejected during the Rome negotiations on the ICC because it would allow the council's five permanent mem- bers, including Russia and China as well as the United States, to exempt their nationals and those of their allies by exercising their vetoes.

As a nation committed to human rights and the rule of law, the United States should be em- bracing an international system of justice, even if it means that Americans, like everyone else, might sometimes be scrutinized.

G . J O H N I K E N BERRY

Is American Multilateralism in Decline?

American foreign policy appears to have taken a sharp unilateral turn. A half century of U.S. leadership in constructing an inter- national order around multilateral institutions, rule-based agreements, and alliance partnerships seems to be giving way to a new assertive—even defiant—unilateralism. Over the last several years, the Bush administration has signaled a deep skep- ticism of multilateralism in a remarkable sequence of rejections of pending international agreements and treaties, including the Kyoto Protocol on Cli - mate Change, the Rome Statute of the Interna- tional Criminal Court (ICC), the Germ Weapons Convention, and the Programme of Action on Il- licit Trade in Small and Light Arms. It also unilat- erally withdrew from the 1970s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which many experts regard as the cornerstone of modern arms-control agreements. More recendy, spurred by its war on terrorism, the Bush administration has advanced new, provoca- tive ideas about the American unilateral and preemptive use of force—and under this go-it- alone-if-necessary banner, it defied allies and world public opinion by launching a preventive war against Iraq. "When it comes to our security," President Bush proclaimed, "we really don't need anybody's permission."1

Unilateralism, of course, is not a new feature of American foreign policy. In every historical era, the United States has shown a willingness to reject treaties, violate rules, ignore allies, and use military force on its own. 2 But many observers see today's U.S. unilateralism as something much more sweep-

From: Perspectives on Politics 1 no. 3 (Sept. 2003): 533-550. Some of the author's notes have been edited.

ing—not an occasional ad hoc policy decision, but a new strategic orientation. Capturing this view, one pundit calls it the "new unilateralism":

After eight years during which foreign policy success was largely measured by the number of treaties the president could sign and the number of summits he could attend, we now have an administration willing to assert American freedom of action and the pri- macy of American national interests. Rather than contain power within a vast web of constraining in- ternational agreements, the new unilateralism seeks to strengthen American power and unashamedly de- ploy it on behalf of self-defined global ends.3

Indeed, Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambas- sador to the United Nations, has charged that the Bush administration threatens to make "a radical break with 55 years of a bipartisan tradition that sought international agreements and regimes of benefit to us."4

America's "new unilateralism" has unsettled world politics. The stakes are high because in the decade since the end of the Cold War, the United States has emerged as an unrivaled and unprece- dented global superpower. At no other time in modern history has a single state loomed so large over the rest of the world. But as American power has grown, the rest of the world is confronted with a disturbing double bind. On the one hand, the United States is becoming more crucial to other countries in the realization of their economic and security goals; it is increasingly in a position to help or hurt other countries. But on the other hand, the growth of American power makes the United States less dependent on weaker states, and so it is easier for the United States to resist or ig- nore these states.

Does this Bush-style unilateralism truly repre- sent a major turn away from the long postwar tradition of multilateralism in American foreign policy? It depends on whether today's American unilateralism is a product of deep structural shifts in the country's global position or if it reflects more contingent and passing circumstances. Does American unipolarity "select" for unilateralism? Do powerful states—when they get the chance— inevitably seek to disentangle themselves from in- ternational rules and institutions? Or are more complex considerations at work? The answers to these questions are relevant to determining whether the rise of American preeminence in the years since the end of the Cold War is ultimately consistent with or destined to undermine the post- 1945 multilateral international order.

This article makes three arguments: First, the new unilateralism is not an inevitable

reaction to rising American power. The interna- tional system may give the United States more op- portunities to act unilaterally, but the incentives to do so are actually complex and mixed. And ar- guably, these incentives make a multilateral ap- proach more—not less-—desirable for Washington in many areas of foreign policy.

Second, despite key officials' deep and ideolog- ically driven skepticism about multilateralism, the Bush administration's opposition to multilateral- ism represents in practical terms an attack on spe- cific types of multilateral agreements more than it does a fundamental assault on the "foundational" multilateralism of the postwar system. One area is arms control, nonproliferation, and the use of force, where many in the administration do resist the traditional multilateral, treaty-based approach. Likewise, some of the other new multilateral treaties that are being negotiated today represent slightly different trade-offs for the United States. In the past, the United States has embraced multilat- eralism because it provided ways to protect Ameri- can freedom of action: escape clauses, weighted voting, and veto rights. The "new unilateralism" is in part a product of the "new multilateralism," which offers fewer opportunities for the United

States to exercise political control over others and fewer ways to escape the binding obligations of the agreements.

Weaker states have responded to the rise of American unipolarity by seeking to embed the United States further in binding institutional rela- tionships (in effect, to "tie Gulliver down"), while American officials attempt to get the benefits of a multilateral order without accepting greater en- croachments on its policy autonomy. We are witnessing not an end to multilateralism but a struggle over its scope and character. A "politics of institutions" is being played out between the United States and the rest of the world within the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organi- zation (NATO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and other postwar multilateral fora.

Third, the circumstances that led the United States to engage in multilateral cooperation in the past are still present and, in some ways, have actu- ally increased. In particular, there are three major sources of multilateralism: functional demands for cooperation (e.g., institutional contracts between states that reduce barriers to mutually beneficial exchange); hegemonic power management, both to institutionalize power advantages and, by re- ducing the arbitrary and indiscriminate exercise of power, to make the hegemonic order more stable and legitimate; and the American legal- institutional political tradition of seeing this do- mestic rule-of-law orientation manifest in the country's approach to international order.

I begin by looking at the logic and dimensions of multilateralism. Next, I present and critique the structural, power-based explanation for the new unilateralism. I then look at three theoretical tradi- tions that offer explanations for continued multilat- eralism. To be sure, unipolarity createsopportunities for unilateralist foreign-policy officials to push their agenda, particularly in the areas of arms control and the dse of force, where multilateral rules and norms have been weak even under the most favorable cir- cumstances. The incentives and pressures for multi- lateralism are altered but not extinguished with the rise of American unipolarity.

What Is Multilateralism?

Multilateralism involves the coordination of rela- tions among three or more states according to a set of rules or principles. It can be distinguished from other types of interstate relations in three ways. First, because it entails the coordination of rela- tions among a group of states, it can be contrasted with bilateral, "hub and spoke," and imperial arrangements. Second, the terms of a given rela- tionship are defined by agreed-upon rules and principles—and sometimes by organizations—so multilateralism can be contrasted with interactions based on ad hoc bargaining or straightforward power politics. Third, multilateralism entails some reduction in policy autonomy, since the choices and actions of the participating states are—at least to some degree—constrained by the agreed-upon rules and principles.5

Multilateralism can operate at three levels of international order: system multilateralism, order- ing or foundational multilateralism, and con- tract multilateralism. At the most basic level, it is manifest in the Westphalian state system, where norms of sovereignty, formal equality, and legal- diplomatic practice prevail.6 This is multilateralism as it relates to the deep organization of the units and their mutual recognition and interaction; this notion is implicit in both realist and neoliberal theories of international order. At a more inter- mediate level, multilateralism can refer to the political-economic organization of regional or in- ternational order. John Ruggie notes that "an 'open' and 'liberal' international economic order is multilateral in form." 7 The overall organization of relations among the advanced industrial countries has this basic multilateral characteristic. As Robert Keohane observes, "Since the end of World War II, multilateralism has become increasingly important in world politics, as manifest in the proliferation of multinational conferences on a bewildering va- riety of themes and an increase in the number of multilateral intergovernmental organizations from fewer than 100 in 1945 to about 200 in 1960 and over 600 in 1980."8 At the surface level, multi-

lateralism also refers to specific intergovernmental treaties and agreements. These can be thought of as distinct "contracts" among states.

Figure 1: Types of Multilateral Relations

system sovereign state system: constitution of legal actors; principles of mutual recognition, formal equality, diplomatic practice

ordering basic organizing principles and features of the international order indivisibility of economic and security areas

contract individual agreements/ treaties among groups of states

Multilateralism can also be understood in terms of the binding character of the rules and principles that guide interstate relations. In its loosest form, multilateralism can simply entail general consultations and informal adjustments among states.9 This form of multilateralism can be traced back to the diplomatic practices of the Con- cert of Europe, where the great powers observed a set of unwritten rules and norms about the balance of power on the continent. For instance, no major power would act alone in matters of diplomacy and territorial adjustments, and no great power could be isolated or humiliated,10 This loose, non- binding type of multilateralism can be found today in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which was established in the early 1990s to pro- mote regional economic cooperation. The W T O and other multilateral economic institutions entail more formal, treaty-based agreements that specify certain commitments and obligations. But the binding character of these multilateral agreements is still qualified: escape clauses, weighted voting, opt-out agreements, and veto rights are all part of the major post-1945 multilateral agreements. The most binding multilateral agreements are ones where states actually cede sovereignty in specific- areas to supranational authorities. The European Union is the most important manifestation of this

sovereignty-transferring, legally binding multilat- eralism."

Multilateralism (as well as unilateralism) can also be understood in terms of its sources. It can emerge from the international system's structural features, including the distribution of power (i.e., the rise or decline of American dominance), the growth of complex interdependence, and the emergence of non-state violent collective action. Incentives for multilateralism can also come from the independent influence of preexisting multilat- eral institutions. For example, the postwar multi-

Figure 2: Sources of Multilateralism

system complex interdependence, unipolarity, the rise of nonstate violent collective action

institutional autonomous influence of preexisting multilateral institutions

domestic American identity, limiting domestic fiscal and manpower costs, election cycles

agentic ideologies of foreign policy elites, nongovernmental organizations, how specific treaties get structured

lateral order might in various ways put pressure on the United States to maintain or even expand its commitments. Incentives for multilateralism may also come from inside a state, manifest in national political identity and tradition or more specific fac- tors such as fiscal and manpower costs and election cycles. Finally, multilateralism can be traced to agentic sources, such as the ideologies of govern- ment elites, the ideas pressed upon government by nongovernmental organizations, and the ma- neuvering of elites over treaty conditions and ratification.

When deciding whether to sign a multilateral agreement, a state faces a trade-off. In choosing to abide by the rules and norms of the agreement, the state must accept a reduction in its policy auton- omy. That is, it must agree to some constraints on its freedom of action—or independence of policy

making—in a particular area. But in exchange, it expects other states to do the same. The multilat- eral bargain will be attractive to a state if it con- cludes that the benefits that flow to it through the coordination of policies are greater than the costs of lost policy autonomy. In an ideal world, a state might want to operate in an international environ- ment in which all other states are heavily rule- bound while leaving itself entirely unencumbered by rules and institutional restraints.12 But because all states are inclined in this way, the question be- comes one of how much autonomy each must re- linquish in order to get rule-based behavior out of the others.

When multilateral bargains are made by states with highly unequal power, the considerations can be more complex. The more that a powerful state is capable of dominating or abandoning weaker states, the more the weaker states will care about constraints on the leading state's policy autonomy. In other words, they will be more eager to see some limits placed on the arbitrary and indiscriminate exercise of power by the leading state. Similarly, the more that the powerful state can restrain itself in a credible fashion, the more that weaker states will be interested in multilateral rules and norms that ac- complish this end. When both these conditions hold—when the leading state can use its power to dominate and abandon, and when it can restrain and commit itself—the weaker states will be partic- ularly eager for a deal. They will, of course, also care about the positive benefits that accrue from coop- eration. Of course, the less important the policy be- havior of weaker states—and the less certain the leading state is that weaker states can in tact con- strain their policies—the less the leading state will offer to limit its own policy autonomy.

Varieties of Mult i lateral ism

In this light, it is easy to see why the United States sought to build a post-1945 order around multilat- eral economic and security agreements such as the

Bretton Woods agreements on monetary and trade relations and the N A T O security pact. The United States ended World War II in an unprecedented power position, so the weaker European states at- tached a premium to taming and harnessing this newly powerful state. Britain, France, and other major states were willing to accept multilateral agreements to the extent that they also constrained and regularized U.S. economic and security ac- tions. American agreement to operate within a multilateral economic order and make an alliance- based security commitment to Europe was worth the price: it ensured that Germany and the rest of Western Europe would be integrated into a wider, American-centered international order. At the same time, the actual restraints on U.S. policy were minimal. Convertible currencies and open trade were in the United States' basic national economic interest. The United States did make a binding se- curity guarantee to Western Europe, and this made American power more acceptable to Europeans, who were then more eager to cooperate with the United States in other areas.13 But the United States did not forswear the right to unilaterally use force elsewhere. * * *

The United States was less determined or suc- cessful in establishing a multilateral order in East Asia. Proposals were made for an East Asian ver- sion of N A T O , but security relations quickly took the shape of bilateral military pacts. Conditions did not favor Atlantic-style multilateralism, Eu- rope had a set of roughly equal-sized states that could be brought together in a multilateral pact tied to the United States, while Japan largely stood alone. But another factor mattered as well; the United States was dominant in East Asia yet wanted less out of the region, so the United States found it less necessary to give up policy autonomy in exchange for institutional cooperation there. * * *

Despite these regional variations, the interna- tional order that took shape after 1945 was decid- edly multilateral. A core objective of American postwar strategists was to ensure that the world did not break apart into 1930s-style closed regions.14

An open system of trade and investment—en- shrined in the General Agreement on Tariffs and

Trade (GATT) and the Bretton Woods agree- ment—provided one multilateral foundation to the postwar order. The alliance ties between the United States and Europe provided another. NATO was not just a narrow security pact but was seen by its founders as an extension of the collec- tive self-defense provision of the UN Charter. * * *

This is multilateralism as Ruggie has described it—as an organizational form. 1 5 The parts of this Western order are connected by economic and se- curity relationships that are informed by basic rules, norms, and institutions. The rules and insti- tutions are understood by participating states to matter, reflecting loosely agreed-upon rights, obligations, and expectations about how "busi- ness" will be done within the order. * * *

On top of this foundational multilateral order, a growing number and variety of multilateral agreements have been offered up and signed by states. At a global level, between 1970 and 1997, the number of international treaties more than tripled; and from 1985 through 1999 alone, the number of international institutions increased by two-thirds.16 What this means is that an expanding number of multilateral "contracts" is being pro- posed and agreed to by states around the world. The United States has become party to more and more of these contracts, This is reflected in the fact that the number of multilateral treaties in force for the United States steadily grew during the twenti- eth century. There were roughly 150 multilateral treaties in force in 1950, 400 in 1980, and close to 600 in 2000. In the most recent five-year period, 1996 through 2000, the United States ratified roughly the same number of treaties as in earlier postwar periods.17 Other data, * * *, indicate an in - crease in bilateral treaties passed by the Congress and a slight decrease in the number of multilateral treaties from 1945 through 2000.18 Measured in these rough aggregate terms, the United States has not significantly backed away from what is a more and more dense web of international treaties and agreements.19

Two conclusions follow from these observa- tions. First, in the most general of terms, there has not been a dramatic decline in the propensity of

the United States to enter into multilateral treaties. In fact, the United States continues to take on mul- tilateral commitments at a steady rate. But the sheer volume of "contracts" that are being offered around the world for agreement has steadily ex- panded—and while the American "yield" on pro- posed multilateral treaties may not be substantially lower than in earlier decades, the absolute number of rejected contracts is necessarily larger. The United States has more opportunities to look uni- lateral today than in the past, even though it is not more likely when confronted with a specific "contract" to be any less multilateral than in ear- lier years. Second, even if the United States does act unilaterally in opposing specific multilateral treaties that come along, it is important to distin- guish these rejected "contracts" from the older foundational agreements that give the basic order its multilateral form. There is no evidence of "rollback" at this deeper level of order. But it is necessary to look more closely at the specific expla- nations for American multilateralism and the re- cent unilateral turn.

Unipolar Power and Multilateralism

The simplest explanation for the new unilateralism is that the United States has grown in power during die 1990s, thereby reducing its incentives to operate within a multilateral order, As one pundit has put it: "Any nation with so much power always will be tempted to go it alone. Power breeds unilateralism. It is as simple as that."20 This is a structural-realist explanation that says, in effect, that because of the shifting distribution of power in favor of the United States, the international system is increasingly "se- lecting" for unilateralism in its foreign policy.21 The United States has become so powerful that it does not need to sacrifice its autonomy or freedom of action within multilateral agreements. Unipolar power gives the United States the ability to act alone and do so without serious costs.

Today's international order, then, is at the early stage of a significant transformation triggered

by what will be a continuous and determined effort by a unipolar America to disentangle itself from the multilateral restraints of an earlier era. It mat- ters little who is president and what political party runs the government. The United States will exer- cise its power more directly—less mediated or constrained by international rules, institutions, or alliances. The result will be an international order that is more hegemonic than multilateral, more power-based than rule-based. The rest of the world will complain, but will not be able or willing to im- pose sufficient costs on the United States to alter its growing unilateral orientation.

This explanation for the decline of American multilateralism rests on several considerations. First, the United States has turned into a unipolar global power without historical precedent. The 1990s surprised the world. Many observers ex- pected the end of the Cold War to usher in a mul- tipolar order with increasingly equal centers of power in Asia, Europe, and America. Instead, the United States began the decade as the world's only superpower and proceeded to grow more powerful at the expense of the other major states. * * *

Second, these massive power advantages give the United States opportunities to resist entangle- ments in multilateral rules and institutions. Multi- lateralism can be a tool or expedient in some circumstances, but states will avoid or shed entan- glements in rules and institutions when they can." * * *

Put another way, power disparities make it eas- ier for the United States to walk away from poten- tial international agreements. Across the spectrum of economic, security, environmental, and other policy issues, the sheer size and power advantages of the United States make it easier to resist multi- lateral restraints. That is, the costs of nonagree- ment are lower for the United States than for other states—which gives it bargaining advantages but also a greater ability to forgo agreement without suffering consequences.23

* * *

Third, the shifting power differentials have also created new divergent interests between the United

States and the rest of the world, a fact that further reduces possibilities for multilateral cooperation. For example, the sheer size of the American econ- omy—and a decade of growth unmatched by Europe, Japan, or the other advanced countries— means that U.S. obligations under the Kyoto Pro- tocol would be vasdy greater than those of other states.24 The United States has global interests and security threats that no other state has. Its troops are the ones most likely to be dispatched to distant battlefields, which means that it is more exposed than other states to the legal liabilities of the ICC. The United States must worry about threats to its interests in all major regions of the world. Such unipolar power is a unique target for terrorism. It is not surprising that Europeans and Asians make different assessments of terrorist threats and rogue states seeking weapons of mass destruction than American officials do. Since multilateralism entails working within agreed-upon rules and institutions about the use of force, this growing divergence will make multilateral agreements less easy to achieve—and less desirable in the view of the United States.

This structural-power perspective on multilat- eralism generates useful insights. One such insight is that the United States—as well as other states— has walked away from international rules and agreements when they did not appear to advance American interests. This helps to explain a lot about American foreign policy over many dec- ades. * * *

But the more general claim about unipolarity and the decline of multilateralism is misleading. To begin with, at earlier moments of power preemi- nence, the United States did not shy away from multilateralism, As Fareed Zakaria notes:

America was the most powerful country in the world when it proposed the creation of an interna- tional organization, the League of Nations, to man- age international relations after the First World War. It was the dominant power at the end of the Second World War, when it founded the United Na- tions, created the Bretton Woods system of interna- tional economic cooperation, and launched most of the world's key international organizations.25

During the 1990s, the United States again used its unrivaled position after the end of the Cold War to advance new multilateral agreements, includ- ing the WTO, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), and APEC. There is no neces- sary or simple connection between a state's power position and its inclinations toward multilateral- ism, a tool that weak and strong alike can use.26

What is most distinctive about American pol- icy is its mixed record on multilateralism. The United States is not rolling back its commitments to foundational multilateralism, but it is picking and choosing among the variety of multilateral agreements being negotiated today. Power consid- erations—and American unipolar power—surely are part of the explanation for both the calcula- tions that go into American decisions and the ac- tions of other states. The United States has actively championed the WTO but is resisting a range of arms control treaties. One has to look beyond gross power distributions and identify more spe- cific costs and incentives that inform state policy.

The chief problem with the structural-power explanation for America's new unilateralism is that it hinges on an incomplete accounting of the po- tential costs of unilateralism. The assumption is that the United States has become so powerful that other countries are unable to impose costs if it acts alone. On economic, environmental, and security issues, the rhetorical question that the United States can always ask when confronted with oppo- sition to American unilateralism is this: they may not like it, but what are they going to do about it? * * *

Unipolarity and Unilateralist Ideologies

One source of the new unilateralism does follow— at least indirectly—from unipolar power. The United States is so powerful that the ideologies and policy views of a few key decision makers in Wash- ington can have a huge impact on the global order, even if these views are not necessarily representa- tive of the wider foreign policy community or of public opinion, * * *

Indeed, the Bush administration does have a large group of officials who have articulated deep intellectual reservations about international treaties and multilateral organizations.2 7 Many of Amer- ica's recent departures from multilateralism are agreements dealing with arms control and prolifer- ation. In this area, American policy elites are deeply divided on how to advance the nation's security—a division that dates back to right-wing opposition to American arms control diplomacy with the Soviet Union during the Nixon-Kissinger era.2" * * *

The circumstances of the post-Cold War era also complicate arms control and nonproliferation agreements. The arms control of the Soviet era had a more immediate and reciprocal character: The United States agreed to restraints on its nuclear ar- senal; but in return, it got relatively tangible con- cessions from the Soviets, and the agreements themselves were widely seen to have a stabilizing impact on the global order—something both sides desired.2 ,1 The arms-control agenda today is more diverse and problematic. New types of agreements are being debated in a more uncertain and shift- ing international security environment. With the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Land Mines Treaty, for example, the United States ac- cepts restraints on its military capabilities without the same degree of confidence that they will gener- ate desired reciprocal action.30 The realms of arms control—along with the calculations of costs and benefits, at least among some American elites— have changed. This helps explain why American unilateralism today is so heavily manifest in this policy area.31

Some observers contend that the Bush ad- ministration has embraced a more ambitious unilateralist agenda aimed at rolling back and disentangling the United States from post-1945 foundational multilateral rules and institutions. Grand strategic ideas of this sort are circulating in- side and outside the administration. One version of this thinking is simply old-style nationalism that sees international institutions and agreements as a basic threat to American sovereignty.32 Another version—increasingly influential in Washington— is advanced by the so-called neoconservative

movement, which seeks to use American power to single-handedly reshape entire countries, particu- larly in the Middle East, so as to make them more congenial with American interests.33 This is a neo- imperial vision of American order that requires the United States to unshackle itself from the norms and institutions of multilateral action (and from partners that reject the neo-imperial project).

It is possible that this neo-imperial agenda could undermine the wider and deeper multilateral order. Given sufficient time and opportunity, a small group of determined foreign policy officials could succeed in subverting multilateral agree- ments and alliance partnerships—even if such steps were opposed by the wider foreign policy community and the American public. This could be done intentionally or it could happen indirectly if, by violating core multilateral rules and norms, the credibility of American commitment to the wider array of agreements and norms becomes suspect and the entire multilateral edifice crum- bles. The possibility of unilateral action against self-interest does exist. Great powers have often in the past launched themselves in aggressive direc- tions (often unilateral) that appear in retrospect to have not been in their interest. * * *

It is extremely doubtful, however, that a neo- imperial foreign policy can be sustained at home or abroad. There is no evidence that the American people are eager for or willing to support such a transformed global role. It is not clear that the country will even be willing to bear the costs of re- building Iraq, let alone undertake a global neo- imperial campaign to overturn and rebuild other countries in the region. * * *

Multilateral Rule Breaking and Rule Making

Even if the United States takes advantage of its unipolar power to act unilaterally in various policy areas, the action can lead to multilateralism—no matter what the United States intended. Britain used its position as the leading naval power of the nineteenth century to suppress piracy on the high seas, which eventually led to agreements and con-

certed action among the major states to protect ocean shipping. 3 4 * * *

Unilateralism leading to new multilateral rules is a dynamic that is particularly likely to emerge when new issues and circumstances alter the inter- est calculations of leading states. In the 1990s, the United States and other states showed a willingness to go beyond long-standing UN norms about sov- ereignty in the use of force in humanitarian crises, th is experience appears to be leading to new mul- tilateral understandings about when the UN Char- ter sanctions international action in defense of human rights.3 5 Further, the United States has re- cently advanced new ideas about the preemptive— and even preventative—use of force to combat terrorism. This unilateral assertion of American rights has triggered a world debate on UN princi- ples regarding the use of force, and the result could well be a new agreement that adapts existing rules and norms to cope with the new circumstances of global terrorism.36 So it is useful to look more closely at the factors that give rise to multilateralism.

Sources of Multilateralism

The United States is not structurally destined to disentangle itself from the multilateral order and go it alone. Indeed, there continue to be deep un- derlying incentives for the United States to support multilateralism—incentives that in many Ways are increasing. The sources of U.S. multilateralism stem from the functional demands of interde- pendence, the long-term calculations of power management, and American political tradition and identity.

Interdependence and Functional Multilateralism

American support for multilateralism is likely to be sustained, even in the face of resistance and ideo- logical challenges to multilateralism within the Bush administration, in part because of a simple logic: as global economic interdependence grows, so does the need for multilateral coordination of

policies. The more economically interconnected states become, the more dependent they are on the actions of other states for the realization of objec- tives. * * ** * One theoretical tradition, neoliberal institu- tionalism, provides an explanation for the rise of multilateral institutions under these circum- stances. Institutions perform a variety of functions, such as reducing uncertainty and the costs of transactions between states.37 Mutually beneficial exchanges are missed in the absence of multilateral rules and procedures, which help states overcome collective action, asymmetrical information, and the fear that other states will cheat or act oppor- tunistically. In effect, multilateral rules and institu- tions provide a contractual environment within j which states can more easily pursue joint gains. j Likewise, as the density of interactions between j states increases, so will the demand for rules and I institutions that facilitate these interactions. In this j sense, multilateralism is self-reinforcing. * * *

This argument helps explain why a powerful state might support multilateral agreements, par ticularly in trade and other economic policy areas. To return to the cost-benefit logic of multilateral ism discussed earlier, the leading state has a major interest in inducing smaller states to open their economies and participate in an integrated world economy. As the world's leading economy, it has an interest in establishing not just an open system but also a predictable one—that is to say, it will want rules, principles, and institutions that create a highly stable and accessible order. As the density and sophistication of these interactions grow, the leading state will have greater incentives for a sta ble, rule-based economic order. * * *

The American postwar commitment to a mul - tilateral system of economic rules and institutions can be understood in this way. As the world's dominant state, the United States championed GATT and the Bretton Woods institutions as ways of locking other countries into an open world economy that would ensure massive economic gains for itself. But to get these states to organize their post-war domestic orders around an open world economy—and accept the political risks

and vulnerabilities associated with openness—the United States had to signal that it too would play by the rules and not exploit or abandon these weaker countries. The postwar multilateral institu- tions facilitated this necessary step. As the world economy and trading system have expanded over the decades, this logic has continued. It is reflected in the WTO, which replaced the GATT in 1995 and embodies an expansive array of legal- institutional rules and mechanisms.38 The United States demands an expanding and ever-more com- plex international economic environment, but to get the support of other states, the United States must itself become more embedded in this system of rules and institutions.

Hegemonic Power and Strategic Restraint

American support for multilateralism also stems from a grand strategic interest in preserving power and creating a stable and legitimate international order. This logic is particularly evident at major historical turning points—such as 1919, 1945, and after the Cold War—when the United States has faced choices about how to use power and organize interstate relations. The support for multilateral- ism is a way to signal restraint and commitment to other states, thereby encouraging the acquiescence and cooperation of weaker states.39 The United States has pursued this strategy to varying degrees across the twentieth century—and this reflects the remarkably durable and legitimate character of the existing international order. From this perspective, multilateralism—and the search for rule-based agreements—should increase rather than decrease with the rise of American unipolarity. Moreover, the existing multilateral order, which itself reflects an older multilateral bargain between the United States and the outside world, should rein in the Bush administration, and the administration should respond to general power management in- centives and limit its tilt toward unilateralism.40

This theoretical perspective begins by looking at

the choices that dominant states face when they are in a position to shape the fundamental character of the international order. A state that wins a war, or through some other turn of events finds itself in a dominant global position, faces a choice: it can use its power to bargain and coerce other states in struggles over the distribution of gains, or, knowing drat its power position will someday decline and that there are costs to enforcing its way within the order, it can move toward a more rule-based, insti- tutionalized order in exchange for the acquiescence and compliant participation of weaker states. In seeking a more rule-based order, the leading state is agreeing to engage in strategy restraint—it is ac- knowledging that there will be limits on the way in which it can exercise its power. Such an order, in effect, has "constitutional" characteristics. Limits are set on what a state within the order can do with its power advantages. Just as in constitutional poli- ties, the implications of "winning" in politics are re- duced. Weaker states realize that the implications of their inferior position are limited and perhaps temporary; operation within the order, despite their disadvantages, does not risk everything, nor will it give the dominant state a permanent advan- tage. Both the powerful and weak states agree to operate within the same order, regardless of radical asymmetries in the distribution of power.41

Multilateralism becomes a mechanism by which a dominant state and weaker ones can reach a bargain over the character of international or- der. The dominant state reduces its "enforcement costs" and succeeds in establishing an order where weaker states will participate willingly rather than resist or balance against the leading power.42 It ac- cepts some restrictions on how it can use its power. The rules and institutions that are created serve as an "investment" in the longer-run preservation of its power advantages. Weaker states agree to the order's rules and institutions. In return, they are assured that the worst excesses of the leading state—manifest as arbitrary and indiscriminate abuses of state power—will be avoided, and they gain institutional opportunities to work and help influence the leading state.43

Arguably, this institutional bargain has been at

the heart of the postwar Western order. After World War II, the United States launched history's most ambitious era of institution building. The U N , the IMF, the World Bank, GATT, NATO, and other in- stitutions that emerged provided the most rule- based structure for political and economic relations in world history. The United States was deeply am- bivalent about making permanent security commit- ments to other states or allowing its political and economic policies to be dictated by intergovern- mental bodies. The Soviet threat during the Cold War was critical in overcoming these doubts. Net- works and political relationships were built that made American power farther-reaching and durable but also more predictable and restrained. * * *

In its most extreme versions, today's new uni- lateralism appears to be a violation of this postwar bargain. Certainly this is die view of some Euro- peans and others around the world. But if the Bush administration's unilateral moves are seen as more limited-—and not emerging as a basic challenge to the foundations of multilateralism—this observa- tion might be incorrect. The problem with the argument about order built on an institutional bargain and strategic restraint is that it reflects judgments by decision makers about how much institutional restraint and commitment by the dominant state is necessary to secure how much participatory acquiescence and compliance by weaker states. The Bush administration might cal- culate that the order is sufficiently stable that the United States can resist an entire range of new multilateral agreements and still not trigger costly responses from its partners. It might also miscalcu- late in this regard and do great damage to the exist- ing order. Yet if the thesis about the constitutional character of the postwar Western order is correct, a basic turn away from multilateralism should not occur. The institutionalized order, which facilitates intergovernmental bargaining and "voice opportu- nities" for America's weaker partners, should have some impact on American policy. The multilateral processes and "pulling and hauling" within the or- der should, at least to some extent, lead the United States to adjust its policies so as not to endanger

the basic postwar bargain. And the Bush adminis- tration should act as if they recognize the virtues of strategic restraint.

The struggle between the United States and its security partners over how to deal with Iraq put American strategic restraint and multilateral secu- rity cooperation to the test. Governments around the world were extremely uncomfortable with the prospect of American unilateral use of force. Re- flecting this view, a French diplomat recently noted: "France is not interested in arguing with the United States. This is a matter of principle. This is about the rules of the game in the world today. About putting the Security Council in the center of international life. And not permitting a nation, whatever nation it may be, to do what it wants, when it wants, where it wants."'44 During the run- up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration in- sisted on its right to act without the multilateral approval of the United Nations—but its decision to take the issue of Iraq back to the United Nations in September 2002 is an indication that the admin- istration sensed the costs of unilateralism.4 5 By seeking a UN Security Council resolution that de- mands tough new weapons inspections and warn- ing that serious consequences will flow from an Iraqi failure to comply, the United States acted to place its anti-Saddam policy in a multilateral framework."46

In theend, the Bush administration went to war with Iraq almost alone, ignoring an uproar of international opposition, and without an explicit Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. Governments that opposed the war had at- tempted to use the Security Council as a tool to re- strain the American unilateral and preemptive use of force, while the Bush administration had at- tempted to use it to provide political cover for its military operations aimed at regime change in Baghdad. The episode reveals a search by the United States for a modicum of legitimacy for its provocative act, but also a willingness to incur po- litical costs and go it alone if necessary. Still, the administration sought to wrap itself in the author- ity of the United Nations. In making the case for

war, President Bush and UN Ambassador John Negreponte did not refer to the administration's controversial National Security Strategy, which claimed an American unilateral right to use force at any time and place in anticipation of future threats.47 Rather, they defended the intervention in terms of the continuing authority of UN resolu- tions and the failure of the Iraqi regime to comply with disarmament agreements. The Bush adminis- tration pulled back from the extreme unilateral brink: instead of asserting a new doctrine of pre- ventive force, it couched its actions in terms of UN authority.

The diplomatic struggle at the United Nations over the American use of force in Iraq reflects a more general debate among major states over whether there will be agreed-upon rules and prin- ciples to guide and limit the exercise of U.S. power. The Bush administration seeks to protect its free- dom to act alone while giving just enough ground to preserve the legitimacy of America's global posi- tion and garner support for the practical problems of fighting terrorism. The administration is again making trade-offs between autonomy and gaining the multilateral cooperation of other states in con- fronting Iraq.

The pressure for multilateralism in the Ameri- can use of force is weaker and more diffuse than in other policy areas, such as trade and other economic realms. The incentives have less to do with the real- ization of specific material interests and more to do with the search for legitimacy—which brings with it the possibility of greater cooperation by other coun- tries and a reduction of the general political "drag" on the American exercise of power. But the Iraq war episode shows how these considerations can give way when a president and his advisers are utterly determined in their policy agenda.

Finally, this same basic struggle has been played out in the controversy over the ICC. European gov- ernments are moving forward to establish a world court with universal jurisdiction and strong inde- pendent judicial authority in the area of war crimes. This necessarily entails an encroachment on Amer- ican sovereignty in cases where crimes by its own

citizens are alleged. The U.S. position during the Clinton years, when the treaty was being negoti- ated, was that the UN Security Council should be able to veto cases that were brought before the ICC. The United States sought to adopt the traditional postwar approach for multilateral agreements— that is, to give the major powers special opt-out and veto rights that make the binding obligations more contingent and subject to state review.48 The pro- ponents of contingent multilateralism calculated that escape clauses made the signing of such agree- ments more likely and that rules and norms pro- mulgated by the agreements would nonetheless have a long-term impact even on powerful states. The ICC represents a newer style of multilateralism in which the scope of the agreement is universal and the binding character is law-based and anchored in international judicial authority.49 The Europeans offered compromises in the ICC treaty: the court's statutes, framed to meet American con- cerns about political prosecutions, provide explicit guarantees that jurisdiction lies first with national governments.50 This suggests that the gap between the "old" and "new" multilateralism is not inher- ently unbridgeable.

Political Identity and Multilateralism

Another source of American multilateralism emerges from the polity itself. The United States has a distinctive self-understanding of its political order, and this has implications for how it thinks about international political order. To be sure, there are multiple political traditions in the United States that reflect divergent and often competing ideas about how the United States should relate to the rest of the world. 5 1 These traditions variously counsel isolationism and activism, realism and ide- alism, aloofness and engagement in the conduct of American foreign affairs. But behind these political- intellectual traditions are deeper aspects of the American political identity that inform the way the United States seeks to build order in the larger global system. The enlightenment origin of the American founding has given the United States a

political identity of self-perceived universal signifi- cance and scope.52 The republican democratic tra- dition that enshrines the rule of law reflects an enduring American view that polities—domestic or international—are best organized around rules and principles of order. America's tradition of civic nationalism also reinforces this notion that the rule of law is the source of legitimacy and political in- clusion. This tradition provides a background sup- port for a multilateral foreign policy.5 3

The basic distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is useful in locating this feature of the American political tradition. Civic identity is group identity composed of commitments to the nation's political creed. Race, religion, gender, lan- guage, and ethnicity are not relevant in defining a citizen's rights and inclusion within the polity. Shared beliefs in the country's principles and val- ues embedded in the rule of law is the organizing basis for political order, and citizens are under- stood to be equal and rights-bearing individuals. Ethnic nationalism, in contrast, maintains that in- dividual rights and participation within the polity are inherited—based on ethnic or racial or reli- gious ties.54

Civic national identity has several implications for the multilateral orientation of American for- eign policy. First, civic identity has tended to en- courage the outward projection of U.S. domestic principles of inclusive and rule-based international political organization. The American national identity is not based on ethnic or religious particu- larism but on a more general set of agreed-upon and normatively appealing principles. Ethnic and religious identities and disputes are pushed down- ward into civil society and removed from the polit- ical arena. When the United States gets involved in political conflicts around the world, it tends to look for the establishment of agreed-upon political principles and rules to guide the rebuilding of or- der. And when the United States promotes rule- based solutions to problems, it is strengthening the normative and principled basis for the exercise of its own power—and thereby making disparities in power more acceptable.

Because civic nationalism is shared with other

Western states, it tends to be a source of cohesion and cooperation. Throughout the industrial demo- cratic world, the dominant form of political iden- tity is based on abstract and juridical rights and responsibilities that coexist with private ethnic and religious associations, fust as warring states and nationalism tend to reinforce each other, so do Western civic identity and cooperative political relations. Political order—domestic and inter- national—is strengthened when there exists a substantial sense of community and shared identity. * * *

Third, the multicultural character of the Amer- ican political identity also reinforces international- ist—and ultimately multilateral—foreign policy. Ruggie notes that culture wars continue in the United States between a pluralistic and multicul- tural identity, and between nativist and parochial alternatives, but that the core identity is still "cos- mopolitan liberal"—an identity that tends to sup- port instrumental multilateralism, * * *

To be sure, American leaders can campaign against multilateral treaties and institutions and win votes. But this has been true across the last century, manifest most dramatically in the rejec- tion of the League of Nations treaty in 1919, but also reflected in other defeats, such as the Interna- tional Trade Organization after World War II. When President George W. Bush went to the United Nations to rally support for his hard-line approach to Iraq, he did not articulate a central role for the world body in promoting international security and peace. He told the General Assembly: "We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions." But he also made it clear that "[t]he purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council reso- lutions will be enforced . . . or action will be un- avoidable.5 5 In contrast, just 12 years earlier, when the elder President Bush appeared before the General Assembly to press his case for resisting Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, he offered a "vision of a new partnership of nations . . . a partnership based on consultations, cooperation and collective ac- tion, especially through international and regional organizations, a partnership united by principle

of l a w and supported by an equitable th cost and commitment." 5 6 It would A m e r i c a n presidents can articulate

nt v i s ions of American foreign policy, ing in its own way with ideas and be- the American polity. If this is true, e s i d e n t s do have political and inteUec-

s h a p e policy—and they are not cap- l a t e r a l i s t - m i n d e d public. public opinion findings confirm this n a l l y suggest that the American public ig a n d eager to conduct foreign policy

l i t e r a l frameworks. In a comprehen- A m e r i c a n and European attitudes on I a f fa i r s , the German Marshall Fund i c a g o Council on Foreign Relations

c l e a r majority of Americans actually i n g the European Union in ratifying c o r d on global warming and the treaty ICC American public attitudes reveal

l t i l a t e r a l bent. When given three alter- ut the role of the United States in n a t i o n a l problems, most Americans i s a i d that the United States should act ) b l e m s together with other countries,

p e r c e n t said that "as the sole remain- wer the United States should continue e e m i n e n t world leader in solving inter- o t o l e m s . " There is also high—and in- p p o r t for strengthening the United r t i c i p a t i n g in UN peacekeeping opera- t i s i n g diplomatic methods to combat when asked if the United States should ot take action alone if it does not have of allies in responding to international percent said that the United States should

l e . O n l y a third of the American public that the United States should act alone.57

Conclus ion

u n i p o l a r i t y is not an adequate explana- c e n t unilateralism in American foreign

is t h e United States doomed to shed its o r i e n t a t i o n . The dominant power po-

sition of the United States creates opportunities to go it alone, but the pressures and incentives that shape decisions about multilateral cooperation are quite varied and crosscutting. The sources of mul- tilateralism—which can be traced to system, in- stitutional, and domestic structural locations— still exist and continue to shape and restrain the Bush administration, unilateral inclinations not- withstanding.

Multilateralism can be manifest at the system, ordering, and contract levels of international or- der. The critical question is not whether the Bush administration is more inclined than previous ad- ministrations to reject specific multilateral treaties and agreements (in some instances, it is), but whether the accumulation of these refusals under- mines the deeper organizational logic of multilat- eralism in the Western and global system. At the ordering or foundational level, multilateralism is manifest in what might be termed "indivisible" economic and security relations. The basic organi- zation of the order is multilateral in that it is open and tied together through diffuse reciprocity and cooperative security. But there is little or no evi- dence that ordering multilateralism is eroding or under attack.58

The sources of unilateralism are more specific and contingent. The United States has always been ambivalent about multilateral commitments. Po- litical judgments about the costs of reduced policy autonomy and the benefits of rule-based order are at the heart of this ambivalence. The dominant area of American unilateralism is arms control and the use of force. * * *

Beyond these conclusions, three questions remain in the debate over the future of multilat- eralism. First, what precisely are the costs of unilateralism? The unilateralists in the Bush ad- ministration act under the assumption that they are minimal. If aggrieved states are not able to take action against the United States—such action ulti- mately would entail the threat of some sort of counterhegemonic coalition—then the costs of unilateralism wil l never truly threaten the Ameri- can global position. This is particularly true in the area of world politics that has been historically the

most immune to binding multilateral rules and in- stitutions—namely, arms control and the use of force. But in areas such as trade, other countries can impose tangible costs on the United States. This helps explain why the United States has been more multilaterally forthcoming in trade than in other areas. The economic gains that flow from the coordination of economic relations also reinforce multilateralism. Additionally, a less tangible cost of unilateralism is when such foreign policy actions threaten the overall legitimacy of American global position. When the United States exercises its power in ways generally seen around the world as legitimate, its "costs of enforcement" go down. But when legitimacy declines, the United States must engage in more difficult and protracted power struggles with other states. Other states cannot fundamentally challenge the United States, but they can make its life more difficult, * * *

Second, to what extent does the existing multi- lateral order reinforce current choices about multi- lateralism? I have pointed out that the United States created a web of multilateral rules and insti- tutions over the last half century that has taken the shape of a mature political order—and the United States is now embedded in this order. A vast lat- ticework of intergovernmental processes and insti- tutional relationships exists across the advanced industrial democracies. * * *

Third, how significant is the challenge of the "new multilateralism" to the older-style postwar multilateralism that the United States champi- oned? I argue in this paper that Washington's resistance to new multilateral agreements has something to do with the new type of multilateral- ism. The older multilateralism came with escape clauses, veto rights, and weighted voting mecha- nisms that allowed the United States and other major states to protect their interests and gave room for maneuvering. The new multilateralism is more legally binding in character. The ICC is per- haps the best example. But how much "new multi- lateralism" is really out there? Is this a clash that is primarily centered on the ICC but not on the wider range of policy areas, or is it a more basic and serious emerging divide? How wide is the gap?

Some experts argue that the exceptions and protec- tions built into the Rome Treaty of the ICC did move in the direction of the old multilateral safe- guards. Moreover, although the WTO manifests "new multilateralism" characteristics, the United States has been one of its major champions. So it is not clear how wide the divide is between old and new multilateralism or even if the conflict over these types of multilateralism pits the United States against the rest of the world. We need to know more about the sources of the new multilateral- ism. * * *

What is certain is that deep forces and incen- tives keep the United States on a multilateral path—rooted in considerations of economic inter- est, power management, and political tradition. To ignore these pressures and incentives would entail a revolution in American foreign policy that even the most hard-line unilateralist in Washington to- day does not imagine. The worst unilateral im- pulses coming out of the Bush administration are so harshly criticized around the world because so many countries have accepted the multilateral vi- sion of international order that the United States has articulated over most of the twentieth century.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Balz 2003, A l . This unilateral turn

did not begin with the Bush administration. Although the Clinton administration articu- lated a foreign policy strategy of "assertive multilateralism," its record was more mixed. For an excellent summary of recent multilat- eral agreements rejected by the United States, see Patrick 2002.

2. Schlesinger 2000. 3. Krauthammer 2001, A29. 4. Purdum2002, 1. 5. This definition of multilateralism draws on

Keohane 1990 and Ruggie 1993. See also Van Oudenaren 2003.

6. Bull 1977. The norm of sovereign equality is what Philpott 2001 calls the "side by side" principle. See also Reus-Smit 1997,

7. Ruggie 1993, 12. 8. Keohane 1990, 731. 9. This distinction points to what might be called

informal manifestations of multilateralism. The United States has at least four routes to take action: (1) it can go it alone, without con- sulting others; (2) it can consult others, but then go it alone; (3) it can consult and take ac- tion with others, not on the basis of agreed- upon rules and principles that define the terms of its relationship with those others, but rather on the basis of the current situation's needs; or (4) it can take action with others, on the basis of agreed-upon rules and principles. The first route is clearly unilateral. The second and third can be coded as multilateral, even though action is not taken in accord with formal mul- tilateral rules and institutions. In areas such as the use of force, where formal and binding multilateral rules and principles are least evi- dent, the difference between unilateral and multilateral action will likely fall between the first route and the second and third. For a dis- cussion of formal and informal institutions, see Koromenos et al. 2001.

10. Schroeder 1994; Elrod 1976. 11. Goldstein etal. 2001. 12. This is the story told by Crozier 1964 about

politics within large-scale organizations. Each individual within a complex organizational hi- erarchy is continually engaged in a dual strug- gle: to tie his colleagues to precise rule-based behavior, thereby creating a more stable and certain environment in which to operate, and to retain as much autonomy and discretion as possible for himself.

13. On the way in which NATO multilateralism restrained American exercise of power, see Weber 1993.

14. This is emphasized by Leffler 1992 and Pollard 1985.

15. Ruggie 1993. 16. National Intelligence Council 2000.

17. State Department data, reported in Patrick 2002. 18. The rise in bilateral treaties reflects a post-

Cold War surge in tax, investment, and extradition agreements with countries that previously were part of the Soviet bloc. Treaties submitted to the Senate have increas- ingly been passed with reservations, under- standings, and conditions. This shows that the United States has more reservations about multilateral commitments, but it provides a way for the country to join international agreements that it does not fully agree with and that it might not otherwise join. See Schocken and Caron 2001.

19. Since 1945 the U.S. executive has submitted 958 bilateral or multilateral treaties to the Sen- ate. Of these treaties, 505 are bilateral and 453 are multilateral. These do not include execu- tive agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and other multilateral trade agreements. There have been approxi- mately 11,000 executive agreements signed during the postwar period.

20. Boot 2002, A29. 21. The classic statement of structural realism is

Waltz 1979. 22. Realists differ on the uses and importance

of multilateral institutions. See Schweller and Priess 1997 and Jervis 1999.

23. Odell 2000. 24. Victor 2001. 25. Zakaria 2002, 76. 26. Brooks and Wohlforth 2002 argue that unipo-

lar power enables the United States to act uni- laterally, but they go on to say that this does not mean that unilateralism is an optimal strategy for unipolar America.

27. As one journalist reports, "The Bush adminis- tration is stocked with skeptics of international treaties and multilateral organizations." Kes- sler 2002, A l .

28. This split in American strategic thinking about the efficacy of arms control as it broke into the open over the failed SALT II treaty during the Carter and Reagan years is detailed in Graham 2002.

29. On the logic of cooperation in U.S.-Soviet arms-control negotiations, see Weber 1992.

30. The Bush administration's rejection of the Convention on Trade in Light Arms appears to be a more straightforward deferral to the National Rifle Association.

31. Because of America's unrivaled military power, it is also true that the costs of cheating by other states have been reduced. For this rea- son, the explanation of shifting costs and ben- efits is inadequate without an appreciation of how elite ideologies and policy ideas color such calculations.

32. For example, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, prior to joining the administration, argued that a great struggle was unfolding between what he calls Americanists and glob- alists. Globalists are depicted as elite activist groups who seek to strengthen "global gover- nance" through a widening net of agreements on environment, human rights, labor, health, and political-military affairs and whose not- so-hidden agenda is to enmesh the United States in international laws and institutions that rob the country of its sovereignty. Ameri- canists, according to Bolton, have finally awoken and are now seizing back the country's control over its own destiny. Bolton 2000.

33. For a general characterization of this uni- lateral—or neo-imperial—thinking, see Iken- berry 2002. Its grand strategic agenda is discussed in Baker 2003 and Ricks 2001.

34. Nye 2002. 35. Chinkin 2000; Reisman 2000. 36. Indeed, some commentators worry precisely

that the American position will lead to a new principle about the use of force. Henry Kis- singer said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; "It cannot be either the American national interest or the world's interest to de- velop principles that grant every nation an un- fettered right of pre-emption against its own definition of threats to its security." Quoted in Harding 2002, 10.

37. Keohane 1984. 38. Vernon 1995; Jackson 1994; Winham 1998.

39. This argument is developed in Ikenberry 2001. 40. The larger literature on hegemonic stability the-

ory argues that the presence of a single powerful state is conducive to multilateral regime cre- ation. This allows it to identify its own national interest with the openness and stability of the larger global system. The classic statement of this thesis is Gilpin 1981. In Keohane's formu- lation, the theory holds that "hegemonic struc- tures of power, dominated by a single country, are most conducive to the development of strong international regimes whose rules are relatively precise and well obeyed." Such states have the capacity to maintain regimes that they favor through the use of coercion or positive sanctions. The hegemonic state gains the ability to shape and dominate the international order, while providing a flow of benefits to smaller states that is sufficient to persuade them to ac- quiesce. See Keohane 1980,132.

41. For a discussion of constitutional logic and in- ternational relations, see Ikenberry 1998.

42. For sophisticated arguments along these lines, see Martin 1993 and Lake 1999.

43. Ikenberry 2001, chapter 3. 44. Farley and McManus 2002, A l . 45. A new investigative report by Bob Woodward

shows in detail how the multilateral approach to Iraq won out in administration policy cir- cles. See Woodward 2002.

46. Wright and McManus 2002; Preston 2002; Peel 2002.

47. National Security Council 2002. 48. Schense and Washburn 2001. 49. The ICC is treaty-based, and its jurisdiction is

only over citizens/subjects of signatory parties and citizens/subjects of nonstate signatories that commit crimes on the territory of signa- tory parties. It aims to universalize this juris- diction.

50. Stephens 2002. 51. See surveys in McDougall 1997 and Mead

2001. 52. Huntington 1983. 53. There are, of course, political ideas and tradi-

tions in the American experience that sup- port unilateral and isolationist policies, which flourished from the founding well into the 1930s and still exist today.

54. This distinction is made by Smith 1986. 55. Bush 2001, 4. 56. Bush 1990, 3. 57. Chicago Council and German Marshall Fund

2002, 27. 58. In this sense, for the system to become less

multilateral, there would need to be evidence that economic and security ties were becom- ing more divisible: an erosion of ties in the di- rection of separate regional spheres, a decline in mutually agreed-upon rules and principles of order, and a lessening of open economic and societal interaction.

J O H N J . M E A R S H E I M E R

The False Promise of

International Institutions

What Are Institutions?

There is no widely-agreed upon definition of insti- tutions in the international relations literature,1

The concept is sometimes defined so broadly as to encompass all of international relations, which gives it little analytical bite.2 For example, defining institutions as "recognized patterns of behavior or practice around which expectations converge" al- lows the concept to cover almost every regularized pattern of activity between states, from war to tar- iff bindings negotiated under the General Agree- ment on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), thus rendering it largely meaningless.3 Still, it is possible to devise a useful definition that is consistent with how most institutionalist scholars employ the concept.

I define institutions as a set of rules that stipu- late the ways in which states should cooperate and compete with each other.4 They prescribe ac- ceptable forms of state behavior, and proscribe unacceptable kinds of behavior. These rules are ne- gotiated by states, and according to many promi- nent theorists, they entail the mutual acceptance of higher norms, which are "standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations."5 These rules are typically formalized in international agreements, and are usually embodied in organiza- tions with their own personnel and budgets.6 Al- though rules are usually incorporated into a formal

From International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/95): 5-49.

international organization, it is not the organiza- tion per se that compels states to obey the rules. In- stitutions are not a form of world government. States themselves must choose to obey the rules they created. Institutions, in short, call for the "decentralized cooperation of individual sover- eign states, without any effective mechanism of command."7

Realists * * * recognize that states sometimes oper- ate through institutions. However, they believe that those rules reflect state calculations of self- interest based primarily on the international distri- bution of power. The most powerful states in the system create and shape institutions so that they can maintain their share of world power, or even increase it. In this view, institutions are essentially "arenas for acting out power relationships."8 For realists, the causes of war and peace are mainly a function of the balance of power, and institutions largely mirror the distribution of power in the sys- tem. In short, the balance of power is the indepen- dent variable that explains war; institutions are merely an intervening variable in the process.

N A T O provides a good example of realist thinking about institutions. NATO is an institu- tion, and it certainly played a role in preventing World War III and helping the West win the Cold War. Nevertheless, N A T O was basically a manifes- tation of the bipolar distribution of power in Eu-

rope during the Cold War, and it was that balance of power, not N A T O per se, that provided the key to maintaining stability on the continent. N A T O was essentially an American tool for managing power in the face of the Soviet threat. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, realists argue that N A T O must either disappear or reconstitute itself on the basis of the new distribution of power in Europe. 9 N A T O cannot remain as it was during the Cold War.

* * *

L I B E R A L I N S T I T U T T I O N A L I S M

Liberal institutionalism does not directly address the question of whether institutions cause peace, but instead focuses on the less ambitious goal of explaining cooperation in cases where state inter- ests are not fundamentally opposed.1 0 Specifically, the theory looks at cases where states are having difficulty cooperating because they have "mixed" interests; in other words, each side has incentives both to cooperate and not to cooperate.11 Each side can benefit from cooperation, however, which lib- eral institutionalists define as "goal-directed be- havior that entails mutual policy adjustments so that all sides end up better off than they would otherwise be." 1 2 The theory is of little relevance in situations where states' interests are fundamentally conflictual and neither side thinks it has much to gain from cooperation. In these circumstances, states aim to gain advantage over each other. They think in terms of winning and losing, and this in- variably leads to intense security competition, and sometimes war. But liberal institutionalism does not deal directly with these situations, and thus says little about how to resolve or even ameliorate them.

Therefore, the theory largely ignores security issues and concentrates instead on economic and, to a lesser extent, environmental issues.13 In fact, the theory is built on the assumption that interna- tional politics can be divided into two realms— security and political economy—and that liberal

institutionalism mainly applies to the latter, but not the former. * * *

According to liberal institutionalists, the principal obstacle to cooperation among states with mutual interests is the threat of cheating.14 The famous "prisoners' dilemma," which is the analytical cen- terpiece of most of the liberal institutionalist litera- ture, captures the essence of the problem that states must solve to achieve cooperation.15 Each of two states can either cheat or cooperate with the other. Each side wants to maximize its own gain, but does not care about the size of the other side's gain; each side cares about the other side only so far as the other side's chosen strategy affects its own prospects for maximizing gain. The most at- tractive strategy for each state is to cheat and hope the other state pursues a cooperative strategy. In other words, a state's ideal outcome is to "sucker" the other side into thinking it is going to cooper- ate, and then cheat. But both sides understand this logic, and therefore both sides will try to cheat the other. Consequently, both sides will end up worse off than if they had cooperated, since mutual cheating leads to the worst possible outcome. Even though mutual cooperation is not as attractive as suckering the other side, it is certainly better than the outcome when both sides cheat.

The key to solving this dilemma is for each side to convince the other that they have a collective in- terest in making what appear to be short-term sac- rifices (the gain that might result from successful cheating) for the sake of long-term benefits (the substantial payoff from mutual long-term cooper- ation). This means convincing states to accept the second-best outcome, which is mutual collabora- tion. The principal obstacle to reaching this coop- erative outcome will be fear of getting suckered, should the other side cheat. This, in a nutshell, is the problem that institutions must solve.

To deal with this problem of "political market failure," institutions must deter cheaters and pro- tect victims. 1 6 Three messages must be sent to po- tential cheaters: you will be caught, you will he

punished immediately, and you will jeopardize fu- ture cooperative efforts. Potential victims, on the other hand, need early warning of cheating to avoid serious injury, and need the means to punish cheaters.

Liberal institutionalists do not aim to deal with cheaters and victims by changing fundamental norms of state behavior. Nor do they suggest trans- forming the anarchical nature of the international system. They accept the assumption that states op- erate in an anarchic environment and behave in a self-interested manner. 1 7 * * * Liberal institu- tionalists instead concentrate on showing how rules can work to counter the cheating problem, even while states seek to maximize their own wel- fare. They argue that institutions can change a state's calculations about how to maximize gains. Specifically, rules can get states to make the short- term sacrifices needed to resolve the prisoners' dilemma and thus to realize long-term gains. Insti- tutions, in short, can produce cooperation.

Rules can ideally be employed to make four major changes in "the contractual environment." 1 8

First, rules can increase the number of transactions between particular states over time.19 This institu- tionalized iteration discourages cheating in three ways. It raises the costs of cheating by creating the prospect of future gains through cooperation, thereby invoking "the shadow of the future" to de- ter cheating today. A state caught cheating would jeopardize its prospects of benefiting from future cooperation, since the victim would probably re- taliate. In addition, iteration gives the victim the opportunity to pay back the cheater: it allows for reciprocation, the tit-for-tat strategy, which works to punish cheaters and not allow them to get away with their transgression. Finally, it rewards states that develop a reputation for faithful adherence to agreements, and punishes states that acquire a rep- utation for cheating.20

Second, rules can tie together interactions be- tween states in different issue areas. Issue-linkage aims to create greater interdependence between states, who will then be reluctant to cheat in one is- sue area for fear that the victim—and perhaps

other states as well—will retaliate in another issue area. It discourages cheating in much the same way as iteration: it raises the costs of cheating and pro- vides a way for the victim to retaliate against the cheater.

Third, a structure of rules can increase the amount of information available to participants in cooperative agreements so that close monitoring is possible. Raising the level of information discour- ages cheating in two ways: it increases the likeli- hood that cheaters will be caught, and more importantly, it provides victims with early warning of cheating, thereby enabling them to take protec- tive measures before they are badly hurt.

Fourth, rules can reduce the transaction costs of individual agreements.21 When institutions per- form the tasks described above, states can devote less effort to negotiating and monitoring coopera- tive agreements, and to hedging against possible defections. By increasing the efficiency of interna- tional cooperation, institutions make it more prof- itable and thus more attractive for self-interested states.

Liberal institutionalism is generally thought to be of limited utility in the security realm, because fear of cheating is considered a much greater ob- stacle to cooperation when military issues are at stake."22 There is the constant threat that betrayal will result in a devastating military defeat. This threat of "swift, decisive defection" is simply not present when dealing with international economics. Given that "the costs of betrayal" are potentially much graver in the military than the economic sphere, states will be very reluctant to accept the "one step backward, two steps forward" logic which underpins the tit-for-tat strategy of conditional co- operation. One step backward in the security realm might mean destruction, in which case there will be no next step—backward or forward. 2 3

* * * There is an important theoretical failing in the liberal institutionalist logic, even as it applies to economic issues, The theory is correct as far as it goes: cheating can be a serious barrier to coopera- tion. It ignores, however, the other major obstacle to cooperation: relative-gains concerns. As Joseph

Grieco has shown, liberal institutionalists assume that states are not concerned about relative gains, but focus exclusively on absolute gains.24 * * *

This oversight is revealed by the assumed order of preference in the prisoners' dilemma game: each state cares about how its opponent's strategy will affect its own (absolute) gains, but not about how much one side gains relative to the other. In other words, each side simply wants to get the best deal for itself, and does not pay attention to how well the other side fares in the process.25 Nevertheless, liberal institutionalists cannot ignore relative-gains considerations, because they assume that states are self-interested actors in an anarchic system, and they recognize that military power matters to states. A theory that explicitly accepts realism's core assumptions—and liberal institutionalism does that—must confront the issue of relative gains if it hopes to develop a sound explanation for why states cooperate.

One might expect liberal institutionalists to of- fer the counterargument that relative-gains logic applies only to the security realm, while absolute- gains logic applies to the economic realm. Given that they are mainly concerned with explaining economic and environmental cooperation, leaving relative-gains concerns out of the theory does not matter.

There are two problems with this argument. First, if cheating were the only significant obstacle to cooperation, liberal institutionalists could argue that their theory applies to the economic, but not the military realm. In fact, they do make that argu- ment. However, once relative-gains considerations are factored into the equation, it becomes impossi- ble to maintain the neat dividing line between eco- nomic and military issues, mainly because military might is significantly dependent on economic might. The relative size of a state's economy has profound consequences for its standing in the in- ternational balance of military power, Therefore, relative-gains concerns must be taken into account for security reasons when looking at the economic as well as military domain, The neat dividing line that liberal institutionalists employ to specify when

their theory applies has little utility when one ac- cepts that states worry about relative gains.26

Second, there are non-realist (i.e., non- security) logics that might explain why states worry about relative gains. Strategic trade theory, for ex- ample, provides a straightforward economic logic for why states should care about relative gains,27 It argues that states should help their own firms gain comparative advantage over the firms of rival states, because that is the best way to insure na- tional economic prosperity. There is also a psycho- logical logic, which portrays individuals as caring about how well they do (or their state does) in a cooperative agreement, not for material reasons, but because it is human nature to compare one's progress with that of others.28

Another possible liberal institutionalist coun- terargument is that solving the cheating problem renders the relative-gains problem irrelevant. If states cannot cheat each other, they need not fear each other, and therefore, states would not have to worry about relative power. The problem with this argument, however, is that even if the cheating problem were solved, states would still have to worry about relative gains because gaps in gains- can be translated into military advantage that can be used for coercion or aggression. And in the in- ternational system, states sometimes have conflict- ing interests that lead to aggression.

There is also empirical evidence that relative- gains considerations mattered during the Gold War even in economic relations among the advanced industrialized democracies in the Or- ganization for Economic Cooperation and Devel- opment (OECD). One would not expect realist logic about relative gains to be influential in this case: the United States was a superpower with little to fear militarily from the other OECD states, and those states were unlikely to use a relative-gains advantage to threaten the United States.29 Further- more, the OECD states were important American allies during the Cold War, and thus the United States benefited strategically when they gained sub stantially in size and strength.

Nonetheless, relative gains appear to have mat -

tered in economic relations among the advanced industrial states. Consider three prominent stud- ies. Stephen Krasner considered efforts at coop- eration in different sectors of the international communications industry. He found that states were remarkably unconcerned about cheating but deeply worried about relative gains, which led him to conclude that liberal institutionalism "is not rel- evant for global communications." Grieco exam- ined American and EC efforts to implement, under the auspices of GA'IT, a number of agreements re- lating to non-tariff barriers to trade. He found that the level of success was not a function of concerns about cheating but was influenced primarily by concern about the distribution of gains, Similarly, Michael Mastanduno found that concern about relative gains, not about cheating, was an impor- tant factor in shaping American policy towards Japan in three cases: the PSX fighter aircraft, satel- lites, and high-definition television.30

I am not suggesting that relative-gains consid- erations make cooperation impossible; my point is simply that they can pose a serious impediment to cooperation and must therefore be taken into ac- count when developing a theory of cooperation among states. This point is apparently now recog- nized by liberal institutionalists. Keohane, for ex- ample, acknowledges that he "did make a major mistake by underemphasizing distributive issues and the complexities they create for international cooperation."31

Can Liberal Institutionalism Be Repaired? Liberal institutionalists must address two questions if they are to repair their theory. First, can institutions facilitate cooperation when states seriously care about relative gains, or do institutions only matter when states can ignore relative-gains considera- tions and focus instead on absolute gains? I find no evidence that liberal institutionalists believe that institutions facilitate cooperation when states care deeply about relative gains. They apparently con- cede that their theory only applies when relative- gains considerations matter little or hardly at all.32

Thus the second question: when do states not

worry about relative gains? The answer to this question would ultimately define the realm in which liberal institutionalism applies.

Liberal institutionalists have not addressed this important question in a systematic fashion, so any assessment of their efforts to repair the theory must be preliminary. * * *

* * *

Problems with the Empirical Record. Although there is much evidence of cooperation among states, this alone does not constitute support for liberal institutionalism. What is needed is evidence of cooperation that would not have occurred in the absence of institutions because of fear of cheating, or its actual presence. But scholars have provided little evidence of cooperation of that sort, nor of cooperation failing because of cheating. Moreover, as discussed above, there is considerable evidence that states worry much about relative gains not only in security matters, but in the economic realm as well.

This dearth of empirical support for liberal in- stitutionalism is acknowledged by proponents of that theory." The empirical record is not com- pletely blank, however, but the few historical cases that liberal institutionalists have studied provide scant support for the theory. Consider two promi- nent examples.

Keohane looked at the performance of the In- ternational Energy Agency (IEA) in 1974-81, a pe- riod that included the 1979 oil crisis.34 This case does not appear to lend the theory much support. First, Keohane concedes that the IEA failed outright when put to the test in 1979: "regime- oriented efforts at cooperation do not always succeed, as the fiasco of IEA actions in 1979 illustrates."35 He claims, however, that in 1980 the IEA had a minor success "under relatively favor- able conditions" in responding to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. Although he admits it is diffi- cult to specify how much the IEA mattered in the 1980 case, he notes that "it seems clear that 'it [the IEA] leaned in the right direction'," a claim that

hardly constitutes strong support for the theory.36

Second, it does not appear from Keohane's analysis that either fear of cheating or actual cheating hin- dered cooperation in the 1979 case, as the theory would predict. Third, Keohane chose the IEA case precisely because it involved relations among advanced Western democracies with market econ- omies, where the prospects for cooperation were excellent.37 The modest impact of institutions in this case is thus all the more damning to the theory.

Lisa Martin examined the role that the Euro- pean Community (EC) played during the Falk- lands War in helping Britain coax its reluctant allies to continue economic sanctions against Argentina after military action started.38 She con- cludes that the EC helped Britain win its allies' cooperation by lowering transaction costs and facilitating issue linkage. Specifically, Britain made concessions on the EC budget and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP); Britain's allies agreed in return to keep sanctions on Argentina.

This case, too, is less than a ringing endorse- ment for liberal institutionalism. First, British ef- forts to maintain EC sanctions against Argentina were not impeded by fears of possible cheating, which the theory identifies as the central impedi- ment to cooperation. So this case does not present an important test of liberal institutionalism, and thus the cooperative outcome does not tell us much about the theory's explanatory power. Sec- ond, it was relatively easy for Britain and her allies to strike a deal in this case, Neither side's core in- terests were threatened, and neither side had to make significant sacrifices to reach an agreement. Forging an accord to continue sanctions was not a difficult undertaking. A stronger test for liberal in- stitutionalism would require states to cooperate when doing so entailed significant costs and risks. Third, the EC was not essential to an agreement. Issues could have been linked without the EC, and although the EC may have lowered transaction costs somewhat, there is no reason to think these costs were a serious impediment to striking a deal. 3 9 It is noteworthy that Britain and America were able to cooperate during the Falklands War,

even though the United States did not belong to the EC.

There is also evidence that directly challenges liberal institutionalism in issue areas where one would expect the theory to operate successfully. The studies discussed above by Grieco, Krasner, and Mastanduno test the institutionalist argument in a number of different political economy cases, and each finds the theory has little explanatory power. More empirical work is needed before a final judgment is rendered on the explanatory power of liberal institutionalism. Nevertheless, the evidence gathered so far is unpromising at best.

In summary, liberal institutionalism does not provide a sound basis for understanding interna- tional relations and promoting stability in the post-Cold War world. It makes modest claims about the impact of institutions, and steers clear of war and peace issues, focusing instead on the less ambitious task of explaining economic coop- eration. Furthermore, the theory's causal logic is flawed, as proponents of the theory now admit. Having overlooked the relative-gains problem, they are now attempting to repair the theory, but their initial efforts are not promising. Finally, the available empirical evidence provides little support for the theory,

Conclusion

The attraction of institutionalist theories for both policymakers and scholars is explained, I believe, not by their intrinsic value, but by their relation- ship to realism, and especially to core elements of American political ideology. Realism has long been and continues to be an influential theory in the United States.40 Leading realist thinkers such as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, for example, occupied key policymaking positions during the Cold War. The impact of realism in the academic world is amply demonstrated in the institutionalist literature, where discussions of realism are perva-

sive.41 Yet despite its influence, Americans who think seriously about foreign policy issues tend to dislike realism intensely, mainly because it clashes with their basic values. The theory stands opposed to how most Americans prefer to think about themselves and the wider world. 4 2

There are four principal reasons why American elites, as well as the American public, tend to regard realism with hostility. First, realism is a pessimistic theory. It depicts a world of stark and harsh compe- tition, and it holds out little promise of making that world more benign. Realists, as Hans Morgenthau wrote, are resigned to the fact that "there is no es- cape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does."43 Such pessimism, of course, runs up against the deep-seated American belief that with time and effort, reasonable individuals can solve important social problems. Americans regard progress as both desirable and possible in politics, and they are therefore uncomfortable with realism's claim that security competition and war will persist despite our best efforts to eliminate them.44

Second, realism treats war as an inevitable, and indeed sometimes necessary, form of state activity. For realists, war is an extension of politics by other means. Realists are very cautious in their prescrip- tions about the use of force: wars should not be fought for idealistic purposes, but instead for balance-of-power reasons. Most Americans, how- ever, tend to think of war as a hideous enterprise that should ultimately be abolished. For the time being, however, it can only justifiably be used for lofty moral goals, like "making the world safe for democracy"; it is morally incorrect to fight wars to change or preserve the balance of power. This makes the realist conception of warfare anathema to many Americans.

Third, as an analytical matter, realism does not distinguish between "good" states and "bad" states, but essentially treats them like billiard balls of varying size. In realist theory, all states are forced to seek the same goal: maximum relative power.4 5

A purely realist interpretation of the Cold War, for example, allows for no meaningful difference in the motives behind American and Soviet behavior during that conflict. According to the theory, both

sides must have been driven by concerns about the balance of power, and must have done what was necessary to try to achieve a favorable balance. Most Americans would recoil at such a description of the Cold War, because they believe the United States was motivated by good intentions while the Soviet Union was not. 4 6

Fourth, America has a rich history of thumbing its nose at realism. For its first 140 years of exis- tence, geography and the British navy allowed the United States to avoid serious involvement in the power politics of Europe. America had an isola- tionist foreign policy for most of this period, and its rhetoric explicitly emphasized the evils of en- tangling alliances and balancing behavior. Even as the United States finally entered its first European war in 1917, Woodrow Wilson railed against real- ist thinking. America has a long tradition of anti- realist rhetoric, which continues to influence us today.

Given that realism is largely alien to American culture, there is a powerful demand in the United States for alternative ways of looking at the world, and especially for theories that square with basic American values. Institutionalist theories nicely meet these requirements, and that is the main source of their appeal to policymakers and schol- ars. Whatever else one might say about these theo- ries, they have one undeniable advantage in the eyes of their supporters: they are not realism. Not only do institutionalist theories offer an alternative to realism, but they explicitly seek to undermine it. Moreover, institutionalists offer arguments that re- flect basic American values. For example, they are optimistic about the possibility of greatly reducing, if not eliminating, security competition among states and creating a more peaceful world. They certainly do not accept the realist stricture that war is politics by other means. Institutionalists, in short, purvey a message that Americans long to hear.

There is, however, a downside for policymakers who rely on institutionalist theories: these theories do not accurately describe the world, hence policies based on them are bound to fail. The international system strongly shapes the behavior of states, limit-

ing the amount of damage that false faith in institu- tional theories can cause, The constraints of the system notwithstanding, however, states still have considerable freedom of action, and their policy choices can succeed or fail in protecting American national interests and the interests of vulnerable people around the globe. The failure of the League of Nations to address German and Japanese aggres- sion in the 1930s is a case in point. The failure of institutions to prevent or stop the war in Bosnia of- fers a more recent example. These cases illustrate that institutions have mattered rather little in the past; they also suggest that the false belief that insti- tutions matter has mattered more, and has had per- nicious effects. Unfortunately, misplaced reliance on institutional solutions is likely to lead to more failures in the future.

NOTES 1. Regimes and institutions are treated as synony-

mous concepts in this article. They are also used interchangeably in the institutionalist literature. See Robert O. Keohane, "International Institu- tions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly, Vol . 32, No. 4 (December 1988), p. 384; Robert O. Keohane, International Institu- tions and State Power: Essays in International Re- lations Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 3-4; and Oran R. Young, International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Re- sources and the Environment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor- nell University Press, 1989), chaps. 1 and 8. The term "multilateralism" is also virtually synony- mous with institutions. To quote John Ruggie, "the term 'multilateral' is an adjective that modi- fies the noun 'institution.' Thus, multilateralism depicts a generic institutional form in interna- tional relations,... [Specifically,] multilateralism is an institutional form which coordinates rela- tions among three or more states on the basis of 'generalized' principles of conduct." Ruggie, "Multilateralism [The Anatomy of an Insti- tutionl," [International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Summer 1992),] pp. 570-571.

2. For discussion of this point, see Arthur A. Stein, Why Nations Cooperate: Circumstance and Choice in International Relations (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 25™ 27. Also see Susan Strange, "Cave! Hic Drag- ones: A Critique of Regime Analysis," in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes, special issue of International Organization, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 479-496.

3. Oran R. Young, "Regime Dynamics: The Rise and Fall of International Regimes," in Krasner, International Regimes, p. 277.

4. See Douglass C. North and Robert P, Thomas, "An Economic Theory of the Growth of the Western World," The Economic History Review, 2nd series, Vol. 23, No. 1 (April 1970), p. 5.

5. Krasner, International Regimes, p. 186. Non- realist institutions are often based on higher norms, while few, if any, realist institutions are based on norms. The dividing line between norms and rules is not sharply defined in the in- stitutionalist literature. See Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 57-58. For example, one might argue that rules, not just norms, are concerned with rights and oblig- ations. The key point, however, is that for many institutionalists, norms, which are core beliefs about standards of appropriate state behavior, are the foundation on which more specific rules are constructed. This distinction between norms and rules applies in a rather straightforward way in the subsequent discussion. Both collective se- curity and critical theory challenge the realist be- lief that states behave in a self-interested way, and argue instead for developing norms that re- quire states to act more altruistically. Liberal in- stitutionalism, on the other hand, accepts the realist view that states act on the basis of self- interest, and concentrates on devising rules that facilitate cooperation among states.

6. International organizations are public agencies established through the cooperative efforts of two or more states. These administrative structures have their own budget, personnel,

and buildings, John Ruggie defines them as "palpable entities with headquarters and letter- heads, voting procedures, and generous pen- sion plans." Ruggie, "Multilateralism," p. 573. Once rules are incorporated into an interna- tional organization, "they may seem almost coterminous," even though they are "distin- guishable analytically." Keohane, International Institutions and State Power, p. 5.

7. Charles Lipson, "Is the Future of Collective Se- curity Like the Past?" in George W. Downs, ed., Collective Security beyond the Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 114,

8. Tony Evans and Peter Wilson, "Regime The- ory and the English School of International Relations: A Comparison," Millennium: Jour- nal of International Studies, Vol . 21, No. 3 (Winter 1992), p. 330.

9. See Gunther Hellmann and Reinhard Wolf, "Neorealism Neoliberal Institutionalism, and the Future of NATO," Security Studies, Vol . 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1993), pp. 3-43.

10. Among the key liberal institutionalist works are: Robert Axelrod and Robert O. Keohane, "Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strate- gies and Institutions," World Politics, Vol, 38, No. 1 (October 1985), pp. 226-254; Keohane, After Hegemony; Keohane, "International In- stitutions: Two Approaches," pp. 379-396; Keohane, International Institutions and State Power, chap. 1; Charles Lipson, "International Cooperation in Economic and Security Affairs," World Politics, Vol . 37, No. 1 (October 1984), pp. 1-23; Lisa L. Martin, "Institutions and Co- operation: Sanctions During the Falkland Is- lands Conflict," International Security, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Spring 1992), pp. 143-178; Lisa L. Mar- tin, Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multi- lateral Economic Sanctions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Kenneth A. Oye, "Explaining Cooperation Under Anarchy: Hypotheses and Strategies," World Politics, Vol. 38, No. I (October 1985), pp. 1-24; and Stein, Why Nations Cooperate.

11, Stein, Why Nations Cooperate, chap. 2. Also see Keohane, After Hegemony, pp. 6-7,12-13,67-69.

12. Milner, "International Theories of Coopera- tion [among Nations: Strengths and Weak- nesses]," [World Politics, V o l . 44, No. 3 (April 1992),] p. 468.

13. For examples of the theory at work in the envi- ronmental realm, see Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), especially chaps. 1 and 9, Some of the most important work on institu- tions and the environment has been done by Oran Young. See, for example, Young, International Cooperation. The rest of my discussion concentrates on economic, not en- vironmental issues, for conciseness, and also because the key theoretical works in the liberal institutionalist literature focus on economic rather than environmental matters.

14. Cheating is basically a "breach of promise." Oye, "Explaining Cooperation Under Anar- chy," p. 1. It usually implies unobserved non- compliance, although there can be observed cheating as well. Defection is a synonym for cheating in the institutionalist literature.

15. The centrality of the prisoners' dilemma and cheating to the liberal institutionalist literature is clearly reflected in virtually all the works cited in footnote 10. As Helen Milner notes in her review essay on this literature: "The focus is primarily on the role of regimes [institu- tions] in solving the defection [cheating] problem." Milner, "International Theories of Cooperation," p, 475.

16. The phrase is from Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 85.

17. Kenneth Oye, for example, writes in the intro duction to an issue of World Politics contain- ing a number of liberal institutionalist essays: "Our focus is on non-altruistic cooperation among states dwelling in international an- archy." Oye, "Explaining Cooperation Under Anarchy," p. 2. Also see Keohane, "Interna- tional Institutions: Two Approaches," pp. 380- 381; and Keohane, International Institutions and State Power, p. 3.

18. Haas, Keohane, and Levy, Institutions for the Earth, p. 11. For general discussions of how rules work, which inform my subsequent discussion of the matter, see Keohane, After Hegemony, chaps. 5-6; Martin, "Institutions and Coopera- tion," pp. 143-178; and Milner, "International Theories of Cooperation," pp. 474-478.

19. See Axelrod and Keohane, "Achieving Cooper- ation Under Anarchy," pp. 248-250; Lipson, "International Cooperation," pp. 4-18.

20. Lipson, "International Cooperation," p. 5. 21. See Keohane, After Hegemony, pp. 89-92. 22. This point is clearly articulated in Lipson,

"International Cooperation," especially pp. 12- 18. The subsequent quotations in this para- graph are from ibid. Also see Axelrod and Keohane, "Achieving Cooperation Under An- archy," pp. 232-233.

23. See Roger B. Parks, "What if 'Fools Die'? A Comment on Axelrod," Letter to American Po- litical Science Review, Vol . 79, No. 4 (Decem- ber 1985), pp. 1173-1174.

24. See Grieco, "Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation [A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism,]" [International Or- ganization, Vol . 42, No. 3 (Summer 1988)]. Other works by Grieco bearing on the subject include: Joseph M. Grieco, "Realist Theory and the Problem of International Coopera- tion: Analysis with an Amended Prisoner's Dilemma Model," The Journal of Politics, Vol . 50, No. 3 (August 1988), pp. 600-624; Grieco, Cooperation among Nations: Europe, America, and Non-Tariff Barriers to Trade (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Grieco, "Understanding the Problem of International Cooperation: The Limits of Neoliberal Institutionalism and the Future of Realist Theory," in Baldwin, [ed.,] Neoreal- ism and Neoliberalism [The Contempory De- bate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)], pp. 301-338. The telling effect of Grieco's criticism is reflected in ibid., which is essentially organized around the relative gains vs. absolute gains debate, an issue given little

attention before Grieco raised it in his widely cited 1988 article. The matter was briefly dis- cussed by two other scholars before Grieco. See Joanne Gowa, "Anarchy, Egoism, and Third Images: The Evolution of Cooperation and International Relations," International Or- ganization, Vol. 40, No, 1 (Winter 1986), pp. 172-179; and Oran R. Young, "Interna- tional Regimes: Toward a New Theory of Institutions," World Politics, Vol, 39, No. I (October 1986), pp. 118-119.

25. Lipson writes: "The Prisoner's Dilemma, in its simplest form, involves two players. Each is as- sumed to be a self-interested, self-reliant max- imizer of his own utility, an assumption that clearly parallels the Realist conception of sov- ereign states in international politics." Lip- son, "International Cooperation," p. 2. Realists, however, do not accept this conception of in- ternational politics and, not surprisingly, have questioned the relevance of the prisoners' di- lemma (at least in its common form) for ex- plaining much of international relations. See Gowa, "Anarchy, Egoism, and Third Images" Grieco, "Realist Theory and the Problem of In- ternational Cooperation"; and Stephen D. Kras- ner, "Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier," World Poli- tics, Vol, 43, No. 3 (April 1991), pp. 336-366.

26. My thinking on this matter has been markedly influenced by Sean Lynn-Jones, in his June 19, 1994, correspondence with me.

27. For a short discussion of strategic trade theory, see Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of In- ternational Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Prince- ton University Press, 1987), pp. 215-221. The most commonly cited reference on the subject is Paul R. Krugman, ed„ Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).

28. See Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 110-113.

29. Grieco maintains in Cooperation among Nations that realist logic should apply here. Robert Pow - ell, however, points out that "in the context of

negotiations between the European Community and the United States . . . it is difficult to at- tribute any concern for relative gains to the ef- fects that a relative loss may have on the probability of survival." Robert Powell, "Ab- solute and Relative Gains in International Rela- tions Theory," American Political Science Review, Vol . 85, No. 4 (December 1991), p. 1319, foot- note 26. I agree with Powell. It is clear from Grieco's response to Powell that Grieco includes non-military logics like strategic trade theory in the realist tent, whereas Powell and I do not. See Grieco's contribution to "The Relative-Gains Problem for International Relations," American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Septem- ber 1993), pp. 733-735.

30. Krasner, "Global Communications and Na- tional Power," pp. 336-366; Grieco, Coopera- tion among Nations; and Michael Mastanduno, "Do Relative Gains Matter? America's Re- sponse to Japanese Industrial Policy," Interna- tional Security, Vol . 16, No. 1 (Summer 1991), pp. 73-113. Also see Jonathan B. Tucker, "Partners and Rivals: A Model of International Collaboration in Advanced Technology," In- ternational Organization, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Win- ter 1991), pp. 83-120.

31. Keohane, "Institutional Theory and the Realist Challenge," [in Baldwin, Neorealism and Neo- liberalism,] p. 292.

32. For example, Keohane wrote after becoming aware of Grieco's argument about relative gains: "Under specified conditions—where mutual interests are low and relative gains are therefore particularly important to states— neoliberal theory expects neorealism to explain elements of state behavior." Keohane, Interna- tional Institutions and State Power, pp. 15-16.

33. For example, Lisa Martin writes that "scholars working in the realist tradition maintain a well-founded skepticism about the empirical impact of institutional factors on state behav- ior. This skepticism is grounded in a lack of studies that show precisely how and when in- stitutions have constrained state decision-

making." According to Oran Young, "One of the more surprising features of the emerging literature on regimes [institutions] is the rela- tive absence of sustained discussions of the sig- nificance of . . . institutions, as determinants of collective outcomes at the international level." Martin, "Institutions and Coopera- tion," p. 144; Young, International Coopera- tion, p. 206.

34. Keohane, After Hegemony, chap. 10, 35. Ibid., p. 16. 36. Ibid., p. 236. A U.S. Department of Energy re-

view of the IEA's performance in the 1980 cri- sis concluded that it had "failed to fulfill its promise." Ethan B. Kapstein, The Insecure Al- liance: Energy Crises and Western Politics Since 1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 198.

37. Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 7. 38. Martin, "Institutions and Cooperation." Mar-

tin looks closely at three other cases in Coercive Cooperation to determine the effect of institu- tions on cooperation. I have concentrated on the Falklands War case, however, because it is, by her own admission, her strongest case. See ibid., p. 96.

39. Martin does not claim that agreement would not have been possible without the EC. In- deed, she appears to concede that even with- out the EC, Britain still could have fashioned "separate bilateral agreements with each EEC member in order to gain its cooperation, [al- though] this would have involved much higher transaction costs." Martin, "Institu- tions and Cooperation," pp. 174-175. How- ever, transaction costs among the advanced industrial democracies are not very high in an era of rapid communications and permanent diplomatic establishments,

40. See Michael J. Smith, Realist Thought from We- ber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1986), chap. 1.

41. Summing up the autobiographical essays of 34 international relations scholars, Joseph Kruzel notes that "Hans Morgenthau is more fre-

quently cited than any other name in these memoirs." Joseph Kruzel, "Reflections on the Journeys," in Joseph Kruzel and James N, Rose- nau, eds., Journeys through World Politics: Auto- biographical Reflections of Thirty-four Academic Travelers (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 505. Although "Morgenthau is often cited, many of the references in these pages are negative in tone. He seems to have inspired his critics even more than his supporters." Ibid.

42, See Keith L. Shimko, "Realism, Neorealism, and American Liberalism," Review of Politics, Vol . 54, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 281-301.

43. Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 201. Nevertheless, Keith Shimko convincingly argues that the shift within real- ism, away from Morgenthau's belief that states are motivated by an unalterable will to power, and toward Waltz's view that states are moti- vated by the desire for security, provides "a residual, though subdued optimism, or at least a possible basis for optimism [about interna- tional politics). The extent to which this opti- mism is stressed or suppressed varies, but it is there if one wants it to be." Shimko, "Real- ism, Neorealism, and American Liberalism," p. 297. Realists like Stephen Van Evera, for ex- ample, point out that although states operate in a dangerous world, they can take steps to dampen security competition and minimize

the danger of war. See Van Evera, Causes of War [Vol. II: National Misperception and the Origins of War, forthcoming],

44. See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional De- fense (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1944), especially pp. 153-190. See also Samuel P, Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (New York: Vintage Books, 1964).

45. It should be emphasized that many realists have strong moral preferences and are driven by deep moral convictions. Realism is not a normative theory, however, and it provides no criteria for moral judgment. Instead, realism merely seeks to explain how the world works. Virtually all realists would prefer a world with- out security competition and war, but they be- lieve that goal is unrealistic given the structure of the international system. See, for example, Robert G. Gilpin, "The Richness of the Tradi- tion of Political Realism," in Keohane, [ed.,j Neorealism and Its Critics, [New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1986) p, 321.

46. Realism's treatment of states as billiard balls of different sizes tends to raise the hackles of comparative politics scholars, who believe that domestic political and economic factors matter- greatly for explaining foreign policy behavior.

WAR AND STRIFE

Warfare and military intervention continue to be central problems of international relations. In Essentials of International Relations, Mingst examines how the ad- herents to the contending approaches attempt to manage insecurity. She explains why wars occur and presents a typology of different kinds of warfare.

Two of the readings in this section address a core issue: the relationship be- tween the use of force and politics. Excerpts from classic books by Carl von Clause- witz, On War (originally published in the 1830s), and Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966), remind us that warfare is not simply a matter of brute force; war needs to be understood as a continuation of political bargaining. In the most influential treatise on warfare ever written, the Prussian General von Clause- witz reminded the generation that followed the devastating Napoleonic Wars that armed conflict should not be considered a blind, all-out struggle governed by the logic of military operations. Rather, he said, the conduct of war had to be subordi- nated to its political objectives. These ideas resonated strongly with American strategic thinkers of Schelling's era, who worried that military plans for total nu- clear war would outstrip the ability of political leaders to control them. Schelling, a Harvard professor who also spent time at the RAND Corporation advising the U.S. Air Force on its nuclear weapons strategy, explained that political bargaining and risk taking, not military victory, lay at the heart of the use and threat of force in the nuclear era.

Like Schelling, Robert Jervis drew on mathematical game theory and theories of bargaining in his influential 1978 article on the 'security dilemma," which ex- plains how war can arise even among stales that seek only to defend themselves. Like the realists, these analysts are interested in studying how states' strategies for survival can lead to tragic results. However, they go beyond the realists in examin- ing how differences in bargaining tactics and perceptions can intensify or mitigate the struggle for security.

The advent of nuclear weapons has led to a lively debate over the relationship between nuclear proliferation and international system stability. Kenneth Waltz

295

and Scott Sagan took up the debate in their 1995 book The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate. A new edition of the book was released in 2003 and includes a new essay in which Waltz contends that nuclear weapons held by both India and Pakistan insure the peace, whereas Sagan warns that nuclear deterrence between the two enemies is destabilizing and will eventually break down.

University of Rochester professor John Mueller argues in a 1988 article that extremely costly major wars like World Wars I and II have become obsolete. Nonetheless, though this view turns out to be correct, it cannot be ignored that war and military competition continue to engulf many parts of the developing world. An excerpt from Michael Doyle's Ways of War and Peace (1997) shows the rele- vance of the realist, liberal, and radical perspectives to understanding the practical and ethical dilemmas of military intervention in such conflicts.

The 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century have been marked by both ethnic conflicts and terrorism. Barry Posen shows how realist theories of con- flict in anarchy, long used by scholars to understand the dynamics of international wars, can also illuminate the strategic incentives that intensify ethnic rivalries when states or empires collapse. Posen draws heavily on the seminal ideas in Jervis's "security dilemma" article. This shows how fundamental theoretical con- cepts, grounded in a powerful logical framework, can serve as general-purpose tools to be adapted to new practical problems as the current agenda of interna- tional issues changes.

While terrorism has long been used as a substitute for war, the attention of the international community has been drawn to this phenomenon following the Sep- tember 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Audrey Kurth Cronin of the Congressional Research Service advises policymakers how to respond to nonstate threats by emphasizing coordinated intelligence, law enforce- ment, economic sanctions, financial controls, public diplomacy, and coalition building. Relying on the old institutions of statecraft is apt to be dangerous. Robert Pope of the University of Chicago conducts empirical research for the American Political Science Review piece excerpted below, gathering an extensive systemic data set on perhaps the least understood aspect of terrorism, suicide terrorism. Contrary to conventional expectations, he finds that suicide bombers cannot be di- rectly tied to Islamic fundamentalism, but rather share a common goal to rid their homelands of domination by foreign democratic regimes. Responding to suicide terrorists by trying to reassert this dominance is only apt to increase the number of terrorists, says Pape.

C A R L V O N C L A U S E W I T Z

War as an Instrument of Policy

* * * War is only a part of political intercourse, therefore by no means an independent thing in itself.

We know, certainly, that War is only called forth through the political intercourse of Govern- ments and Nations; but in general it is supposed that such intercourse is broken off by War, and that a totally different state of things ensues, sub- ject to no laws but its own.

We maintain, on the contrary, that War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means. We say mixed with other means in order thereby to maintain at the same time that this political intercourse does not cease by the War itself, is not changed into some- thing quite different, but that, in its essence, it con- tinues to exist, whatever may be the form of the means which it uses, and that the chief lines on which the events of the War progress, and to which they are attached, are only the general features of policy which run all through the War until peace takes place. And how can we conceive it to be oth- erwise? Does the cessation of diplomatic notes stop the political relations between different Nations and Governments? Is not War merely another kind of writing and language for political thoughts? It has certainly a grammar of its own, but its logic is not peculiar to itself.

Accordingly, War can never be separated from political intercourse, and if, in the consideration of the matter, this is done in any way, all the threads of the different relations are, to a certain extent, broken, and we have before us a senseless thing without an object.

This kind of idea would be indispensable even if War was perfect War, the perfectly unbridled el-

From Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), bk. 5, chap. 6. The author's notes have been omitted.

ement of hostility, for all the circumstances on which it rests, and which determine its leading fea- tures, viz. our own power, the enemy's power, Al- lies on both sides, the characteristics of the people and their Governments respectively, etc.—are they not of a political nature, and are they not so inti- mately connected with the whole political inter- course that it is impossible to separate them? But this view is doubly indispensable if we reflect that real War is no such consistent effort tending to an extreme, as it should be according to the abstract idea, but a half-and-half thing, a contradiction in itself; that, as such, it cannot follow its own laws, but must be looked upon as a part of another whole—and this whole is policy.

Policy in making use of War avoids all those rigorous conclusions which proceed from its na- ture; it troubles itself little about final possibilities, confining its attention to immediate probabilities. If such uncertainty in the whole action ensues therefrom, if it thereby becomes a sort of game, the policy of each Cabinet places its confidence in the belief that in this game it will surpass its neighbour in skill and sharp-sightedness.

Thus policy makes out of the all-overpowering element of War a mere instrument, changes the tremendous battle-sword, which should be lifted with both hands and the whole power of the body to strike once for all, into a light handy weapon, which is even sometimes nothing more than a rapier to exchange thrusts and feints and parries.

Thus the contradictions in which man, natu- rally timid, becomes involved by War may be solved, if we choose to accept this as a solution.

If War belongs to policy, it wi l l naturally take its character from thence. If policy is grand and powerful, so also wil l be the War, and this may be carried to the point at which War attains to its ab- solute form.

In this way of viewing the subject, therefore, we

need not shut out of sight the absolute form of War, we rather keep it continually in view in the background.

Only through this kind of view War recovers unity; only by it can we see all Wars as things of one kind; and it is only through it that the judge- ment can obtain the true and perfect basis and point of view from which great plans may be traced out and determined upon.

It is true the political element does not sink deep into the details of War. Vedettes are not planted, patrols do not make their rounds from political considerations; but small as is its influence in this respect, it is great in the formation of a plan for a whole War, or a campaign, and often even for a battle.

For this reason we were in no hurry to establish this view at the commencement. While engaged with particulars, it would have given us little help, and, on the other hand, would have distracted our attention to a certain extent; in the plan of a War or campaign it is indispensable.

There is, upon the whole, nothing more im- portant in life than to find out the right point of view from which things should be looked at and judged of, and then to keep to that point; for we can only apprehend the mass of events in their unity from one standpoint; and it is only the keeping to one point of view that guards us from inconsistency.

If, therefore, in drawing up a plan of a War, it is not allowable to have a two-fold or three-fold point of view, from which things may be looked at, now with the eye of a soldier, then with that of an administrator, and then again with that of a politi- cian, etc., then the next question is, whether policy is necessarily paramount and everything else sub- ordinate to it.

That policy unites in itself, and reconciles all the interests of internal administrations, even those of humanity, and whatever else are rational subjects of consideration is presupposed, for it is nothing in itself, except a mere representative and exponent of all these interests towards other States. That policy may take a false direction, and may promote unfairly the ambitious ends, the private

interests, the vanity of rulers, does not concern us here; for, under no circumstances can the Art of War be regarded as its preceptor, and we can only look at policy here as the representative of the in- terests generally of the whole community.

The only question, therefore, is whether in framing plans for a War the political point of view should give way to the purely military (if such a point is conceivable), that is to say, should disap- pear altogether, or subordinate itself to it, or whether the political is to remain the ruling point of view and the military to be considered subordi- nate to it.

That the political point of view should end completely when War begins is only conceivable in contests which are Wars of life and death, from pure hatred: as Wars are in reality, they are, as we before said, only the expressions or manifestations of policy itself. The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be contrary to common sense, for policy has declared the War; it is the intelligent faculty, War only the instrument, and not the reverse. The subordination of the mili- tary point of view to the political is, therefore, the only thing which is possible.

If we reflect on the nature of real War, and call to mind what has been said, that every War should be viewed above all things according to the probabil- ity of its character, and its leading features as they are to be deduced from the political forces and pro- portions, and that often—indeed we may safely af- firm, in our days, almost always—War is to be regarded as an organic whole, from which the sin- gle branches are not to be separated, in which therefore every individual activity flows into the whole, and also has its origin in the idea of this whole, then it becomes certain and palpable to us that the superior standpoint for the conduct of the War, from which its leading lines must proceed, can be no other than that of policy.

From this point of view the plans come, as it were, out of a cast; the apprehension of them and the judgement upon them become easier and more natural, our convictions respecting them gain in force, motives are more satisfying and history more intelligible.

At all events from this point of view there is no longer in the nature of things a necessary conflict between the political and military interests, and where it appears it is therefore to be regarded as imperfect knowledge only. That policy makes de- mands on the War which it cannot respond to, would be contrary to the supposition that it knows the instrument which it is going to use, therefore, contrary to a natural and indispensable supposi- tion. But if policy judges correctly of the march of military events, it is entirely its affair to determine what are the events and what the direction of events most favourable to the ultimate and great end of the War.

In one word, the Art of War in its highest point of view is policy, but, no doubt, a policy which fights battles instead of writing notes.

According to this view, to leave a great military enterprise or the plan for one, to a purely military judgement and decision is a distinction which can- not be allowed, and is even prejudicial; indeed, it is an irrational proceeding to consult professional soldiers on the plan of a War, that they may give a purely military opinion upon what the Cabinet ought to do; but still more absurd is the demand of Theorists that a statement of the available means of War should be laid before the General, that he may draw out a purely military plan for the War or for a campaign in accordance with those means. Experi- ence in general also teaches us that notwithstand- ing the multifarious branches and scientific character of military art in the present day, still the leading outlines of a War are always determined by the Cabinet, that is, if we would use technical lan- guage, by a political not a military organ.

This is perfectly natural. None of the principal plans which are required for a War can be made without an insight into the political relations; and, in reality, when people speak, as they often do, of the prejudicial influence of policy on the conduct of a War, they say in reality something very differ- ent to what they intend. It is not this influence but the policy itself which should be found fault with. If policy is right, that is, if it succeeds in hitting the object, then it can only act with advantage on the War. If this influence of policy causes a divergence

from the object, the cause is only to be looked for in a mistaken policy.

It is only when policy promises itself a wrong effect from certain military means and measures, an effect opposed to their nature, that it can exer- cise a prejudicial effect on War by the course it pre- scribes. Just as a person in a language with which he is not conversant sometimes says what he does not intend, so policy, when intending right, may often order things which do not tally with its own views.

This has happened times without end, and it shows that a certain knowledge of the nature of War is essential to the management of political intercourse.

But before going further, we must guard our- selves against a false interpretation of which this is very susceptible. We are far from holding the opin- ion that a War Minister smothered in official pa- pers, a scientific engineer, or even a soldier who has been well tried in the field, would, any of them, necessarily make the best Minister of State where the Sovereign does not act for himself; or, in other words, we do not mean to say that this acquain- tance with the nature of War is the principal quali- fication for a War Minister; elevation, superiority of mind, strength of character, these are the princi- pal qualifications which he must possess; a knowl- edge of War may be supplied in one way or the other. * * *

We shall now conclude with some reflections de- rived from history.

In the last decade of the past century, when that remarkable change in the Art of War in Eu- rope took place by which the best Armies found that a part of their method of War had become ut- terly unserviceable, and events were brought about of a magnitude far beyond what any one had any previous conception of, it certainly appeared that a false calculation of everything was to be laid to the charge of the Art of War. * * *

* * *

But is it true that the real surprise by which men's minds were seized was confined to the conduct of

War, and did not rather relate to policy itself? That is: Did the ill success proceed from the influence of policy on the War, or from a wrong policy itself?

The prodigious effects of the French Revolu- tion abroad were evidendy brought about much less through new methods and views introduced by the French in the conduct of War than through the changes which it wrought in state-craft and civil administration, in the character of Governments, in the condition of the people, etc. That other Gov- ernments took a mistaken view of all these things; that they endeavoured, with their ordinary means, to hold their own against forces of a novel kind and overwhelming in strength—all that was a blunder in policy.

Would it have been possible to perceive and mend this error by a scheme for the War from a purely military point of view? Impossible. For if there had been a philosophical strategist, who merely from the nature of the hostile elements had foreseen all the consequences, and prophesied re- mote possibilities, still it would have been practi- cally impossible to have turned such wisdom to account.

If policy had risen to a just appreciation of the forces which had sprung up in France, and of the new relations in the political state of Europe, it might have foreseen the consequences which must follow in respect to the great features of War, and it was only in this way that it could arrive at a cor- rect view of the extent of the means required as well as of the best use to make of those means.

We may therefore say, that the twenty years' victories of the Revolution are chiefly to be as- cribed to the erroneous policy of the Governments by which it was opposed.

It is true these errors first displayed themselves in the War, and the events of the War completely disappointed the expectations which policy enter- tained. But this did not take place because policy neglected to consult its military advisers. That Art of War in which the politician of the day could be- lieve, namely, that derived from the reality of War at that time, that which belonged to the policy of the day, that familiar instrument which policy had hitherto used—that Art of War, I say, was natu- rally involved in the error of policy, and therefore could not teach it anything better. It is true that War itself underwent important alterations both in its nature and forms, which brought it nearer to its absolute form; but these changes were not brought about because the French Government had, to a certain extent, delivered itself from the leading- strings of policy; they arose from an altered policy, produced by the French Revolution, not only in France, but over the rest of Europe as well. This policy had called forth other means and other powers, by which it became possible to conduct War with a degree of energy which could not have been thought of otherwise.

Therefore, the actual changes in the Art of War are a consequence of alterations in policy; and, so far from being an argument for the possible sepa- ration of the two, they are, on the contrary, very strong evidence of the intimacy of their connexion.

Therefore, once more: War is an instrument of policy; it must necessarily bear its character, it must measure with its scale: the conduct of War, in its great features, is therefore policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen, but does not on that account cease to think according to its own laws.

T H O M A S C . S C H E L L I N G

The Diplomacy of Violence

The usual distinction between diplomacy and force is not merely in the instruments, words or bullets, but in the relation between adver- saries—in the interplay of motives and the role of communication, understandings, compromise, and restraint. Diplomacy is bargaining: it seeks outcomes that, though not ideal for either party, are better for both than some of the alternatives. In diplomacy each party somewhat controls what the other wants, and can get more by compromise, ex- change, or collaboration than by taking things in his own hands and ignoring the other's wishes. The bargaining can be polite or rude, entail threats as well as offers, assume a status quo or ignore all rights and privileges, and assume mistrust rather than trust. But whether polite or impolite, con- structive or aggressive, respectful or vicious, whether it occurs among friends or antagonists and whether or not there is a basis for trust and goodwill, there must be some common interest, if only in the avoidance of mutual damage, and an awareness of the need to make the other party pre- fer an outcome acceptable to oneself.

Wi th enough military force a country may not need to bargain. Some things a country wants it can take, and some things it has it can keep, by sheer strength, skill and ingenuity. It can do this forcibly, accommodating only to opposing strength, skill, and ingenuity and without trying to appeal to an enemy's wishes. Forcibly a country can repel and expel, penetrate and occupy, seize, exterminate, disarm and disable, confine, deny ac- cess, and directly frustrate intrusion or attack. It can, that is, if it has enough strength. "Enough" de- pends on how much an opponent has.

There is something else, though, that force can

From Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. I. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

do. It is less military, less heroic, less impersonal, and less unilateral; it is uglier, and has received less attention in Western military strategy. In addition to seizing and holding, disarming and confining, penetrating and obstructing, and all that, military force can be used to hurt. In addition to taking and protecting things of value it can destroy value. In addition to weakening an enemy militarily it can cause an enemy plain suffering,

Pain and shock, loss and grief, privation and horror are always in some degree, sometimes in terrible degree, among the results of warfare; but in traditional military science they are incidental, they are not the object. If violence can be done in- cidentally, though, it can also be done purposely. The power to hurt can be counted among the most impressive attributes of military force.

Hurting, unlike forcible seizure or self-defense, is not unconcerned with the interest of others. It is measured in the suffering it can cause and the vic- tims' motivation to avoid it. Forcible action wil l work against weeds or floods as well as against armies, but suffering requires a victim that can feel pain or has something to lose, To inflict suffering gains nothing and saves nothing directly; it can only make people behave to avoid it. The only pur- pose, unless sport or revenge, must be to influence somebody's behavior, to coerce his decision or choice. To be coercive, violence has to be antici- pated. And it has to be avoidable by accommoda- tion. The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.

The Contrast of Brute Force with Coercion

There is a difference between taking what you want and making someone give it to you, between

fending off assault and making someone afraid to assault you, between holding what people are try- ing to take and making them afraid to take it, be- tween losing what someone can forcibly take and giving it up to avoid risk or damage. It is the dif- ference between defense and deterrence, between brute force and intimidation, between conquest and blackmail, between action and threats. It is the difference between the unilateral, "undiplomatic" recourse to strength, and coercive diplomacy based on the power to hurt.

The contrasts are several. The purely "military" or "undiplomatic" recourse to forcible action is concerned with enemy strength, not enemy inter- ests; the coercive use of the power to hurt, though, is the very exploitation of enemy wants and fears. And brute strength is usually measured relative to enemy strength, the one directly opposing the other, while the power to hurt is typically not re- duced by the enemy's power to hurt in return. Op- posing strengths may cancel each other, pain and grief do not. The willingness to hurt, the credibility of a threat, and the ability to exploit the power to hurt will indeed depend on how much the adver- sary can hurt in return; but there is little or noth- ing about an adversary's pain or grief that directly reduces one's own. Two sides cannot both over- come each other with superior strength; they may both be able to hurt each other. With strength they can dispute objects of value; with sheer violence they can destroy them.

And brute force succeeds when it is used, whereas the power to hurt is most successful when held in reserve. It is the threat of damage, or of more damage to come, that can make someone yield or comply. It is latent violence that can influ- ence someone's choice—violence that can still be withheld or inflicted, or that a victim believes can be withheld or inflicted. The threat of pain tries to structure someone's motives, while brute force tries to overcome his strength. Unhappily, the power to hurt is often communicated by some per- formance of it. Whether it is sheer terroristic vio- lence to induce an irrational response, or cool premeditated violence to persuade somebody that you mean it and may do it again, it is not the pain

and damage itself but its influence on somebody's behavior that matters. It is the expectation of more violence that gets the wanted behavior, if the power to hurt can get it at all.

To exploit a capacity for hurting and inflicting damage one needs to know what an adversary trea- sures and what scares him and one needs the ad- versary to understand what behavior of his will cause the violence to be inflicted and what will cause it to be withheld. The victim has to know what is wanted, and he may have to be assured of what is not wanted. The pain and suffering have to appear contingent on his behavior; it is not alone the threat that is effective—the threat of pain or loss if he fails to comply—but the corresponding assurance, possibly an implicit one, that he can avoid the pain or loss if he does comply. The prospect of certain death may stun him, but it gives him no choice.

Coercion by threat of damage also requires that our interests and our opponent's not be absolutely opposed. If his pain were our greatest delight and our satisfaction his greatest woe, we would just proceed to hurt and to frustrate each other. It is when his pain gives us little or no satisfaction com- pared with what he can do for us, and the action or inaction that satisfies us costs him less than the pain we can cause, that there is room for coercion. Coercion requires finding a bargain, arranging for him to be better off doing what we want—worse off not doing what we want—when he takes the threatened penalty into account.

It is this capacity for pure damage, pure vio- lence, that is usually associated with the most vi- cious labor disputes, with racial disorders, with civil uprisings and their suppression, with racke- teering. It is also the power to hurt rather than brute force that we use in dealing with criminals; we hurt them afterward, or threaten to, for their misdeeds rather than protect ourselves with cor- dons of electric wires, masonry walls, and armed guards. Jail, of course, can be either forcible re- straint or threatened privation; if the object is to keep criminals out of mischief by confinement, success is measured by how many of them are got- ten behind bars, but if the object is to threaten pri-

vation, success will be measured by how few have to be put behind bars and success then depends on the subject's understanding of the consequences. Pure damage is what a car threatens when it tries to hog the road or to keep its rightful share, or to go first through an intersection. A tank or a bulldozer can force its way regardless of others' wishes; the rest of us have to threaten damage, usually mutual damage, hoping the other driver values his car or his limbs enough to give way, hoping he sees us, and hoping he is in control of his own car. The threat of pure damage will not work against an un- manned vehicle.

This difference between coercion and brute force is as often in the intent as in the instrument. To hunt down Comanches and to exterminate them was brute force; to raid their villages to make them behave was coercive diplomacy, based on the power to hurt. The pain and loss to the Indians might have looked much the same one way as the other; the difference was one of purpose and effect. If Indians were killed because they were in the way, or somebody wanted their land, or the authorities despaired of making them behave and could not confine them and decided to exterminate them, that was pure unilateral force. If some Indians were killed to make other Indians behave, that was coer- cive violence—or intended to be, whether or not it was effective. The Germans at Verdun perceived themselves to be chewing up hundreds of thou- sands of French soldiers in a gruesome "meat- grinder." If the purpose was to eliminate a military obstacle—the French infantryman, viewed as a military "asset" rather than as a warm human be- ing—the offensive at Verdun was a unilateral exer- cise of military force. If instead the object was to make the loss of young men—not of impersonal "effectives," but of sons, husbands, fathers, and the pride of French manhood—so anguishing as to be unendurable, to make surrender a welcome relief and to spoil the foretaste of an Allied victory, then it was an exercise in coercion, in applied violence, intended to offer relief upon accommodation. And of course, since any use of force tends to be brutal, thoughtless, vengeful, or plain obstinate, the mo- tives themselves can be mixed and confused. The

fact that heroism and brutality can be either coer- cive diplomacy or a contest in pure strength does not promise that the distinction will be made, and the strategies enlightened by the distinction, every time some vicious enterprise gets launched.

The contrast between brute force and coercion is illustrated by two alternative strategies attributed to Genghis Khan. Early in his career he pursued the war creed of the Mongols: the vanquished can never be the friends of the victors, their death is necessary for the victor's safety. This was the uni- lateral extermination of a menace or a liability. The turning point of his career, according to Lynn Montross, came later when he discovered how to use his power to hurt for diplomatic ends. "The great Khan, who was not inhibited by the usual mercies, conceived the plan of forcing captives— women, children, aged fathers, favorite sons—to march ahead of his army as the first potential vic- tims of resistance."1 Live captives have often proved more valuable than enemy dead; and the technique discovered by the Khan in his maturity remains contemporary. North Koreans and Chi- nese were reported to have quartered prisoners of war near strategic targets to inhibit bombing at- tacks by United Nations aircraft. Hostages repre- sent the power to hurt in its purest form.

Coercive Violence in Warfare

This distinction between the power to hurt and the power to seize or hold forcibly is important in modern war, both big war and little war, hypothet- ical war and real war. For many years the Greeks and the Turks on Cyprus could hurt each other in- definitely but neither could quite take or hold forcibly what they wanted or protect themselves from violence by physical means. The Jews in Palestine could not expel the British in the late 1940s but they could cause pain and fear and frustration through terrorism, and eventually influence somebody's decision. The brutal war in Algeria was more a contest in pure violence than in military strength; the question was who would first find the pain and degradation unendurable. The French troops preferred—indeed they continually

tried—to make it a contest of strength, to pit mili- tary force against the nationalists' capacity for ter- ror, to exterminate or disable the nationalists and to screen off the nationalists from the victims of their violence. But because in civil war terrorists commonly have access to victims by sheer physical propinquity, the victims and their properties could not be forcibly defended and in the end the French troops themselves resorted, unsuccessfully, to a war of pain.

Nobody believes that the Russians can take Hawaii from us, or New York, or Chicago, but no- body doubts that they might destroy people and buildings in Hawaii, Chicago, or New York. Whether the Russians can conquer West Germany in any meaningful sense is questionable; whether they can hurt it terribly is not doubted. That the United States can destroy a large part of Russia is universally taken for granted; that the United States can keep from being badly hurt, even devas- tated, in return, or can keep Western Europe from being devastated while itself destroying Russia, is at best arguable; and it is virtually out of the question that we could conquer Russia territorially and use its economic assets unless it were by threatening disaster and inducing compliance. It is the power to hurt, not military strength in the traditional sense, that inheres in our most impressive military capabilities at the present time [1966]. We have a Department of Defense but emphasize retaliation— "to return evil for evil" (synonyms: requital, reprisal, revenge, vengeance, retribution). And it is pain and violence, not force in the traditional sense, that inheres also in some of the least impres- sive military capabilities of the present time—the plastic bomb, the terrorist's bullet, the burnt crops, and the tortured farmer.

War appears to be, or threatens to be, not so much a contest of strength as one of endurance, nerve, obstinacy, and pain. It appears to be, and threatens to be, not so much a contest of military strength as a bargaining process—dirty, extortion- ate, and often quite reluctant bargaining on one side or both—nevertheless a bargaining process.

The difference cannot quite be expressed as one between the use of force and the threat of

force. The actions involved in forcible accomplish- ment, on the one hand, and in fulfilling a threat, on the other, can be quite different. Sometimes the most effective direct action inflicts enough cost or pain on the enemy to serve as a threat, sometimes not. The United States threatens the Soviet Union with virtual destruction of its society in the event of a surprise attack on the United States; a hundred million deaths are awesome as pure damage, but they are useless in stopping the Soviet at tack- especially if the threat is to do it all afterward any- way. So it is worth while to keep the concepts dis- tinct—to distinguish forcible action from the threat of pain—recognizing that some actions serve as both a means of forcible accomplishment and a means of inflicting pure damage, some do not. Hostages tend to entail almost pure pain and damage, as do all forms of reprisal after the fact. Some modes of self-defense may exact so little in blood or treasure as to entail negligible violence; and some forcible actions entail so much violence that their threat can be effective by itself.

The power to hurt, though it can usually ac- complish nothing directly, is potentially more ver- satile than a straightforward capacity for forcible accomplishment. By force alone we cannot even lead a horse to water—we have to drag h i m - - much less make him drink. Any affirmative action, any collaboration, almost anything but physical exclusion, expulsion, or extermination, requires that an opponent or a victim do something, even if only to stop or get out. The threat of pain and damage may make him want to do it, and anything he can do is potentially susceptible to inducement. Brute force can only accomplish what requires no collaboration. The principle is illustrated by a tech- nique of unarmed combat: one can disable a man by various stunning, fracturing, or killing blows, but to take him to jail one has to exploit the man's own efforts. "Come-along" holds are those that threaten pain or disablement, giving relief as long as the victim complies, giving him the option of using his own legs to get to jail.

We have to keep in mind, though, that what is pure pain, or the threat of it, at one level of deci- sion can be equivalent to brute force at another

level. Churchill was worried, during the early bombing raids on London in 1940, that Londoners might panic. Against people the bombs were pure violence, to induce their undisciplined evasion; to Churchill and the government, the bombs were a cause of inefficiency, whether they spoiled trans- port and made people late to work or scared peo- ple and made them afraid to work. Churchill's decisions were not going to be coerced by the fear of a few casualties. Similarly on the battlefield: tac- tics that frighten soldiers so that they run, duck their heads, or lay down their arms and surrender represent coercion based on the power to hurt; to the top command, which is frustrated but not co- erced, such tactics are part of the contest in mili- tary discipline and strength.

The fact that violence—pure pain and dam- age—can be used or threatened to coerce and to deter, to intimidate and to blackmail, to demoral- ize and to paralyze, in a conscious process of dirty bargaining, does not by any means imply that vio- lence is not often wanton and meaningless or, even when purposive, in danger of getting out of hand. Ancient wars were often quite "total" for the loser, the men being put to death, the women sold as slaves, the boys castrated, the cattle slaughtered, and the buildings leveled, for the sake of revenge, justice, personal gain, or merely custom. If an en- emy bombs a city, by design or by carelessness, we usually bomb his if we can. In the excitement and fatigue of warfare, revenge is one of the few satis- factions that can be savored; and justice can often be construed to demand the enemy's punishment, even if it is delivered with more enthusiasm than justice requires. When Jerusalem fell to the Cru- saders in 1099 the ensuing slaughter was one of the bloodiest in military chronicles, "The men of the West literally waded in gore, their march to the church of the Holy Sepulcher being gruesomely likened to 'treading out the wine press' . . . . , " re- ports Montross (p. 138), who observes that these excesses usually came at the climax of the capture of a fortified post or city. "For long the assailants have endured more punishment than they were able to inflict; then once the walls are breached, pent up emotions find an outlet in murder, rape

and plunder, which discipline is powerless to pre- vent." The same occurred when Tyre fell to Alexander after a painful siege, and the phenome- non was not unknown on Pacific islands in the Second World War. Pure violence, like fire, can be harnessed to a purpose; that does not mean that behind every holocaust is a shrewd intention suc- cessfully fulfilled.

But if the occurrence of violence does not al- ways bespeak a shrewd purpose, the absence of pain and destruction is no sign that violence was idle. Violence is most purposive and most success- ful when it is threatened and not used. Successful threats are those that do not have to be carried out. By European standards, Denmark was virtually unharmed in the Second World War; it was vio- lence that made the Danes submit. Withheld vio- lence—successfully threatened violence—can look clean, even merciful. The fact that a kidnap victim is returned unharmed, against receipt of ample ransom, does not make kidnapping a nonviolent enterprise. * * *

The Strategic Role of Pain and Damage

Pure violence, nonmilitary violence, appears most conspicuously in relations between unequal coun- tries, where there is no substantial military chal- lenge and the outcome of military engagement is not in question. Hitler could make his threats con- temptuously and brutally against Austria; he could make them, if he wished, in a more refined way against Denmark. It is noteworthy that it was Hitler, not his generals, who used this kind of lan- guage; proud military establishments do not like to think of themselves as extortionists. Their favorite job is to deliver victory, to dispose of opposing military force and to leave most of the civilian vio- lence to politics and diplomacy. But if there is no room for doubt how a contest in strength will come out, it may be possible to bypass the military stage altogether and to proceed at once to the coer- cive bargaining.

A typical confrontation of unequal forces oc- curs at the end of a war, between victor and van- quished. Where Austria was vulnerable before a shot was fired, France was vulnerable after its mili- tary shield had collapsed in 1940. Surrender nego- tiations are the place where the threat of civil violence can come to the fore. Surrender negotia- tions are often so one-sided, or the potential vio- lence so unmistakable, that bargaining succeeds and the violence remains in reserve. But the fact that most of the actual damage was done during the military stage of the war, prior to victory and defeat, does not mean that violence was idle in the aftermath, only that it was latent and the threat of it successful.

Indeed, victory is often but a prerequisite to the exploitation of the power to hurt. When Xenophon was fighting in Asia Minor under Per- sian leadership, it took military strength to dis- perse enemy soldiers and occupy their lands; but land was not what the victor wanted, nor was vic- tory for its own sake.

Next day the Persian leader burned the villages to the ground, not Leaving a single house standing, so as to strike terror into the other tribes to show them what would happen if they did not give in. . . . He sent some of the prisoners into the hills and told them to say that if the inhabitants did not come down and settle in their houses to submit to him, he would burn up their villages too and destroy their crops, and they would die of hunger.2

Military victory was but the price of admission. The payoff depended upon the successful threat of violence.

* * *

The Nuclear Contribution to Terror and Violence

Man has, it is said, for the first time in history enough military power to eliminate his species from the earth, weapons against which there is no conceivable defense. War has become, it is said, so destructive and terrible that it ceases to be an in-

strument of national power. "For the first time in human history," says Max Lerner in a book whose title, The Age of Overkill, conveys the point, "men have botded up a power . . which they have thus far not dared to use."3 And Soviet military author- ities, whose party dislikes having to accommodate an entire theory of history to a single technological event, have had to reexamine a set of principles that had been given the embarrassing name of "permanently operating factors" in warfare. In- deed, our era is epitomized by words like "the first time in human history," and by the abdication of what was "permanent."

For dramatic impact these statements are splendid. Some of them display a tendency, not at all necessary, to belittle the catastrophe of earlier wars. They may exaggerate the historical novelty of deterrence and the balance of terror. More impor- tant, they do not help to identify just what is new about war when so much destructive energy can be packed in warheads at a price that permits ad- vanced countries to have them in large numbers. Nuclear warheads are incomparably more devas- tating than anything packaged before. What does that imply about war?

It is not true that for the first time in history man has the capability to destroy a large fraction, even the major part, of the human race. Japan was defenseless by August 1945. With a combination of bombing and blockade, eventually invasion, and if necessary the deliberate spread of disease, the United States could probably have exterminated the population of the Japanese islands without nu- clear weapons. It would have been a gruesome, ex- pensive, and mortifying campaign; it would have taken time and demanded persistence. But we had the economic and technical capacity to do it; and, together with the Russians or without them, we could have done the same in many populous parts of the world. Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks.

It is a grisly thing to talk about. We did not do it and it is not imaginable that we would have done

it. We had no reason; if we had had a reason, we would not have the persistence of purpose, once the fury of war had been dissipated in victory and we had taken on the task of executioner. If we and our enemies might do such a thing to each other now, and to others as well, it is not because nuclear weapons have for the first time made it feasible.

* * *

* * * In the past it has usually been the victors who could do what they pleased to the enemy. War has often been "total war" for the loser. With deadly monotony the Persians, Greeks, or Romans "put to death all men of military age, and sold the women and children into slavery," leaving the de- feated territory nothing but its name until new set- tlers arrived sometime later. But the defeated could not do the same to their victors. The boys could be castrated and sold only after the war had been won, and only on the side that lost it. The power to hurt could be brought to bear only after military strength had achieved victory. The same sequence characterized the great wars of this century; for reasons of technology and geography, military force has usually had to penetrate, to exhaust, or to collapse opposing military force—to achieve mili- tary victory—before it could be brought to bear on the enemy nation itself. The Allies in World War I could not inflict coercive pain and suffering di- rectly on the Germans in a decisive way until they could defeat the German army; and the Germans could not coerce the French people with bayonets unless they first beat the Allied troops that stood in their way. With two-dimensional warfare, there is a tendency for troops to confront each other, shielding their own lands while attempting to press into each other's. Small penetrations could not do major damage to the people; large penetra- tions were so destructive of military organization that they usually ended the military phase of the war.

Nuclear weapons make it possible to do mon- strous violence to the enemy without first achiev- ing victory. With nuclear weapons and today's means of delivery, one expects to penetrate an en- emy homeland without first collapsing his military

force. What nuclear weapons have done, or appear to do, is to promote this kind of warfare to first place. Nuclear weapons threaten to make war less military, and are responsible for the lowered status of "military victory" at the present time. Victory is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy. And it is no assurance against being terribly hurt. One need not wait until he has won the war before in- flicting "unendurable" damages on his enemy. One need not wait until he has lost the war. There was a time when the assurance of victory—false or gen- uine assurance—could make national leaders not just willing but sometimes enthusiastic about war. Not now.

Not only can nuclear weapons hurt the enemy before the war has been won, and perhaps hurt de- cisively enough to make the military engagement academic, but it is widely assumed that in a major war that is all they can do. Major war is often dis- cussed as though it would be only a contest in na- tional destruction. If this is indeed the case—if the destruction of cities and their populations has be- come, with nuclear weapons, the primary object in an all-out war—the sequence of war has been re- versed. Instead of destroying enemy forces as a prelude to imposing one's wil l on the enemy na- tion, one would have to destroy the nation as a means or a prelude to destroying the enemy forces. If one cannot disable enemy forces without virtu- ally destroying the country, the victor does not even have the option of sparing the conquered na- tion. He has already destroyed it. Even with block- ade and strategic bombing it could be supposed that a country would be defeated before it was de- stroyed, or would elect surrender before annihila- tion had gone far. In the Civi l War it could be hoped that the South would become too weak to fight before it became too weak to survive. For "all- out" war, nuclear weapons threaten to reverse this sequence.

So nuclear weapons do make a difference, marking an epoch in warfare. The difference is not just in the amount of destruction that can be ac- complished but in the role of destruction and in the decision process. Nuclear weapons can change the speed of events, the control of events, the

sequence of events, the relation of victor to van- quished, and the relation of homeland to fighting front. Deterrence rests today on the threat of pain and extinction, not just on the threat of military defeat. We may argue about the wisdom of an- nouncing "unconditional surrender" as an aim in the last major war, but seem to expect "uncon- ditional destruction" as a matter of course in an- other one.

Something like the same destruction always could be done. With nuclear weapons there is an expectation that it would be done. It is not "overkill" that is new; the American army surely had enough 30 caliber bullets to kill everybody in the world in 1945, or if it did not it could have bought them without any strain. What is new is plain "kill"—the idea that major war might be just a contest in the killing of countries, or not even a contest but just two parallel exercises in devastation.

That is the difference nuclear weapons make. At least they may make that difference. They also may not. If the weapons themselves are vulnerable to attack, or the machines that carry them, a suc- cessful surprise might eliminate the opponent's means of retribution. That an enormous explosion can be packaged in a single bomb does not by itself guarantee that the victor will receive deadly pun- ishment. Two gunfighters facing each other in a Western town had an unquestioned capacity to kill one another; that did not guarantee that both would die in a gunfight—only the slower of the two. Less deadly weapons, permitting an injured one to shoot back before he died, might have been more conducive to a restraining balance of terror, or of caution. The very efficiency of nuclear weapons could make them ideal for starting war, if they can suddenly eliminate the enemy's capability to shoot back.

And there is a contrary possibility: that nuclear weapons are not vulnerable to attack and prove not to be terribly effective against each other, pos- ing no need to shoot them quickly for fear they will be destroyed before they are launched, and with no task available but the systematic destruction of the enemy country and no necessary reason to do it

fast rather than slowly. Imagine that nuclear de- struction had to go slowly—that the bombs could be dropped only one per day. The prospect would look very different, something like the most terror- istic guerilla warfare on a massive scale. It happens that nuclear war does not have to go slowLy; but it may also not have to go speedily. The mere exis- tence of nuclear weapons does not itself determine that everything must go off in a blinding flash, any more than that it must go slowly. Nuclear weapons do not simplify things quite that much.

* * *

War no longer looks like just a contest of strength. War and the brink of war are more a contest of nerve and risk-taking, of pain and endurance. Small wars embody the threat of a larger war; they are not just military engagements but "crisis diplo- macy." The threat of war has always been some- where underneath international diplomacy, but for Americans it is now much nearer the surface. Like the threat of a strike in industrial relations, the threat of divorce in a family dispute, or the threat of bolting the party at a political convention, the threat of violence continuously circumscribes in- ternational politics. Neither strength nor goodwill procures immunity.

Military strategy can no longer be thought of, as it could for some countries in some eras, as the science of military victory. It is now equally, if not more, the art of coercion, of intimidation and de- terrence. The instruments of war are more puni- tive than acquisitive. Military strategy, whether we like it or not, has become the diplomacy of violence.

NOTES 1. Lynn Montross, War Through the Ages (3d ed.

New York, Harper and Brothers, I960), p. 146. 2. Xenophon, The Persian Expedition, Rex Warner,

transl. (Baltimore, I'cnguin Books, 1949), p. 272. "The 'rational' goal of the threat of vio- lence," says H. L. Nieburg, "is an accommoda- tion of interests, not the provocation of actual

violence. Similarly the 'rational' goal of actual violence is demonstration of the will and capa- bility of action, establishing a measure of the credibility of future threats, not the exhaustion

of that capability in unlimited conflict." "Uses of Violence," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 7 (1963), 44.

3. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 47.

R O B E R T J E R V I S

Cooperation under the Security Dilemma

1. Anarchy and the Security Dilemma

The lack of an international sovereign not only permits wars to occur, but also makes it difficult for states that are satisfied with the status quo to arrive at goals that they recognize as being in their common interest. Because there are no institutions or authorities that can make and enforce interna- tional laws, the policies of cooperation that will bring mutual rewards if others cooperate may bring disaster if they do not. Because states are aware of this, anarchy encourages behavior that leaves all concerned worse off than they could be, even in the extreme case in which all states would like to freeze the status quo, This is true of the men in Rousseau's "Stag Hunt." If they cooperate to trap the stag, they will all eat well. But if one per- son defects to chase a rabbit—which he likes less than stag—none of the others will get anything. Thus, all actors have the same preference order, and there is a solution that gives each his first choice: (1) cooperate and trap the stag (the inter- national analogue being cooperation and disarma- ment); (2) chase a rabbit while others remain at their posts (maintain a high level of arms while others are disarmed); (3) all chase rabbits (arms competition and high risk of war); and (4) stay at the original position while another chases a rabbit (being disarmed while others are armed). Unless

From World Politics 30, no. 2 (January 1978): 167-214. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

each person thinks that the others will cooperate, he himself will not. And why might he fear that any other person would do something that would sac- rifice his own first choice? The other might not un- derstand the situation, or might not be able to control his impulses if he saw a rabbit, or might fear that some other member of the group is unre- liable, If the person voices any of these suspicions, others are more likely to fear that he will defect, thus making them more likely to defect, thus mak- ing it more rational for him to defect. Of course in this simple case—and in many that are more real- istic—there are a number of arrangements that could permit cooperation. But the main point re- mains: although actors may know that they seek a common goal, they may not be able to reach it.

Even when there is a solution that is everyone's first choice, the international case is characterized by three difficulties not present in the Stag Hunt. First, to the incentives to defect given above must be added the potent fear that even if the other state now supports the status quo, it may become dissat- isfied later. No matter how much decision makers are committed to the status quo, they cannot bind themselves and their successors to the same path. Minds can be changed, new leaders can come to power, values can shift, new opportunities and dangers can arise.

The second problem arises from a possible so- lution. In order to protect their possessions, states often seek to control resources or land outside their own territory. Countries that are not self-

sufficient must try to assure that the necessary sup- plies will continue to flow in wartime. This was part of the explanation for Japan's drive into China and Southeast Asia before World War II. If there were an international authority that could guaran- tee access, this motive for control would disappear. But since there is not, even a state that would pre- fer the status quo to increasing its area of control may pursue the latter policy.

When there are believed to be tight linkages be- tween domestic and foreign policy or between the domestic politics of two states, the quest for secu- rity may drive states to interfere pre-emptively in the domestic politics of others in order to provide an ideological buffer zone. * * *

More frequently, the concern is with direct at- tack. In order to protect themselves, states seek to control, or at least to neutralize, areas on their bor- ders. But attempts to establish buffer zones can alarm others who have stakes there, who fear that undesirable precedents will be set, or who believe that their own vulnerability will be increased. When buffers are sought in areas empty of great powers, expansion tends to feed on itself in order to protect what is acquired * * *.

Though this process is most clearly visible when it involves territorial expansion, it often op- erates with the increase of less tangible power and influence. The expansion of power usually brings with it an expansion of responsibilities and com- mitments; to meet them, still greater power is re- quired. The state will take many positions that are subject to challenge, It will be involved with a wide range of controversial issues unrelated to its core values. And retreats that would be seen as normal if made by a small power would be taken as an in- dex of weakness inviting predation if made by a large one.

The third problem present in international politics but not in the Stag Hunt is the security dilemma: many of the means by which a state tries to increase its security decrease the secprity of oth- ers. In domestic society, there are several ways to increase the safety of one's person and property without endangering others. One can move to a safer neighborhood, put bars on the windows,

avoid dark streets, and keep a distance from suspi- cious-looking characters. Of course these measures are not convenient, cheap, or certain of success. But no one save criminals need be alarmed if a per- son takes them. In international politics, however, one state's gain in security often inadvertently threatens others. In explaining British policy on naval disarmament in the interwar period to the Japanese, Ramsey MacDonald said that "Nobody wanted Japan to be insecure."1 But the problem was not with British desires, but with the conse- quences of her policy. In earlier periods, too, Britain had needed a navy large enough to keep the shipping lanes open. But such a navy could not avoid being a menace to any other state with a coast that could be raided, trade that could be in- terdicted, or colonies that could be isolated. When Germany started building a powerful navy before World War I, Britain objected that it could only be an offensive weapon aimed at her. As Sir Ed- ward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, put it to King Edward VII: "If the German Fleet ever becomes su- perior to ours, the German Army can conquer this country. There is no corresponding risk of this kind to Germany; for however superior our Fleet was, no naval victory could bring us any nearer to Berlin," The English position was half correct: Ger- many's navy was an anti-British instrument. But the British often overlooked what the Germans knew full well: "in every quarrel with England, German colonies and trade were . . . hostages for England to take." Thus, whether she intended it or not, the British Navy constituted an important in- strument of coercion.2

II. What Makes Cooperation More Likely?

Given this gloomy picture, the obvious question is, why are we not all dead? Or, to put it less starkly, what kinds of variables ameliorate the impact of anarchy and the security dilemma? The working of several can be seen in terms of the Stag Hunt or re- peated plays of the Prisoner's Dilemma.3 The Pris- oner's Dilemma differs from the Stag Hunt in that there is no solution that is in the best interests of

R O B E R T JERVIS: Cooperation under the Security Dilemma 311

all the participants; there are offensive as well as defensive incentives to defect from the coalition with the others; and, if the game is to be played only once, the only rational response is to defect. But if the game is repeated indefinitely, the latter characteristic no longer holds and we can analyze the game in terms similar to those applied to the Stag Hunt. It would be in the interest of each actor to have others deprived of the power to defect; each would be willing to sacrifice this ability if oth- ers were similarly restrained. But if the others are not, then it is in the actor's interest to retain the power to defect.' The game theory matrices for these two situations are given below, with the numbers in the boxes being the order of the actor's preferences.

STAC HUNT

A

C O O P E R A T E Mtreirr

PRISONER'S DILEMMA A

C O O P E R A T E DEFE4 T

C O O P E R A T E

B D E F E C T

I i •t

•I

1 J

J

C O O P E R A T E

B DEFECT

2

2

1

•1 1

i

J

i

We can see the logical possibilities by rephras- ing our question: "Given either of the above situa- tions, what makes it more or less likely that the players will cooperate and arrive at CC?" The chances of achieving this outcome will be in- creased by: (1 ) anything that increases incentives to cooperate by increasing the gains of mutual co- operation (CC) and/or decreasing the costs the ac- tor will pay if he cooperates and the other does not (CD); (2) anything that decreases the incentives for defecting by decreasing the gains of taking advan- tage of the other (DC) and/or increasing the costs of mutual noncooperation (DD); (3) anything that increases each side's expectation that the other will cooperate.5

T H E C O S T S O P B E I N G E X P L O I T E D ( C D )

The fear of being exploited (that is, the cost of CD) most strongly drives the security dilemma; one of the main reasons why international life is not more nasty, brutish, and short is that states are not as

vulnerable as men are in a state of nature. People are easy to kil l , but as Adam Smith replied to a friend who feared that the Napoleonic Wars would ruin England, "Sir, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."* The easier it is to destroy a state, the greater the reason for it either to join a larger and more secure unit, or else to be especially suspicious of others, to require a large army, and, if condi- tions are favorable, to attack at the slightest provo- cation rather than wait to be attacked. If the failure to eat that day—be it venison or rabbit—means that he will starve, a person is likely to defect in the Stag Hunt even if he really likes venison and has a high level of trust in his colleagues. (Defection is especially likely if the others are also starving or if they know that he is.) By contrast, if the costs of CD are lower, if people are well-fed or states are re- silient, they can afford to take a more relaxed view of threats.

A relatively low cost of CD has the effect of transforming the game from one in which both players make their choices simultaneously to one in which an actor can make his choice after the other has moved. He wil l not have to defect out of fear that the other will, but can wait to see what the other will do. States that can afford to be cheated in a bargain or that cannot be destroyed by a sur- prise attack can more easily trust others and need not act at the first, and ambiguous, sign of menace. Because they have a margin of time and error, they need not match, or more than match, any others' arms in peacetime. They can mobilize in the pre- war period or even at the start of the war itself, and still survive. For example, those who opposed a crash program to develop the H-bomb felt that the U.S. margin of safety was large enough so that even if Russia managed to gain a lead in the race, Amer- ica would not be endangered. The program's advo- cates disagreed: "If we let the Russians get the super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain." 7

When the costs of CD are tolerable, not only is security easier to attain but, what is even more i m - portant here, the relatively low level of arms and relatively passive foreign policy that a status-quo power will be able to adopt are less likely to threaten others. Thus it is easier for status-quo

states to act on their common interests if they are hard to conquer. A l l other things being equal, a world of small states will feel the effects of anarchy much more than a world of large ones. Defensible borders, large size, and protection against sudden attack not only aid the state, but facilitate coopera- tion that can benefit all states.

Of course, if one state gains invulnerability by being more powerful than most others, the prob- lem will remain because its security provides a base from which it can exploit others. When the price a state will pay for D D is low, it leaves others with few hostages for its good behavior. Others who are more vulnerable will grow apprehensive, which will lead them to acquire more arms and will re- duce the chances of cooperation. The best situa- tion is one in which a state will not suffer greatly if others exploit it, for example, by cheating on an arms control agreement (that is, the costs of CD are low); but it will pay a high long-run price if co- operation with the others breaks down—for exam- ple, if agreements cease functioning or if there is a long war (that is, the costs of DD are high). The state's invulnerability is then mostly passive; it pro- vides some protection, but it cannot be used to menace others. As we will discuss below, this situa- tion is approximated when it is easier for states to defend themselves than to attack others, or when mutual deterrence obtains because neither side can protect itself.

The differences between highly vulnerable and less vulnerable states are illustrated by the contrast- ing policies of Britain and Austria after the Napoleonic Wars. Britain's geographic isolation and political stability allowed her to take a fairly relaxed view of disturbances on the Continent. Mi- nor wars and small changes in territory or in the distribution of power did not affect her vital inter- ests. An adversary who was out to overthrow the system could be stopped after he had made his in- tentions clear. And revolutions within other states were no menace, since they would not set off un- rest within England. Austria, surrounded by strong powers, was not so fortunate; her policy had to be more closely attuned to all conflicts. By the time an aggressor-state had clearly shown its colors, Aus-

tria would be gravely threatened. And foreign rev- olutions, be they democratic or nationalistic, would encourage groups in Austria to upset the ex- isting order. So it is not surprising that Metternich propounded the doctrine summarized earlier, which defended Austria's right to interfere in the internal affairs of others, and that British leaders rejected this view. Similarly, Austria wanted the Congress system to be a relatively fight one, regu- lating most disputes, The British favored a less cen- tralized system. In other words, in order to protect herself, Austria had either to threaten or to harm others, whereas Britain did not. For Austria and her neighbors the security dilemma was acute; for Britain it was not.

The ultimate cost of CD is of course loss of sovereignty. This cost can vary from situation to situation. The lower it is (for instance, because the two states have compatible ideologies, are similar ethnically, have a common culture, or because the citizens of the losing state expect economic bene- fits), the less the impact of the security dilemma; the greater the costs, the greater the impact of the dilemma. Here is another reason why extreme dif- ferences in values and ideologies exacerbate inter- national conflict.

* * *

Subjective Security Demands, Decision makers act in terms of the vulnerability they feel, which can differ from the actual situation; we must therefore examine the decision makers' subjective security requirements. Two dimensions are involved. First, even if they agree about the objective situation, people can differ about how much security they desire—or, to put it more precisely, about the price they are willing to pay to gain increments of security. The more states value their security above all else (that is, see a prohibitively high cost in CD) , the more they are likely to be sensitive to even minimal threats, and to demand high levels of arms. And if arms are positively valued because of pressures from a military-industrial complex, it will be especially hard for status-quo powers to co- operate. By contrast, the security dilemma will not

operate as strongly when pressing domestic con- cerns increase the opportunity costs of armaments. In this case, the net advantage of exploiting the other (DC) will be less, and the costs of arms races (that is, one aspect of DD) will be greater, there- fore the state will behave as though it were rela- tively invulnerable.

The second aspect of subjective security is the perception of threat (that is, the estimate of whether the other will cooperate). A state that is predisposed to see either a specific other state as an adversary, or others in general as a menace, will re- act more strongly and more quickly than a state that sees its environment as benign. Indeed, when a state believes that another not only is not likely to be an adversary, but has sufficient interests in com- mon with it to be an ally, then it will actually wel- come an increase in the other's power.

* * *

GEOGRAPHY, C O M M I T M E N T S , BELIEFS, AND SECURITY

T H R O U G H EXPANSION

* * * Situations vary in the ease or difficulty with which all states can simultaneously achieve a high degree of security. The influence of military tech- nology on this variable is the subject of the next section. Here we want to treat the impact of beliefs, geography, and commitments (many of which can be considered to be modifications of geography, since they bind states to defend areas outside their homelands). In the crowded continent of Europe, security requirements were hard to mesh. Being surrounded by powerful states, Germany's prob- lem—or the problem created by Germany—was always great and was even worse when her rela- tions with both France and Russia were bad, such as before World War I, In that case, even a status- quo Germany, if she could not change the political situation, would almost have been forced to adopt something like the Schlieffen Plan. Because she could not hold off both of her enemies, she had to be prepared to defeat one quickly and then deal with the other in a more leisurely fashion. If France or Russia stayed out of a war between the other

state and Germany, they would allow Germany to dominate the Continent (even if that was not Ger- many's aim). They therefore had to deny Germany this ability, thus making Germany less secure. Al- though Germany's arrogant and erratic behavior, coupled with the desire for an unreasonably high level of security (which amounted to the desire to escape from her geographic plight), compounded the problem, even wise German statesmen would have been hard put to gain a high degree of secu- rity without alarming their neighbors.

III. Offense, Defense, and the Security Dilemma

Another approach starts with the central point of the security dilemma—that an increase in one state's security decreases the security of others— and examines the conditions under which this proposition holds. Two crucial variables are in- volved: whether defensive weapons and policies can be distinguished from offensive ones, and whether the defense or the offense has the advan- tage. The definitions are not always clear, and many cases are difficult to judge, but these two variables shed a great deal of light on the question of whether status-quo powers will adopt compati- ble security policies. A l l the variables discussed so far leave the heart of the problem untouched. But when defensive weapons differ from offensive ones, it is possible for a state to make itself more secure without making others less secure. And when the defense has the advantage over the of- fense, a large increase in one state's security only slightly decreases the security of the others, and status-quo powers can all enjoy a high level of se- curity and largely escape from the state of nature.

O F F E N S E - D E F E N S E B A L A N C E

When we say that the offense has the advantage, we simply mean that it is easier to destroy the other's army and take its territory than it is to defend one's own. When the defense has the advantage, it is eas-

ier to protect and to hold than it is to move for- ward, destroy, and take. If effective defenses can be erected quickly, an attacker may be able to keep territory he has taken in an initial victory. Thus, the dominance of the defense made it very hard for Britain and France to push Germany out of France in World War I. But when superior defenses are difficult for an aggressor to improvise on the bat- defield and must be constructed during peacetime, they provide no direct assistance to him.

The security dilemma is at its most vicious when commitments, strategy, or technology dic- tate that the only route to security lies through ex- pansion. Status-quo powers must then act like aggressors; the fact that they would gladly agree to forego the opportunity for expansion in return for guarantees for their security has no implications for their behavior. Even if expansion is not sought as a goal in itself, there wil l be quick and drastic changes in the distribution of territory and influ- ence. Conversely, when the defense has the advan- tage, status-quo states can make themselves more secure without gravely endangering others.8 In- deed, if the defense has enough of an advantage and if the states are of roughly equal size, not only will the security dilemma cease to inhibit status- quo states from cooperating, but aggression will be next to impossible, thus rendering international anarchy relatively unimportant. If states cannot conquer each other, then the lack of sovereignty, although it presents problems of collective goods in a number of areas, no longer forces states to de- vote their primary attention to self-preservation. Although, if force were not usable, there would be fewer restraints on the use of nonmilitary in- struments, these are rarely powerful enough to threaten the vital interests of a major state.

Two questions of the offense-defense balance can be separated. First, does the state have to spend more or less than one dollar on defensive forces to offset each dollar spent by the other side on forces that could be used to attack? If the state has one dollar to spend on increasing its security, should it put it into offensive or defensive forces? Second, with a given inventory of forces, is it better to at- tack or to defend? Is there an incentive to strike

first or to absorb the other's blow? These two as- pects are often linked: if each dollar spent on of- fense can overcome each dollar spent on defense, and if both sides have the same defense budgets, then both are likely to build offensive forces and find it attractive to attack rather than to wait for the adversary to strike.

These aspects affect the security dilemma in different ways. The first has its greatest impact on arms races. If the defense has the advantage, and if the status-quo powers have reasonable subjective security requirements, they can probably avoid an arms race. Although an increase in one side's arms and security will still decrease the other's security, the former's increase will be larger than the latter's decrease. So if one side increases its arms, the other can bring its security back up to its previous level by adding a smaller amount to its forces. And if the first side reacts to this change, its increase will also be smaller than the stimulus that produced it. Thus a stable equilibrium will be reached. Shifting from dynamics to statics, each side can be quite secure with forces roughly equal to those of the other. In- deed, if the defense is much more potent than the offense, each side can be willing to have forces much smaller than the other's, and can be indiffer- ent to a wide range of the other's defense policies.

The second aspect—whether it is better to at- tack or to defend—influences short-run stability. When the offense has the advantage, a state's reac- tion to international tension will increase the chances of war. The incentives for pre-emption and the "reciprocal fear of surprise attack" in this situation have been made clear by analyses of the dangers that exist when two countries have first- strike capabilities.9 There is no way for the state to increase its security without menacing, or even at- tacking, the other. Even Bismarck, who once called preventive war "committing suicide from fear of death," said that "no government, if it regards war as inevitable even if it does not want it, would be so foolish as to leave to the enemy the choice of time and occasion and to wait for the moment which is most convenient for the enemy."10 In another arena, the same dilemma applies to the policeman in a dark alley confronting a suspected criminal

who appears to be holding a weapon. Though racism may indeed be present, the security dilemma can account for many of the tragic shoot- ings of innocent people in the ghettos.

Beliefs about the course of a war in which the offense has the advantage further deepen the secu- rity dilemma. When there are incentives to strike first, a successful attack will usually so weaken the other side that victory will be relatively quick, bloodless, and decisive. It is in these periods when conquest is possible and attractive that states consolidate power internally—for instance, by de- stroying the feudal barons—and expand exter- nally. There are several consequences that decrease the chance of cooperation among status-quo states. First, war will be profitable for the winner. The costs will be low and the benefits high. Of course, losers will suffer; the fear of losing could induce states to try to form stable cooperative arrangements, but the temptation of victory will make this particularly difficult. Second, because wars are expected to be both frequent and short, there will be incentives for high levels of arms, and quick and strong reaction to the other's increases in arms. The state cannot afford to wait until there is unambiguous evidence that the other is building new weapons. Even large states that have faith in their economic strength cannot wait, because the war will be over before their products can reach the army. Third, when wars are quick, states will have to recruit allies in advance.11 Without the op- portunity for bargaining and re-alignments during the opening stages of hostilities, peacetime diplo- macy loses a degree of the fluidity that facilitates balance-of-power policies. Because alliances must be secured during peacetime, the international sys- tem is more likely to become bipolar. It is hard to say whether war therefore becomes more or less likely, but this bipolarity increases tension between the two camps and makes it harder for status-quo states to gain the benefits of cooperation. Fourth, if wars are frequent, statesmen's perceptual thresh- olds will be adjusted accordingly and they will be quick to perceive ambiguous evidence as indicat- ing that others are aggressive. Thus, there will be more cases of status-quo powers arming against

each other in the incorrect belief that the other is hostile.

When the defense has the advantage, all the foregoing is reversed. The state that fears attack does not pre-empt—since that would be a wasteful use of its military resources—but rather prepares to receive an attack. Doing so does not decrease the security of others, and several states can do it simultaneously; the situation will therefore be stable, and status-quo powers will be able to cooperate. * * *

More is involved than short-run dynamics. When the defense is dominant, wars are likely to become stalemates and can be won only at enor- mous cost. Relatively small and weak states can hold off larger and stronger ones, or can deter at- tack by raising the costs of conquest to an unac- ceptable level. States then approach equality in what they can do to each other. Like the .45-caliber pistol in the American West, fortifications were the "great equalizer" in some periods. Changes in the status quo are less frequent and cooperation is more common wherever the security dilemma is thereby reduced.

Many of these arguments can be illustrated by the major powers' policies in the periods preceding the two world wars. Bismarck's wars surprised statesmen by showing that the offense had the ad- vantage, and by being quick, relatively cheap, and quite decisive. Falling into a common error, ob- servers projected this pattern into the future. The resulting expectations had several effects. First, states sought semi-permanent allies. In the early stages of the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III had thought that there would be plenty of time to recruit Austria to his side. Now, others were not going to repeat this mistake. Second, defense bud- gets were high and reacted quite sharply to in- creases on the other side. * * * Third, most decision makers thought that the next European war would not cost much blood and treasure.12

That is one reason why war was generally seen as inevitable and why mass opinion was so bellicose. Fourth, once war seemed likely, there were strong pressures to pre-empt. Both sides believed that whoever moved first could penetrate the other

deep enough to disrupt mobilization and thus gain an insurmountable advantage. (There was no such belief about the use of naval forces. Although Churchill made an ill-advised speech saying that if German ships "do not come out and fight in time of war they will be dug out like rats in a hole,"1 3

everyone knew that submarines, mines, and coastal fortifications made this impossible. So at the start of the war each navy prepared to defend itself rather than attack, and the short-run destabilizing forces that launched the armies toward each other did not operate.)14 Furthermore, each side knew that the other saw the situation the same way, thus increasing the perceived danger that the other would attack, and giving each added reasons to precipitate a war if conditions seemed favorable. In the long and the short run, there were thus both offensive and defensive incentives to strike. This situation casts light on the common question about German motives in 1914: "Did Germany unleash the war deliberately to become a world power or did she support Austria merely to defend a weakening ally," thereby protecting her own po- sition? 1 5 To some extent, this question is mislead- ing. Because of the perceived advantage of the offense, war was seen as the best route both to gaining expansion and to avoiding drastic loss of influence. There seemed to be no way for Ger- many merely to retain and safeguard her existing position.

Of course the war showed these beliefs to have been wrong on all points. Trenches and machine guns gave the defense an overwhelming advantage. The fighting became deadlocked and produced horrendous casualties. It made no sense for the combatants to bleed themselves to death, If they had known the power of the defense beforehand, they would have rushed for their own trenches rather than for the enemy's territory. Each side could have done this without increasing the other's incentives to strike. War might have broken out anyway, * * * but at least the pressures of time and the fear of allowing the other to get the first blow would not have contributed to this end. And, had both sides known the costs of the war, they would have negotiated much more seriously, The

obvious question is why the states did not seek a negotiated settlement as soon as the shape of the war became clear. Schlieffen had said that if his plan failed, peace should be sought.16 The answer is complex, uncertain, and largely outside of the scope of our concerns. But part of the reason was the hope and sometimes the expectation that breakthroughs could be made and the dominance of the offensive restored. Without that hope, the political and psychological pressures to fight to a decisive victory might have been overcome.

The politics of the interwar period were shaped by the memories of the previous conflict and the belief that any future war would resemble it. Polit- ical and military lessons reinforced each other in ameliorating the security dilemma. Because it was believed that the First World War had been a mis- take that could have been avoided by skillful con- ciliation, both Britain and, to a lesser extent, France were highly sensitive to the possibility that interwar Germany was not a real threat to peace, and alert to the danger that reacting quickly and strongly to her arms could create unnecessary con- flict. And because Britain and France expected the defense to continue to dominate, they concluded that it was safe to adopt a more relaxed and non threatening military posture.17 Britain also felt less need to maintain tight alliance bonds. The Allies" military posture then constituted only a slight dan- ger to Germany; had the latter been content with the status quo, it would have been easy for both sides to have felt secure behind their lines of for- tifications. Of course the Germans were not con - tent, so it is not surprising that they devoted their money and attention to finding ways out of a defense-dominated stalemate. Blitzkrieg tactics were necessary if they were to use force to change the status quo.

The initial stages of the war on the Western Front also contrasted with the First World War. Only with the new air arm were there any incen- tives to strike first, and these forces were too weak to carry out the grandiose plans that had been both dreamed and feared. The armies, still the main in- strument, rushed to defensive positions. Perhaps the allies could have successfully attacked while the

Germans were occupied in Poland.18 But belief in the defense was so great that this was never seri- ously contemplated. Three months after the start of the war, the French Prime Minister summed up the view held by almost everyone but Hitler: on the Western Front there is "deadlock. Two Forces of equal strength and the one that attacks seeing such enormous casualties that it cannot move without endangering the continuation of the war or of the aftermath."19 The Allies were caught in a dilemma they never fully recognized, let alone solved. On the one hand, they had very high war aims; al- though unconditional surrender had not yet been adopted, the British had decided from the start that the removal of Hitler was a necessary condi- tion for peace.20 On the other hand, there were no realistic plans or instruments for allowing the Al- lies to impose their will on the other side. The British Chief of the Imperial General Staff noted, "The French have no intention of carrying out an offensive for years, if at all"; the British were only slightly bolder.21 So the Allies looked to a long war that would wear the Germans down, cause civilian suffering through shortages, and eventually under- mine Hitler. There was little analysis to support this view—-and indeed it probably was not sup- portable—-but as long as the defense was dominant and the numbers on each side relatively equal, what else could the Allies do?

To summarize, the security dilemma was much less powerful after World War I than it had been before. In the later period, the expected power of the defense allowed status-quo states to pursue compatible security policies and avoid arms races. Furthermore, high tension and fear of war did not set off short-run dynamics by which each state, trying to increase its security, inadvertently acted to make war more likely. The expected high costs of war, however, led the Allies to believe that no sane German leader would run the risks entailed in an attempt to dominate the Continent, and dis- couraged them from risking war themselves.

Technology and Geography. Technology and geog- raphy are the two main factors that determine whether the offense or the defense has the advantage.

As Brodie notes, "On the tactical level, as a ride, few physical factors favor the attacker but many favor the defender. The defender usually has the advantage of cover. He characteristically fires from behind some form of shelter while his opponent crosses open ground."22 Anything that increases the amount of ground the attacker has to cross, or impedes his progress across it, or makes him more vulnerable while crossing, increases the advantage accruing to the defense. When states are separated by barriers that produce these effects, the security dilemma is eased, since both can have forces adequate for de- fense without being able to attack. * * *

Oceans, large rivers, and mountain ranges serve the same function as buffer zones. Being hard to cross, they allow defense against superior num- bers. The defender has merely to stay on his side of the barrier and so can utilize all the men he can bring up to it. The attacker's men, however, can cross only a few at a time, and they are very vulner- able when doing so. If all states were self-sufficient islands, anarchy would be much less of a problem. A small investment in shore defenses and a small army would be sufficient to repel invasion. Only very weak states would be vulnerable, and only very large ones could menace others. As noted above, the United States, and to a lesser extent Great Britain, have partly been able to escape from the state of nature because their geographical posi- tions approximated this ideal.

Although geography cannot be changed to conform to borders, borders can and do change to conform to geography. Borders across which an at- tack is easy tend to be unstable. States living within them are likely to expand or be absorbed. Frequent wars are almost inevitable since attacking will often seem the best way to protect what one has. This process will stop, or at least slow down, when the state's borders reach—by expansion or contrac- tion—a line of natural obstacles. Security without attack will then be possible. Furthermore, these lines constitute salient solutions to bargaining problems and, to the extent that they are barriers to migration, are likely to divide ethnic groups, thereby raising the costs and lowering the incen- tives for conquest.

Attachment to one's state and its land reinforce one quasi-geographical aid to the defense. Con- quest usually becomes more difficult the deeper the attacker pushes into the other's territory. Na- tionalism spurs the defenders to fight harder; ad- vancing not only lengthens the attacker's supply- lines, but takes him through unfamiliar and often devastated lands that require troops for garrison duty. These stabilizing dynamics will not operate, however, if the defender's war materiel is situated near its borders, or if the people do not care about their state, but only about being on the winning side. * * *

* * *

The other major determinant of the offense- defense balance is technology. When weapons are highly vulnerable, they must be employed before they are attacked. Others can remain quite invul- nerable in their bases. The former characteristics are embodied in unprotected missiles and many kinds of bombers. (It should be noted that it is not vulnerability per se that is crucial, but the location of the vulnerability. Bombers and missiles that are easy to destroy only after having been launched to- ward their targets do not create destabilizing dy- namics.) Incentives to strike first are usually absent for naval forces that are threatened by a naval at- tack. Like missiles in hardened silos, they are usu- ally well protected when in their bases, Both sides can then simultaneously be prepared to defend themselves successfully.

In ground warfare under some conditions, forts, trenches, and small groups of men in pre- pared positions can hold off large nvimbers of attackers. * * *

Concerning nuclear weapons, it is generally agreed that defense is impossible—a triumph not of the offense, but of deterrence. Attack makes no sense, not because it can be beaten off, but because the at- tacker will be destroyed in turn. In terms of the questions under consideration here, the result is the equivalent of the primacy of the defense. First, security is relatively cheap. Less than one percent

of the G.N.P. is devoted to deterring a direct attack on the United States; most of it is spent on acquir- ing redundant systems to provide a lot of insur- ance against the worst conceivable contingencies. Second, both sides can simultaneously gain secu- rity in the form of second-strike capability. Third, and related to the foregoing, second-strike capabil- ity can be maintained in the face of wide variations in the other side's military posture. There is no purely military reason why each side has to react quickly and strongly to the other's increases in arms. Any spending that the other devotes to try- ing to achieve first-strike capability can be neutral- ized by the state's spending much smaller sums on protecting its second-strike capability, Fourth, there are no incentives to strike first in a crisis,

O F F E N S E - D E F E N S E D I F F E R E N T I A T I O N

The other major variable that affects how strongly the security dilemma operates is whether weapons and policies that protect the state also provide the capability for attack. If they do not, the basic pos- tulate of the security dilemma no longer applies. A state can increase its own security without decreas- ing that of others. The advantage of the defense can only ameliorate the security dilemma. A differ- entiation between offensive and defensive stances comes close to abolishing it. Such differentiation does not mean, however, that all security problems will be abolished. If the offense has the advantage, conquest and aggression will still be possible. And if the offense's advantage is great enough, status quo powers may find it too expensive to protect themselves by defensive forces and decide to pro- cure offensive weapons even though this will men- ace others. Furthermore, states will still have to worry that even if the other's military posture shows that it is peaceful now, it may develop ag- gressive intentions in the future.

Assuming that the defense Is at least as potent , as the offense, the differentiation between them al- lows status-quo states to behave in ways that are clearly different from those of aggressors. Three ,

beneficial consequences follow. First, status-quo powers can identity each other, thus laying the foundations for cooperation. Conflicts growing out of the mistaken belief that the other side is ex- pansionist will be less frequent. Second, status-quo states will obtain advance warning when others plan aggression. Before a state can attack, it has to develop and deploy offensive weapons. If procure- ment of these weapons cannot be disguised and takes a fair amount of time, as it almost always does, a status-quo state will have the time to take countermeasures. It need not maintain a high level of defensive arms as long as its potential adver- saries are adopting a peaceful posture. * * *

* * * [I]f all states support the status quo, an ob- vious arms control agreement is a ban on weapons that are useful for attacking. As President Roo- sevelt put it in his message to the Geneva Disarma- ment Conference in 1933: "If all nations will agree wholly to eliminate from possession and use the weapons which make possible a successful attack, defenses automatically will become impregnable, and the frontiers and independence of every nation will become secure."23 The fact that such treaties have been rare * * * shows either that states are not always willing to guarantee the security of oth- ers, or that it is hard to distinguish offensive from defensive weapons.

IV Four Worlds

The two variables we have been discussing- whether the offense or the defense has the ad- vantage, and whether offensive postures can be distinguished from defensive ones—can be com- bined to yield four possible worlds.

The first world is the worst for status-quo states. There is no way to get security without menacing others, and security through defense is terribly difficult to obtain. Because offensive and defensive postures are the same, status-quo states acquire the same kind of arms that are sought by

aggressors. And because the offense has the advan- tage over the defense, attacking is the best route to protecting what you have; status-quo states will therefore behave like aggressors. The situation will be unstable. Arms races are likely. Incentives to strike first will turn crises into wars. Decisive victo- ries and conquests will be common. States will grow and shrink rapidly, and it will be hard for any state to maintain its size and influence without try- ing to increase them. Cooperation among status- quo powers will be extremely hard to achieve.

Offense Mas the Advantage

Defense Has the Advantage

Offensive Posture Not distinguishable from Defensive One

Offensive Posture Distinguishable from Defensive One

There are no cases that totally fit this picture, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to Europe before World War I. Britain and Germany, although in many respects natural allies, ended up as enemies. Of course much of the explanation lies in Germany's ill-chosen policy, And from the per- spective of our theory, the powers' ability to avoid war in a series of earlier crises cannot be easily ex- plained. Nevertheless, much of the behavior in this period was the product of technology and beliefs that magnified the security dilemma. Decision makers thought that the offense had a big advan- tage and saw little difference between offensive and defensive military postures. The era was character- ized by arms races. And once war seemed likely, mobilization races created powerful incentives to strike first.

In the nuclear era, the first world would be one in which each side relied on vulnerable weapons that were aimed at similar forces and each side un- derstood the situation. In this case, the incentives

to strike first would be very high—so high that status-quo powers as well as aggressors would be sorely tempted to pre-empt. And since the forces could be used to change the status quo as well as to preserve it, there would be no way for both sides to increase their security simultaneously. Now the fa- miliar logic of deterrence leads both sides to see the dangers in this world. Indeed, the new understand- ing of this situation was one reason why vulnerable bombers and missiles were replaced. Ironically, the 1950's would have been more hazardous if the de- cision makers had been aware of the dangers of their posture and had therefore felt greater pres- sure to strike first. This situation could be recre- ated if both sides were to rely on MIRVed ICBMs.

In the second world, the security dilemma operates because offensive and defensive postures cannot be distinguished; but it does not operate as strongly as in the first world because the defense has the ad- vantage, and so an increment in one side's strength increases its security more than it decreases the other's. So, if both sides have reasonable subjective security requirements, are of roughly equal power, and the variables discussed earlier are favorable, it is quite likely that status-quo states can adopt com- patible security policies. * * *

This world is the one that comes closest to matching most periods in history. Attacking is usually harder than defending because of the strength of fortifications and obstacles. But purely defensive postures are rarely possible because forti- fications are usually supplemented by armies and mobile guns which can support an attack. In the nuclear era, this world would be one in which both sides relied on relatively invulnerable ICBM's and believed that limited nuclear war was impossible. * * *

In the third world there may be no security dilemma, but there are security problems. Because states can procure defensive systems that do not threaten others, the dilemma need not operate. But because the offense has the advantage, aggression is possible, and perhaps easy. If the offense has enough of an advantage, even a status-quo state

may take the initiative rather than risk being at- tacked and defeated. If the offense has less of an advantage, stability and cooperation are likely be- cause the status-quo states will procure defensive forces. They need not react to others who are s imi - larly armed, but can wait for the warning they would receive if others started to deploy offensive weapons. But each state will have to watch the oth- ers carefully, and there is room for false suspicions. The costliness of the defense and the allure of the offense can lead to unnecessary mistrust, hostility, and war, unless some of the variables discussed earlier are operating to restrain defection.

The fourth world is doubly safe. The differentia- tion between offensive and defensive systems per- mits a way out of the security dilemma; the advantage of the defense disposes of the problems discussed in the previous paragraphs. There is no reason for a status-quo power to be tempted to procure offensive forces, and aggressors give notice of their intentions by the posture they adopt. In- deed, if the advantage of the defense is great enough, there are no security problems. The loss of the ultimate form of the power to alter the status quo would allow greater scope for the exercise of nonmilitary means and probably would tend to freeze the distribution of values.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Gerald Wheeler, Prelude to Pearl

Harbor (Columbia: University of Missour i Press 1963), 167.

2. Quoted in Leonard Wainstein, "The Dread- nought Gap," in Robert Art and Kenneth Waltz, eds., The Use of Force (Boston: Little, Brown 1971), 155 * * .

3. In another article, Jervis says: "International politics sometimes resembles what is called a Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). In this scenario, two men have been caught red-handed corn-

mitting a minor crime. The district attorney knows that they are also guilty of a much more serious offense. He tells each of them sepa- rately that if he confesses and squeals on his buddy, he will go free and the former colleague will go to jail for thirty years. If both of them refuse to give any information, they will be prosecuted for the minor crime and be jailed for thirty days; if they both squeal, plea- bargaining will get them ten years. In other words, as long as each criminal cares only about himself, he will confess to the more seri- ous crime no matter what he thinks his col- league will do. If he confesses and his buddy does not, he will get the best possible outcome (freedom); if he confesses and his buddy also does so, the outcome will not be good (ten years in jail), but it will be better than keeping silent and going to jail for thirty years. Since both can see this, both will confess. Paradoxi- cally, if they had both been irrational and kept quiet, they would have gone to jail for only a month." (Robert Jervis, "A Political Science Perspective on the Balance of Power and the Concert," American Historical Review 97, no. 3 (June 1992): 720.)

4. Experimental evidence for this proposition is summarized in James Tedeschi, Barry Schlenker, and Thomas Bonoma, Conflict, Power, and Games (Chicago: Aldine 1973), 135-41.

5. The results of Prisoner's Dilemma games played in the laboratory support this argu- ment. See Anatol Rapoport and Albert Chammah, Prisoner's Dilemma (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1965), 33-50. Also see Robert Axelrod, Conflict of Interest (Chicago: Markham 1970), 60-70.

6. Quoted in Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Mis- sile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1959), 6.

7. Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: Freemar, 1976), 56-60.

8. Thus, when Wolfers, [Discord and Collabora- tion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press 1962),]

126, argues that a status-quo state that settles for rough equality of power with its adversary, rather than seeking preponderance, may be able to convince the other to reciprocate by showing that it wants only to protect itself, not menace the other, he assumes that the defense has an advantage.

9. Schelling, [ The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press 1963),] chap. 9.

10. Quoted in Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions (New York: Norton 1975), 377, 461.

11. George Quester, Offense and Defense in the In- ternational System (New York: John Wiley 1977), 105-06; Sontag [European Diplomatic History, 1871-1932 (New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts 1933)],4-5.

12. Some were not so optimistic. Gray's remark is well-known: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time." The German Prime Minister, Beth- mann Hollweg, also feared the consequences of the war. But the controlling view was that it would certainly pay for the winner.

13. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Chur- chill, III, The Challenge of War, 1914-1916 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1971), 84.

14. Quester (fn. 33), 98-99. Robert Art, The Influ- ence of Foreign Policy on Seapower, II (Beverly Hills: Sage Professional Papers in International Studies Series, 1973), 14-18, 26-28.

15. Konrad Jarausch, "The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg's Calcu- lated Risk, July 1914," Central European His- tory, II (March 1969), 50.

16. Brodie (fn. 6), 58. 17. President Roosevelt and the American dele-

gates to the League of Nations Disarmament Conference maintained that the tank and mo- bile heavy artillery had re-established the dominance of the offensive, thus making dis- armament more urgent (Boggs, [Attempts to Define and Limit "Aggressive" Armament in Diplomacy and Strategy (Columbia: University of Missouri Studies, X V I , No. 1, 1941)), pp. 31, 108), but this was a minority position and may not even have been believed by the

Americans. The reduced prestige and influ- ence of the military, and the high pressures to cut government spending throughout this pe- riod also contributed to the lowering of de- fense budgets.

18. Jon Kimche, The Unfought Battle (New York: Stein 1968); Nicholas William Bethell, The War Hitler Won: The Fall of Poland, September 1939 (New York: Holt 1972); Alan Alexan- droff and Richard Rosecrance, "Deterrence in 1939," World Politics, X X I X (April 1977), 404-24,

19. Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly, eds., Time Unguarded: The Ironside Diaries, 1937-1940 (New York: McKay 1962), 173.

20. For a short time, as France was falling, the

British Cabinet did discuss reaching a negoti- ated peace with Hitler. The official history ig- nores this, but it is covered in P .M.H. Bell, A Certain Eventuality (Farnborough, England: Saxon House 1974), 40-48.

21. Macleod and Kelly (fn. 19), 174. In flat contra- diction to common sense and almost every- thing they believed about modern warfare, the Allies planned an expedition to Scandinavia to cut the supply of iron ore to Germany and to aid Finland against the Russians. But the dom- inant mood was the one described above.

22. Brodie (fn. 6), 179. 23. Quoted in Merze Tate, The United States and

Armaments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1948), 108.

S C O T T D . S A G A N A N D K E N N E T H N . W A L T Z

Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Weapons:

For Better or Worse?

n May 11 and 13, 1998, India tested five nu- clear weapons. By the end of the month, Pakistan had followed suit, claiming to have

detonated six nuclear devices—five to match New Delhi's tests and one in response to India's 1974 "peaceful nuclear explosive." With these tests, the governments in Islamabad and New Delhi loudly announced to the world, and to each other, that they held the capability to re- taliate with nuclear weapons in response to major attack.

What has happened since May 1998? Has the spread of nuclear weapons to the region made In-

From The Spread of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Nor- ton, 2003), 88-124. Some of the authors' notes have been omitted.

dia and Pakistan more or less secure? What is the likely future of a nuclear South Asia? * * *

India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Conflict

India and Pakistan were born into conflict, and the disputed territory of Kashmir has been a political and military battleground for over fifty years. The British partitioned their "Jewel in the Crown" in 1947, granting independence to a Muslim Pakistan and a secular, but predominantly Hindu, India. Kashmir—the largest of the semi-autonomous princely states within British India—was 80 per- cent Muslim in population. Its maharajah, how-

ever, was Hindu. London expected Kashmir to become part of Pakistan, given its geographic and religious characteristics. When the Hindu mahara- jah in Kashmir failed to choose sides, Muslim rebels from the British colonial army, aided by Pakistani troops dressed as guerilla forces and Pathan tribesmen from Pakistan, attacked the Kashmiri state militia and marched on the state capital, Srinagar. The maharajah, having fled to India, quickly announced that Kashmir should become part of India. Indian military units imme- diately flew into Kashmir to defend the territory. This brief conflict set the pattern of future clashes between India and Pakistan.

Conservative estimates of the number of civil- ians killed in the communal violence that accom- panied the partition of India range from two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand.1 The 1947-48 war, in which from three thousand to eight thousand soldiers were killed, ended in stale- mate. A bipartite Pakistani state was created that embodied the Muslim majority territories (except for Kashmir) on both sides of India: East Pakistan and West Pakistan were one state separated by the vast expanse of northern India. Pakistani forces held significant portions of the northern sector of Kashmir, and Pakistan created "Azad Kashmir" (Free Kashmir) in territory it held. A "line of con- trol" was established separating the armed forces of India and Pakistan. The Indian government has never accepted the United Nations mandate calling for a plebiscite to determine the fate of Kashmir. In India's view, a plebiscite would set a dangerous precedent, stimulating demands for independence by other Indian states. Pakistan, in turn, has never accepted Indian control over Kashmir. Every Pak- istani government, whether civilian or military, has insisted that the Kashmiri population wants to join its Muslim neighbor and should be allowed to do so.

Since the cease-fire in 1948, tensions between India and Pakistan have led to numerous military clashes. In the spring and summer of 1965, Pak- istani armed forces attacked Indian territory in both Gujarat (in southwest India) and across the line of control into Kashmir, leading to a two-

month war in which an estimated four to five thousand soldiers were killed. In 1971, Indian armed forces dismembered the Pakistani state, countering attacks from Pakistan in the west and crossing into East Pakistan to help rebel forces there declare the independent state of Bangladesh. Estimates of the military fatalities in that war range from six thousand to twelve thousand. In 1984, In- dian forces took control of a Pakistani army post on the disputed Siachen glacier at the dizzying heights of over twenty thousand feet. The ensuing conflict—which has been described as "two bald men fighting over a comb"—has continued since 1984, with the loss of an estimated one thousand Indian and Pakistani soldiers.2 In Kashmir, occa- sional artillery duels across the line of control and infiltration of guerrilla forces continued through- out the 1990s, with estimates of up to fifty thou- sand civilian and military fatalities.

This bloody history shows that South Asia is a tinderbox filled with tension and danger. The re- gion thus provides an important test of the ideas we developed in the first two chapters of this book. What the spread of nuclear weapons will do to this strife-torn region is one of today's most urgent questions.

For the Worse: Till Death Do Us Part

Scott D. Sagan

The emerging nuclear history of India and Pak- istan strongly supports the pessimistic predictions of organizational theorists. * * * Military organiza- tional behavior has led to serious problems in meeting all three requirements for stable nuclear deterrence—prevention of preventive war during periods of transition when one side has a tempo- rary advantage, the development of survivable second-strike forces, and avoidance of accidental nuclear war, * * * Similar problems will emerge in new nuclear states. In this chapter, I will demon- strate that these problems have, in fact, now ap- peared in India and Pakistan.

It should be acknowledged from the start that there are important differences between the nu- clear relationship emerging between India and Pakistan and the cold war system that developed over time between the United States and the Soviet Union. While the differences are clear, however, the significance of these differences is not. For ex- ample, the nuclear arsenals in South Asia are, and are likely to remain, much smaller and less sophis- ticated than were the U.S. and Soviet arsenals. This should make each arsenal both more vulnerable to a counterforce attack (an attack on the adversary's own nuclear forces) and less capable of mounting counterforce attacks, and thus the net effect is un- certain. There are also important differences in civil-military relations in the two cases, but these differences, too, are both stabilizing and poten- tially destabilizing. The Soviets and the Americans both eventually developed an "assertive" com- mand system with tight high-level civilian control over their nuclear weapons,3 Also India has an ex- treme system of assertive civilian control of the military, with (at least until recenyly) very little direct military influence on any aspect of nuclear weapons policy, Pakistan, however, is at the other end of the spectrum, with the military in complete control of the nuclear arsenal, and with only mar- ginal influence from civilian political leaders, even during the periods when there was a civilian- led government in Islamabad. There are, finally, important differences in mutual understanding, proximity, and hostility. India and Pakistan share a common colonial and pre-colonial history, have some common cultural roots, and share a com- mon border; they also have engaged in four wars against each other, and are involved in a violent fifty-year dispute about the status of Kashmir. In contrast, the Americans and Soviets were on oppo- site sides of the globe and viewed each other as mysterious, often unpredictable adversaries. The cold war superpowers were involved in a deep- seated ideological rivalry, but held no disputed ter- ritory between them and had no enduring history of armed violence against each other.

There is also, however, a crucially important similarity between the nuclear conditions that ex-

isted in cold war and those that exist in South Asia today. In both cases, the parochial interests and routine behaviors of the organizations that manage nuclear weapons limit the stability of nuclear de- terrence. The newest nuclear powers will not make exactly the same mistakes with nuclear weapons as did their superpower predecessors. They are, how- ever, also unlikely to meet with complete success in the difficult effort to control these weapons and maintain nuclear peace.

T H E P R O B L E M O F P R E V E N T I V E W A R

Pakistan has been under direct military rule for al- most half of its existence, and some analysts have argued that that the organizational biases of its military leaders had strong effects on strategic de- cisions concerning the initiation and conduct of the 1965 and 1971 wars with India.4 In contrast, India has a sustained tradition of strict civilian control over the military since its independence. These patterns of civil-military relations influence nuclear weapons doctrine and operations. In India, the military has traditionally not been involved in decisions concerning nuclear testing, design, or even command and control. In Pakistan, the mili- tary largely runs the nuclear weapons program; even during the periods in which civilian prime ministers have held the reins of government, they have neither been told the full details of the nuclear weapons program nor been given direct control over the operational arsenal.5

An organizational theory lens suggests that it is very fortunate that it was India, not Pakistan, that was the first to develop nuclear weapons in South Asia. Military rule in Islamabad (and military in- fluence during periods of civilian rule) certainly has played an important role in Pakistani decision making concerning the use of force (see the discus - sion of the Kargil conflict below). But the Pakistani military did not possess nuclear weapons before India tested in 1974, and thus was not in a position to argue that preventive war now was better than war later after India developed a rudimentary arsenal.

The preventive war problem in South Asia is a

complex one, however, and new evidence suggests that military influence in India produced serious risks of preventive war in the 1980s, despite strong institutionalized civilian control. The government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi considered, but then rejected, plans to attack Pakistan's Kahuta nuclear facility in the early 1980s, a preventive at- tack plan that was recommended by senior Indian military leaders.6 Yet, as occurred in the United States, the preferences of senior officers did not suddenly change when civilian leaders ruled against preventive war. Instead, the beliefs went underground, only to resurface later in a poten- tially more dangerous form.

These beliefs emerged from the shadows dur- ing the 1986-87 "Brasstacks" crisis.7 This serious crisis began in late 1986 when the Indian military initiated a massive military exercise in Rajasthan, involving an estimated 250,000 troops and 1,500 tanks, including the issuance of live ammunition to troops and concluding with a simulated "counter-offensive" attack, including Indian Air Force strikes, into Pakistan. The Pakistani military, fearing that the exercise might turn into a large- scale attack, alerted military forces and conducted exercises along the border, which led to Indian military counter-movements closer to the border and an operational Indian Ai r Force alert. The re- sulting crisis produced a flurry of diplomatic activ- ity and was resolved only after direct intervention by the highest political authorities.8

The traditional explanation for the Brasstacks crisis has been that it was an accidental crisis, caused by Pakistan's misinterpretation of an inad- vertently provocative Indian Army exercise. For example, Devin Hagerty's detailed examination of "New Delhi's intentions in conducting Brasstacks" concludes that "India's conduct of 'normal' exer- cises rang alarm bells in Pakistan; subsequently, the logic of the security dilemma structured both sides' behavior, with each interpreting the other's defensive moves as preparations for offensive ac- tion." 9 A stronger explanation, however, unpacks "New Delhi's intentions" to look at what different Indian decision makers in the capital wanted to do before and during the crisis,

The key is to understand the preventive-war thinking of the then-Indian chief of the Army Staff, General Krishnaswami Sundarji. Sundarji appar- ently believed that India's security would be greatly eroded by Pakistani development of a usable nu- clear arsenal and thus deliberately designed the Brasstacks exercise in hopes of provoking a Pak- istani military response. He hoped that this would then provide India with an excuse to implement existing contingency plans to go on the offensive against Pakistan and to take out its nuclear pro- gram in a preventive str ike. 1 0 According to the memoirs of Lieutenant General P . N . Hoon, the commander in chief of the Western Army during Brasstacks:

Brasstacks was no military exercise. It was a plan to build up a situation for a fourth war with Pakistan. And what is even more shocking is that the Prime Minister, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, was not aware of these plans for war.11

The preventive war motivation behind Sun- darji's plans helps to explain why the Indian mi l i - tary did not provide full notification of the exercise to the Pakistanis and then failed to use the special hotline to explain their operations when informa- tion was requested by Pakistan during the crisis. 1 2

A final piece of evidence confirms that Sundarji advocated a preventive strike against Pakistan dur- ing the crisis. Considerations of an attack on Pak- istani nuclear facilities went all the way up to the most senior decision makers in New Delhi in Janu- ary 1987:

[Prime Minister] Rajiv [Gandhi) now considered the possibility that Pakistan might initiate war with India. In a meeting with a handful of senior bureau- crats and General Sundarji, he contemplated beating Pakistan to the draw by launching a preemptive at- tack on the Army Reserve South. This would have included automatically an attack on Pakistan's nu- clear facilities to remove the potential for a Pakistani nuclear riposte to India's attack. Relevant govern- ment agencies were not asked to contribute analysis or views to the discussion. Sundarji argued that India's cities could be protected from a Pakistani counterattack (perhaps a nuclear one), but, upon being probed, could not say how. One important

advisor from the Ministry of Defense argued eloquently that 'India and Pakistan have already fought their last war, and there is too much to lose in contemplating another one.' This view ultimately prevailed.13

T H E K A R G I L C O N F L I C T A N D F U T U R E P R O B L E M S

Optimists cannot accept that the Brasstacks crisis may have been a deliberate attempt to spark a pre- ventive attack, but they might be reassured by the final outcome, as senior political leaders stepped in to stop further escalation. The power of nuclear deterrence to prevent war in South Asia, optimists insist, has been demonstrated in repeated crises: the Indian preventive attack discussions in 1984; the Brasstacks crisis; and the 1990 Kashmir crisis. "There is no more ironclad law in international re- lations theory than this," Devin Hagerty's detailed study concludes, "nuclear states do not fight wars with each other."14

In the spring and summer of 1999, however, one year after the exchange of nuclear tests, India and Pakistan did fight a war in the mountains along the line of control separating the portions of Kashmir controlled by each country, near the In- dian town of Kargil. The conflict began in May, when the Indian intelligence services discovered what appeared to be Pakistani regular forces lodged in mountain redoubts on the Indian side of the line of control. For almost two months, Indian Army units attacked the Pakistani forces and In- dian Air Force jets bombed their bases high in the Himalayan peaks. Although the Indian forces care- fully stayed on their side of the line of control in Kashmir, Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vaj- payee informed the U.S. government that he might have to order attacks into Pakistan. U.S. spy satel- lites revealed that Indian tanks and heavy artillery were being prepared for a counter-offensive in Rajasthan.15 The fighting ended in July, when Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif flew to Washington and, after receiving "political cover" in the form of statement that President Bill Clinton would "take a personal interest" in resolving the Kashmir problem, pledged to withdraw forces to

the Pakistani side of the line of control.1 6 Over one thousand Indian and Pakistani soldiers died in the conflict, and Sharif's decision to pull out was one of the major causes of the coup that overthrew his regime in October 1999.

The 1999 Kargil conflict is disturbing not only because it demonstrates that nuclear-armed states can fight wars, but also because the organizational biases of the Pakistani military were a major cause of the conflict. Moreover, such biases continue to exist and could play a role in starting crises in the future. This increases the dangers of both a preven- tive and preemptive strike if war is considered in- evitable, as well as the risk of a deliberate, but limited, use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield.

Three puzzling aspects of the Kargil conflict are understandable from an organizational per- spective. First, in Late 1998, the Pakistani military planned the Kargil operation, paying much more attention, as organization theory would predict, to the tactical effects of the surprise military maneu- ver than to the broader strategic consequences. Ig- noring the likely international reaction and the predictable domestic consequences of the military incursion in India, however, proved to be a signifi- cant factor in the ultimate failure of the Kargil operation.

Second, the Pakistani Army also started the op- eration with the apparent belief—following the logic of what has been called the "stability/instabil- ity paradox"—that a "stable nuclear balance" be- tween India and Pakistan permitted more offensive actions to take place with impunity in Kashmir.1 7 It is important to note that this belief was more strongly held by senior military officers than by civilian leaders. For example, at the height of the fighting near Kargil, Pakistani Army leaders stated that "there is almost a red alert situation," but they nevertheless insisted "there is no chance of the Kargil conflict leading to a full-fledged war be- tween the two sides."18 Although Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif apparently approved the plan to move forces across the line of control, it is not clear that he was fully briefed on the nature, scope, or potential consequences of the operation.19 The prime minister's statement that he was "trying to

avoid nuclear war" and his suggestion that he feared "that India was getting ready to launch a full-scale military operation against Pakistan" pro- vide a clear contrast to the confident military as- sessment that there was virtually no risk of an Indian counterattack or escalation to nuclear war. 2 0

Third, the current Pakistani military govern- ment's interpretation of the Kargil crisis, at least in public, is that Nawaz Sharif lost courage and backed down unnecessarily. This view is not widely shared by Pakistani scholars and journalists, but such a "stab in the back" thesis does serve the parochial self-interests of the Pakistani army, which does not want to acknowledge its errors or those of the current Musharraf regime. The New Delhi government's interpretation, however, is that the Indian threats that military escalation—a counterattack across the international border— would be ordered, if necessary, forced Pakistan to retreat. These different "lessons learned" could produce ominous outcomes in future crises: each side believes that the Kargil conflict proved that if its government displays resolve and threatens to escalate to new levels of violence, the other side will exhibit restraint and back away from the brink.

Future military crises between India and Pak- istan are likely to be nuclear crises. Proliferation optimists are not concerned about this likelihood, however, since they argue that the danger of pre- ventive war, if it ever existed at all, has been elimi- nated by the development of deliverable nuclear weapons in both countries after May 1998. The problem of preventive war during periods of tran- sition in South Asia is only of historical interest now, optimists would insist,

I am not convinced by this argument for two basic reasons. First, there is an arms race looming on the horizon in South Asia. The Indian gov- ernment has given strong support to the Bush administration's plans to develop missile defense technology and has expressed interest in eventually procuring or developing its own missile defense capability. I believe that the Indian nuclear pro- gram is strongly influenced by the fact that hawk- ish nuclear policies are popular among Indian

voters and thus serve the domestic political inter- ests of Indian politicians. China is likely to respond to the U.S. decision to build national missile de- fenses by increasing the size and readiness of its own missile force. This will in turn encourage the Indian government to increase its own missile de- ployments and develop defense technology.

These deployments in India, however, will threaten the smaller nuclear deterrent forces in Pakistan, and this would inevitably reopen the window of opportunity for preventive war consid- erations. Military biases, under the preventive war logic of "better now than later," could encourage precipitous action in either country if the govern- ment had even a fleeting moment of superiority in this new kind of arms race.

The second reason to be pessimistic is that, in serious crises, attacks might be initiated based on the belief that an enemy's use of nuclear weapons is imminent and unavoidable. While it is clear that the existence of nuclear weapons in South Asia made both governments cautious in their use of conventional military force in 1999, it is also clear that Indian leaders were prepared to escalate the conflict if necessary. Pakistani political authorities, however, made nuclear threats during the crisis, suggesting that nuclear weapons would be used precisely under such conditions. 2 1 Moreover, ac- cording to U.S. officials the Pakistani military, ap- parently without the Prime Minister's knowledge took initial steps to alert its nuclear forces during the Kargil conflict. 2 2

This dangerous alerting pattern was repeated in the South Asian crises that occurred after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States and the December 13, 2001, terrorist attack on the Parliament in New Delhi. In both cases, the Pakistani government feared that its nuclear forces would be attacked and therefore took alert mea- sures to disperse the nuclear weapons and missiles to new locations away from their storage sites.23

Pakistani fears that attacks on their nuclear arsenal were being planned may not have been entirely fanciful.

After the September 11 Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, President Bush warned Is-

lamabad that Pakistan would either side with the United States in the new war against terrorism or else be treated as a terrorist state. The development of military plans for U.S. commando raids against the Pakistani nuclear weapons sites was soon widely reported.24 President Musharraf defused the crisis by deciding to abandon support for the Tal- iban regime in Afghanistan and to provide logisti- cal and intelligence support for the U.S. war there.

After the December 13 terrorist attack against the Indian Parliament, the Indian government sent massive military forces to the Pakistani border and threatened to attack unless Musharraf cracked down on the radical Islamic groups that supported terrorist operations in Kashmir and New Delhi. Before Musharraf could respond, General S. Pad- manabhan, the Indian Army chief, issued a belli- cose statement announcing that the military buildup "was not an exercise": "A lot of viable op- tions (beginning from a strike on the camps to a full conventional war) are available. We can do it. . . . If we go to war, jolly good."2 5 Senior Indian po- litical authorities criticized the Army chief for making the statement, and diplomats in New Delhi speculated that General Padmanabhan had delib- erately made it more difficult for the Pakistanis to back down in this crisis, thus increasing the likeli- hood of war.2 6 Again, President Musharraf defused the crisis, at least temporarily, by initiating a crack- down on Islamic Jihadi groups promoting terror- ism in Kashmir and the rest of India.

What lessons should be drawn from these dangerous crises? Optimists will look at only the final result and assume that it was inevitable: De- terrence and coercion worked, as serious threats were issued, the Pakistani president compromised, and no war occurred. At a deeper level, however, two more ominous lessons should be learned. First, President Musharraf's decision to back down was by no means inevitable, and he was subject to significant criticism from Islamic parties and some military circles for his conciliatory stance. Other Pakistani leaders could have gone the other way, and, indeed, Musharraf may be less prone to com- promise in the future precisely because he was forced to change policies under the threat of attack

in these crises. Second, the Pakistani fear that a preventive or preemptive strike against its nuclear arsenal was imminent forced it to take very dan- gerous military alerting steps in both crises. Taking nuclear weapons and missiles out of their more se- cure storage locations and deploying them into the field may make the forces less vulnerable to an enemy attack, but it makes the weapons more vulnerable to theft or internal attacks by ter- rorist organizations, Given the number of al Qaeda members and supporters in Pakistan, this hidden terrorist problem may well have been the most se- rious nuclear danger of the crises. * * * In short, the crises of 2001 and 2002 demonstrate that nu- clear weapons in South Asia may well produce a modicum of restraint, but also momentous dangers.

In future crises in South Asia, the likelihood of either a preventive or preemptive attack will be strongly influenced by a complex mixture of per- ceptions of the adversary's intent, estimates about its future offensive and defensive capabilities, and estimates of the vulnerability of its current nuclear arsenal. Organizational biases could encourage worst-case assumptions about the adversary's in- tent and pessimistic beliefs about the prospects for successful strategic deterrence over the long terra. Unfortunately, as will be seen below, inherent or- ganizational characteristics can also produce vul- nerabilities to an enemy strike.

S U R V I V A B I L I T Y O F N U C L E A R F O R C E S I N S O U T H AS I A

The fear of retaliation is central to successful deter- rence, and the second requirement for stability with nuclear weapons is therefore the develop- ment of secure, second-strike forces. Unfortu- nately, there are strong reasons to be concerned about the ability of the Indian and Pakistani mili- tary to maintain survivable forces. Two problems can already be seen to have reduced (at least tem- porarily) the survivability of nuclear forces in Pak- istan. First, there is evidence that the Pakistani military, as was the case in the cold war examples cited earlier, deployed its missile forces, following standard operating procedures, in ways that pro-

duce signatures giving away their deployment loca- tions. Indian intelligence officers, for example, identified the locations of planned Pakistani de- ployments of M-11 missiles by spotting the place- ment of "secret" defense communication terminals nearby.27 A second, and even more dramatic, ex- ample follows a cold war precedent quite closely. Just as the road engineers in the Soviet Union in- advertently gave away the location of their ICBMs because construction crews built roads with wide- radius turns next to the missile silos, Pakistani road construction crews have inadvertently sig- naled the location of the "secret" M -11 missiles by placing wide-radius roads and roundabouts out- side newly constructed garages at the Sargodha military base.28

Finally, analysts should also not ignore the pos- sibility that Indian or Pakistani intelligence agen- cies could intercept messages revealing the "secret" locations of otherwise survivable military forces, an absolutely critical issue with small or opaque nuclear arsenals. The history of the 1971 war, for example, demonstrates that both states' intelli- gence agencies were able to intercept critical classi- fied messages sent by and to the other side: for example, the Pakistanis learned immediately when the Indian Army commander issued operational orders to prepare for military intervention against East Pakistan; and before the war, Indian intelli- gence agencies acquired a copy of a critical message from Beijing to Rawalpindi informing the Pakista- nis that China would not intervene militarily in any Pakistani-Indian war.29 Perhaps most dramati- cally, on December 12, 1971, the Indians inter- cepted a radio message scheduling a meeting of high-level Pakistani officials at Government House in Dacca, which led to an air attack on the building in the middle of the meeting.30

The Kargil conflict provides newer evidence of the difficulty of keeping knowledge about "secret" operations away from one's adversary. Through- out the conflict, the Pakistani government insisted that the forces fighting on the Indian side of the line of control were "mujahideen," indigenous Is- lamic freedom fighters. This cover was exposed, however, when some of the "mujahideen" failed to

leave their Pakistani military identification cards at their base in Pakistan and wrote about General Musharraf's involvement in the operation's plan- ning process in a captured diary.31 Indian intelli- gence organizations also intercepted a critical secret telephone conversation between General Musharraf and one of his senior military officers, which revealed the Pakistani Army's central in- volvement in the Kargil intrusion. 3 2 These are the kinds of organizational snafus that compromise highly secret operations—including "secret" nu- clear weapons locations—in the future.

NORMAL ACCIDENTS AND UNAUTHORIZED USE IN NUCLEAR SOUTH ASIA

Will the Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals be more safe and secure than were the U.S. and Soviet arsenals during the cold war? It is clear that the emerging South Asian nuclear deterrence system is both smaller and less complex today than was the case in the United States or Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. It is also clear, however, that the South Asian nuclear relationship is inherently more tightly coupled, because of geographical proximity. With inadequate warning systems in place and with weapons with short flight times emerging in the region, the time-lines for decision making are highly compressed and the danger that one accident could lead to another and then lead to a catastrophic accidental war is high and grow- ing. The proximity of New Delhi and Islamabad to their potential adversary's border poses particular concerns about rapid "decapitation" attacks on national capitals. Moreover, there are legitimate concerns about social stability and support for terrorists inside Pakistan, problems that could compromise nuclear weapons safety and security.

Proliferation optimists wi l l cite the small sizes of India and Pakistan's nuclear arsenals as a reason to be less worried about these problems. Yet the key from a normal accidents perspective is not the numbers, but rather the structure of the arsenal. Flere there is both good and bad news. The good news is that under normal peacetime conditions, neither the Indians, nor the Pakistanis regularly

deploy nuclear forces mated with delivery systems in the field. The bad news, however, is two-fold. First, Pakistani nuclear weapons do not have PALs (Permissive Action Links, the advanced electronic locks on U.S. nuclear weapons that require a spe- cial code for the weapons' activation) on them. Second, Pakistan has started to alert its nuclear weapons in crises; it did so in 1999 during the Kargil crisis and then again in September and De- cember of 2001, in response to fears of Indian (and maybe U.S.) military action after the terrorist at- tacks in New York, Washington, and New Delhi. 3 3

From an organizational perspective, it is not surprising to find evidence of serious accidents emerging in the Indian nuclear and missile pro- grams. * * * On January 4, 2001, Indian defense secretary Yogendra Narain led a special inspec- tion of the Milan missile production facility in Hy- derabad. The Milan missile:—a short-range (two kilometer) missile normally armed with a large conventional warhead—had failed in test launches and during the Kargil war, and Narain was to dis- cuss the matter with the plant's managers and technical personnel. For reasons that remain un- clear, the electrical circuitry was not disconnected and the live conventional warhead was not capped on the missile displayed for the visiting dignitary from New Delhi. When the plant manager acci- dentally touched the start button, the missile launched, flew through the body of one official, killing him instantly, and then nose-dived into the ground, catching on fire and injuring five other workers. The defense secretary was shocked, but unharmed. The official killed was the quality con- trol officer for the Milan-missile program.3 4

* * *

In addition, there should be serious concern about whether both countries can maintain centralized control over their nuclear weapons. Although gov- ernment policy in this regard is, for obvious rea- son, kept classified, it is known that Pakistan has no personnel reliability program (PRP) for the of- ficers who control the arsenal or the guards who protect the weapons storage sites. In the United States, the program is a set of psychological tests

and organizational checks; each year, between 2.5 percent and 5.0 percent of previously PRP cer- tified individuals have been decertified, that is, deemed unsuitable for nuclear weapons related duties.35 Presumably, similarly low, but still signifi- cant, percentages of officers, soldiers, and civilians in other countries would be of questionable relia- bility as guardians of the arsenal. This personnel reliability problem is serious in India, where civil- ian custodians maintain custody of the nuclear weapons; it is particularly worrisome in Pakistan, where the weapons are controlled by a professional military organization facing the difficult challenge of maintaining discipline while dealing with a fail- ing economy, serious social problems, and growing religious fundamentalism. This situation increases the risk of accidents and of unauthorized use, such as theft or use by terrorists groups.

B E Y O N D D E N I A L

Nuclear South Asia will be a dangerous place, not because of ill will or irrationality among govern- ment leaders, nor because of any unique cultural inhibitions against strategic thinking in both coun- tries. India and Pakistan face a dangerous nuclear future because they have become like other nuclear powers. Their leaders seek security through nu- clear deterrence, but imperfect humans inside imperfect organizations control their nuclear weapons. If my theories are right, these organiza- tions will someday fail to produce secure nuclear deterrence. Unfortunately, the evidence from these first years of South Asia's nuclear history suggests that the pessimistic predictions of organization theory are likely to come true, even though I can- not predict the precise pathway by which deter- rence will break down.

The possibility that other nuclear states might be able to influence nuclear behavior in South Asia does, however, lead to one final optimistic note. There are many potential unilateral steps and bilat-

eral agreements that could be instituted to reduce the risk of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and the U.S. government can play a useful role in helping to facilitate such agreements. Many, though not all, of the problems identified in this article can be reduced if nuclear weapons in both countries are maintained in a de-alerted state, with warheads removed from delivery vehicles. U.S. as- sistance could be helpful in providing the arms verification technology that could permit such de- alerting (or non-alerting in this case) to take place within a cooperative framework. The United States could also be helpful in providing intelligence and warning information, on a case-by-case basis, in peacetime or in crises to reduce the danger of false alarms. Finally, increased security of storage sites and safer management of nuclear weapons opera- tions can be encouraged by sharing better security devices for storage sites and discussing organiza- tional "best practices."

For Better: Nuclear Weapons Preserve an Imperfect Peace

Kenneth N. Waltz

The American government and most American journalists look on the blossoming of nuclear forces in South Asia as an ominous event, different in implication and effect from all the similar events that we worried about throughout the cold war. A 1998 New York Times headline, for example, pro- claimed that "India's Arms Race Isn't Safe Like the Cold War."36 Few thought the American-Soviet arms race safe at the time, and for good reasons few Indians and Pakistanis expect an arms race now. Most of the alarmist predictions about the fate of the subcontinent display forgetfulness about the past and confusion over the effects of nuclear weapons. In the same New York Times article, Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non- Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment, reports that Pentagon war games between Pakistan

and India always end with a nuclear exchange. Has everyone in that building forgotten that deterrence works precisely because nuclear states fear that conventional military engagements may escalate to the nuclear level, and therefore they draw back from the brink? Admiral David E. Jeremiah, once vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laments the cultural mindset that leads Americans to be- lieve that "everybody thinks like us," and a long- time president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, Michael Krepon, worries that because of the Pressler Amendment, which cut off aid to nations developing nuclear weapons, Pakistani officers have not had the benefit of attending our military schools.37 One's reaction to both statements may well be "thank goodness."

The Brookings Institution totaled up the cost of American nuclear weapons over the decades and arrived at the figure of 5.5 trillion dollars. Strobe Talbott, when he was deputy secretary of state, im- plied that military competition between Pakistan and India will cause them to spend on a propor- tionate scale. When asked why we should not pro- vide India and Pakistan with advice about, and equipment for, safe deterrence, he retorted that "if they locked themselves into the mentality of M A D (Mutual Assured Destruction), they will then be tempted into—like us—a consideratble escalation of the arms race."38 Yet nuclear states need race only to the second-strike level, which is easy to achieve and maintain. Indian and Pakistani leaders have learned from our folly. A minimal deterrent deters as well as a maximal one. Homi Jehangar Bhabha, father of the Indian bomb, called this "ab- solute deterrence." K. Subrahmanyam, a foremost strategist, emphasizes that Indians have learned that to build large forces is wasteful and foolish. An arsenal of about sixty weapons, he believes, will de- ter either Pakistan or China; and Pakistan might need, say, twenty to deter India.3 9 Some have claimed that no nuclear country has been satisfied with having only a minimum deterrent.40 Yet China, with even today only about twenty ICBMs, has been content with small numbers; and India and Pakistan would follow its example were it not for the disruptive effects of American missile

defenses on the strategic arms balance in Asia, dis- cussed below. Political as well as economic con- straints on both countries ensure this. Talbott has discerned "a global trend away from reliance on nuclear weapons."41 The United States does rely less on nuclear weapons now because it is the world's dominant conventional power, spending as much on its armed forces in the year 2000 as the next eight big spenders combined. Pardy for that reason, some other countries rely more on their nuclear weapons—Russia, for example, with its conventional forces in shambles. Countries that once counted on one of the two great powers for military assistance are now concerned to pro- vide security for themselves: Pakistan, India, Iraq, Japan, and North Korea are all examples.

India tested its "peaceful bomb" in 1974. Its next tests came twenty-four years later. The United States complained loudly both times. Yet the United States tested nuclear weapons many times yearly for many years on end—more than a thou- sand above and below ground, which is more than the tests of all other countries combined. Amer- ica's excuse was, at first, that it anticipated a mor- tal threat from the Soviet Union and, later, that it actually faced such a threat. America's nonpro- liferation policy denies that such reasoning can legitimate other countries' entering the tight circle of nuclear powers. Nevertheless, the reasoning the United States applied to itself applies to India and to Pakistan as well. Does anyone believe that test- ing nuclear warheads is something that, in their place, we would not have done?

The question raised by India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests is not whether they should have been conducted, but whether their security requires their becoming nuclear powers. Some countries need nuclear weapons; some do not. Brazil and Ar- gentina set themselves on course to become nu- clear states. Both decided to abandon the effort. Neither posed a threat to the other. South Africa became a nuclear state and then, finding no com- mensurate threat, reversed its policy.

Pakistan obviously needs nuclear weapons. When asked why nuclear weapons are so popular in Pakistan, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto

answered, "It's our history. A history of three wars with a larger neighbor. India is five times larger than we are. Their military strength is five times larger. In 1971, our country was disintegrated. So the security issue for Pakistan is an issue of sur- vival." From the other side, Shankar Bajpai, former Indian ambassador to Pakistan, China, and the United States, has said that "Pakistan's quest for a nuclear capability stems from its fear of its larger neighbor, removing that fear should open up im- mense possibilities"—possibilities for a less wor- ried and more relaxed life. Shamshad Ahmad, Pakistan's foreign secretary, has echoed their thoughts: "In South Asia nuclear deterrence may . . . usher in an era of durable peace between Pak- istan and India, providing the requisite incentives for resolving all outstanding issues, especially Jammu and Kashmir."42 In recent years, some In- dians and Pakistanis have begun to talk about a peaceful accommodation, and according to a New York Times reporter, "just about everybody" in Kashmir "cites the two countries' possession of nu- clear weapons as a factor pushing towards peace.43

In the 1980s, after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the United States, knowing of Pak- istan's nuclear progress, nevertheless continued to supply Pakistan with sophisticated conventional weapons. The United States did not care much about Pakistan's nuclear progress as long as Soviet worries dominated American policy. Once the So- viet Union went into steep decline and then disap- peared, America dropped Pakistan, with a speed that surprised not only Pakistan but India as well. For Pakistan to compete conventionally with India was economically impassible. Nuclear weapons linked to a sensible strategy are a low cost way of leveling the playing field. Understandably Pakistan felt itself pressed to follow the nuclear course.

Can India be seen in a similar light? With its- superior conventional forces, it needed no nuclear weapons to protect itself against a Pakistan that lacked them, but what about China? Americans think of India as the dominant power in South Asia. India feels differently. India is part of a hostile world. With a Muslim minority of about 150 million, it adjoins Muslim Pakistan, and

beyond lies a Muslim world becoming more fun- damentalist and more hostile. To the north is an increasingly nationalist, steadily more powerful, and potentially unstable China. The United States has reinforced India's worries about a Chinese- Pakistani-American axis, notably when America "tilted" toward Pakistan in the 1971 war with In- dia. In the middle of the war, Henry Kissinger told Mao Zedong, "We want to keep the pressure on India both militarily and politically," adding that if China "took measures to protect its security, the US would oppose efforts of others to interfere."44

In a show of support for Pakistan, the American navy moved the aircraft carrier Enterprise into the Indian Ocean, To this day, Indians consider this an attempt to hold them in nuclear awe. They call it blackmail.45 India continues to believe that Amer- ica favors China over India. A professor at Jawa- harlal Nehru University found nuclear cooperation between Beijing and Islamabad "unprecedented in the history of international relations."46 And an In- dian minister of defense wondered, as many Indi- ans do, "why India and Pakistan should be seen as blowing each other up when nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States and China are seen as stabilizing factors."47 That the United States seems to trust China as an old nuclear power, and not India as a new one, is a cause of bitter resentment.

The decision to make nuclear weapons was a momentous one for India. The tests of May 1998 were overwhelmingly popular with the public at large, but the decision emerged over decades, with much opposition along the way, Even today, Indi- ans who view nuclear deterrence as a difficult and demanding task believe that India will be unable to develop and deploy a nuclear force sufficient for the deterrence of China. In their view, the main ef- fect of India's developing nuclear capabilities was to cause Pakistan to develop its own. India is there- fore worse off with nuclear weapons than it would have been without them. The Indian view that car- ried the day rests on the contrary argument, devel- oped in Chapter 1: namely, that it does not take much to deter.

Is it farfetched for India to worry about a Chi-

nese threat to its security? Any country has trouble seeing the world as others do. Let's try. If the United States shared a two-thousand mile border with a country that was more populous, more prosperous, more heavily armed, and in possession of nuclear weapons, we would react militarily and, judging from our response to the Soviet Union, more vigorously than India has done. What is far- fetched is for the United States to worry about a Chinese threat to its security and then wonder why India does too.

Kanti Bajpai, a professor at Nehru University, strongly opposes India's nuclear armament. He doubts that India's nuclear deterrent would dis- suade China from seizing Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast or Pakistan from seizing Kashmir in the northwest. This is comparable to the worry, dreamt up in the 1960s, about a "Hamburg grab." Some American military commentators, worried that the Soviet Union might suddenly seize Ham- burg, which jutted into East Germany, and then in effect ask, "Is NATO's fighting to regain Hamburg worth risking a nuclear conflagration?" Similarly, Kanti Bajpai imagines "a quick grabbing thrust into the two states, backed by nuclear weapons, in the hope of presenting India with a fait accom- p l i . " 4 8 Such worries are as fanciful as American worries were in the cold war. The invader would have to assemble troops near the border. India would then alert its forces, including nuclear ones. With the potential crisis easily foreseeable, why would China or Pakistan run such risks?

One answer to the question is that Pakistan did move troops across the line of control into Kash- mir and fight for a time at a fairly high level in the engagement known as Kargil. Joseph Cirincione voices widespread fears when, with the Kashmir conflict in mind, he says, "Just assemble all the risk factors and multiply it out. . . . This is the most dangerous and unstable military situation in the world."49 His pronouncement repeats the tired old error of inferring from the conventional past what the nuclear future holds, a mistake made almost every time another country gets nuclear weapons, With nuclear weapons added, conventionally dangerous and unstable situations become safer

and stabler ones. Nuclear weapons produce what Joseph Nye calls the "crystal ball" effect. Everyone knows that if force gets out of hand all the parties to a conflict face catastrophe.50 With conventional weapons, the crystal ball is clouded. With nuclear weapons, it is perfectly clear.

What reasons do we have to believe that In- dia's and Pakistan's crystal balls are clouded? Well, again, Kargil. Some observers worry that Pakistan may believe that it can safely raise the level of con- ventional violence since nuclear weapons limit the extent of India's response. But, of course, they also limit the size and scope of Pakistan's attack, since Pakistan knows it could face nuclear retalia- tion. And the same reasoning applies to India. It's the same old story: In the presence of nuclear weapons, a country can achieve a significant vic- tory only by risking devastating retaliation.

Sagan calls Kargil the fourth Indian-Pakistani war because it fits the social science definition holding that a military encounter is a war if it produces more than one thousand battle-related deaths. If Kargil is called a war, then the definition of war requires revision; and now that both coun- tries have nuclear weapons the fifth "war" will be no worse than the so-called fourth one. The late Pakistani chief of the army staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg, remarked that India and Pakistan can no longer fight even a conventional war over Kash- mir, and his counterpart, the chief of the Indian army staff, General Krishnaswami Sundarji, con- curred. 5 1 Kargil showed once again that deterrence does not firmly protect disputed areas but does limit the extent of the violence. Indian rear admiral Raja Menon put the larger point simply: "The Kargil crisis demonstrated that the subcontinental nuclear threshold probably lies territorially in the heartland of both countries, and not on the Kash- mir cease-fire line." 5 2

The obvious conclusion to draw from Kargil is that the presence of nuclear weapons prevented es- calation from major skirmish to full-scale war. This contrasts starkly with the bloody 1965 war, in which both parties were armed only with conven- tional weapons.

Another question is whether India and Pak-

istan can firmly control and safely deploy nuclear forces sufficient to deter. Because I have already said enough about the ease of deterrence, I shall concentrate on questions of safety and control. Sagan claims that "the emerging history of nu- clear India and nuclear Pakistan strongly supports the pessimistic predictions of organizational theo- rists." Yet the evidence, accumulated over five decades, shows that nuclear states fight with nu- clear states only at low levels, that accidents seldom occur, and that when they do they never have bad effects. If nuclear pessimists were right, nuclear de- terrence would have failed again and again, Nu- clear pessimists deal with the potential causes of catastrophe; optimists, with the effects the causes do not produce. Since the evidence fails to support the predictions of pessimists, one wonders why the spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia should have bad rather than good effects. What differ- ences in the situation of India and Pakistan may cause their fates to depart from the nuclear norm? If they and their situations are different, then the happy histofy of the nuclear past does not forecast their futures. American commentators dwell on the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union earlier and India and Pakistan today. Among the seeming differences, these are given prominence: differences in the states involved, differences in their histories of conflict, and dif- ferences in the distance between the competing parties. I consider them in turn,

D O E S D E T E R R E N C E D E P E N D O N W H O I S D E T E R R I N G

W H O M ?

For decades we believed that we were trying to de- ter two monstrous countries—one an "evil em- pire" and the other a totalitarian country ruled by a megalomaniac. Now we learn that deterrence worked in the past because the United States, the Soviet Union, and China were settled and sensible societies. Karl Kaiser, of the Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Affairs, and Arthur G. Rubinoff, of the University of Toronto, for ex- ample, argue that the success of deterrence de- pends on its context, that is, on who the countries

are and on how they relate to each other. In Kaiser's view, "the stability of nuclear deterrence between East and West rest(ed) on a multitude of military and political factors which in other re- gions are either totally missing or are only partially present." In Rubinoff's view, it is foolish to com- pare the American-Soviet conflict with South Asia, where the dynamics are "reminiscent of the out- break of the First World War." Reminiscence flick- ers, however, since no one then had nuclear weapons. With a Hindu chauvinist in power in New Delhi and an Islamic party governing India, Rubinoff finds "no resemblance to the deterrent situation that characterized the U.S.-Soviet con- flict."53 That statement may once have applied to India and Pakistan, but only until they armed themselves with nuclear weapons. The history of the cold war shows that what matters is not the character of the countries that have nuclear weapons but the fact that they have them. Differ- ences among nuclear countries abound, but for keeping the peace what difference have they made?

Whatever the identity of rulers, and whatever the characteristics of their states, the national be- haviors they produce are strongly conditioned by the world outside. With conventional weapons, a defensive country has to ask itself how much power it must harness to its policy in order to dis- suade an aggressive state from striking. Countries willing to run high risks are hard to dissuade. The characteristics of governments and the tempera- ments of leaders have to be carefully weighed. With nuclear weapons, any state will be deterred by another state's second-strike forces; one need not be preoccupied with the qualities of the state that is to be deterred or scrutinize its leaders. In a nuclear world, any state—whether ruled by a Stalin, a Mao Zedong, a Saddam Hussein, or a Kim Jong II—will be deterred by the knowledge that ag- gressive actions may lead to its own destruction.

DOES D E T E R R E N C E D E P E N D O N T H E D E T E R R E R S '

R E C E N T HISTORY?

India and Pakistan have fought three wars in little more than fifty years, and Kashmir is a bone in the

throat of Pakistan. In contrast, America and Russia have never fought a war against each other. Yet some other nuclear countries look more like India and Pakistan, and nuclear weapons have kept the peace between them. Russia and China have suf- fered numerous military invasions by one another over the centuries. In the 1960s, when both had nuclear weapons, skirmishes broke out from time to time along the Siberian frontier, and the fighting was on a fairly large scale, The bitterness of the an- tagonists rivalled that between India and Pakistan, fueled by ethnic resentments and ideological differences.

Clashes between nuclear countries over periph- eral areas are hardly the exception, Of today's eight nuclear countries, five have fought their neighbors in the past half century: Russia, China, Israel, Pak- istan, and India, Those who believe that the South Asian situation is without parallel often ignore the Middle East. The parallel is not exact, but it is in- structive. The Middle East is unrivalled for long- standing conflict, irreconcilable disputes, feelings of distrust and hatred, and recurrent wars, In 1973, two nonnuclear Arab countries, Egypt and Syria, attacked Israel and fought what by anyone's defi- nition was a war. Limited in extent by one side's nuclear weapons, it nonetheless did not spiral out of control. 5 4

DOES D E T E R R E N C E DEPEND ON DISTANCE?

Proximity does make warning time short. Missiles can fly between Islamabad and New Delhi in less than five minutes, Yet nuclear countries in the past have often been close militarily if not geographi- cally, Cuba is only ninety miles from American shores, and that is proximity enough.* * *

Operation Brasstracks was an all-service Indian operation staged in 1987. As Sagan says, it is widely believed that General Sundarji intended it to be a prelude to a war in which India would de- stroy Pakistan's nuclear facilities. Sundarji may have thought that even if Pakistan had a few bombs, India would be able to destroy them on the

ground. In retrospect, Brasstracks looks more like a typical instance of Indian failure to coordinate policies among the Prime Minister's Office, the Ex- ternal Affairs Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and the military services.

Brasstracks is not something new in the nu- clear annals. It pales in comparison to provocative acts by the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1983, for example, Able Archer—a recurrent N A T O military exercise—was more extensive than ever before. It was held at a time of extraordinary tension. The Soviets believed that surprise was the key to American war plans. During the exercise, the simulated alert of NATO nuclear forces was thought by the Soviets to be a real one. American Pershing II missiles were to be deployed in Europe soon. The Soviets believed that some of them, with their fifty-kiloton payload, fifty-meter accuracy, and ten-minute delivery time to Moscow, had al- ready arrived.5 5 Early in the Reagan administra- tion, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and other officials proclaimed that it was our aim to be able to fight, sustain, and win a nuclear war. With some reason, Soviet leaders believed it was about to begin.

* * *

Proximity shortens the time between launch and landing. With little warning time, quick decisions would seem to be required. However, acting on early warnings of incoming missiles that may turn out to be false could be fatal to both sides. The no- tion that deterrence demands the threat of swift re- taliation was ingrained in American and Russian thinking, and it remains so today, with both forces still on hair-trigger alert. Yet deterrence of a would-be attacker does not depend on the belief that retaliation will be prompt, but only on the be- lief that the attacked may in due course retaliate. As K. Subrahmanyam has put it, "The strike back need not be highly time-critical."56 A small force may be a vulnerable force, but smaller is worse than bigger only if the attacker believes he can destroy all of the force before any of it can be launched.

Students of organizations rightly worry about complex and tighdy coupled systems because

they are susceptible to damaging accidents. They wrongly believe that conflicting nuclear states should be thought of as a tightly-coupled system. Fortunately, nuclear weapons loosen the coupling of states by lessening the effects of proximity and by cutting through the complexities of conven- tional confrontations. Organizational theorists fail to distinguish between the technical complexities of nuclear-weapons systems and the simplicity of the situations they create.

Sagan points out that the survival of Indian and Pakistani forces cannot be guaranteed. But neither can their complete destruction, and that is what matters. Oddly, many pessimists believe that countries with small and technologically limited nuclear forces may be able to accomplish the diffi- cult feat of making a successful first strike but not the easy one of making their own nuclear force ap- pear to be invulnerable. They overlook a basic nu- clear truth: If some part of a force is invulnerable, all of the force is invulnerable. Destroying even a major portion of a nuclear force does no good be- cause of the damage a small number of surviving warheads can do. Conventional weapons put a premium on striking first to gain the initial ad- vantage and set the course of the war. Nuclear weapons eliminate this premium, The initial ad- vantage is insignificant if the cost of gaining it is half a dozen cities.

More important than the size of arsenals, the sophistication of command and control, the prox- imity of competitors, and the history of their rela- tions, are the sensibilities of leaders. Fortunately, nuclear weapons make leaders behave sensibly even though under other circumstances they might be brash and reckless.

The South Asian situation, said so often to be without precedent, finds precedents galore. Rather than assuming that the present differs significantly from the past, we should emphasize the similarities and learn from them. Fortunately, India and Pak- istan have learned from their nuclear predecessors. Nuclear maturity for some countries comes at an early age. During the present Bush administration, the United States, however, seems to be entering its- second childhood.

Sagan believes that future Indian-Pakistani crises may be nuclear. Once countries have nu- clear weapons any confrontation that merits the term "crisis" is a nuclear one. With conventional weapons, crises tend toward instability. Because of the perceived, or misperceived, advantage of striking first, war may be the outcome. Nuclear weapons make crises stable, which is an important reason for believing that India and Pakistan are better off with than without them.

Yet because nuclear weapons limit escalation, they may tempt countries to fight small wars. Glenn Snyder long ago identified the strategic sta- bility/tactical instability paradox. Benefits carry costs in the nuclear business just as they do in other endeavors. The possibility of fighting at low levels is not a bad price to pay for the impossibility of fighting at high levels. This impossibility be- comes obvious, since in the presence of nuclear weapons no one can score major gains, and all can lose catastrophically.

Sagan carries Snyder's logic a step farther by arguing that Pakistan and India may nevertheless fight to a higher level of violence, believing that if one side or the other begins to lose control, a third party will step in to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. The idea is a hangover from cold war days when the United States and the Soviet Union thought they had compelling reasons to intervene in other countries' conflicts. The end of the cold war reduced the incentives for such intervention. As K. Subrahmanyam has said, "In a world domi- nated by the Cold War, there was a certain pre- dictability that any Chinese nuclear threat to India would be countervailed by one or the other super power or both. In the aftermath of the Cold War that predictability has disappeared."57 Intervention by a third party during low-level fighting would still be possible, but neither side could count on it.

Kanti Bajpai spotted another consequence of nuclear weapons that may be harmful: They may drive the antagonists apart by removing the need to agree. Since deterrence works, Bajpai wonders why countries would try to setde their differences. India and Pakistan, however, did not reach agree- ment on Kashmir or on other issues when neither

had nuclear weapons; now both sides have at least an incentive to discuss their problems.

Crises on the subcontinent recur, and when they do, voices of despair predict a conventional clash ending in nuclear blasts. On December 13, 2001, five gunmen attacked the Indian Parlia- ment. Fourteen people died, including the gun- men. India, blaming Pakistani terrorists, mounted its largest mobilization in the past thirty years and massed troops and equipment along the India- Pakistan border. As in the crisis of 1990, the United States deployed its diplomats, this time dis- patching Secretary of State Colin Powell to calm the contestants. Tempers on both sides flared, bombast filled the air, and an American commen- tator pointed out once again that all of the Ameri- can military's war games show that a conventional Indian-Pakistani war will end in a nuclear confla- gration.58 Both India and Pakistan claimed that they could fight conventionally in the face of nu- clear weapons. What reason do we have to believe that military and civilian leaders on either side fail to understand the dangers of fighting a conven- tional war against a nuclear neighbor? The state- ments of Pakistan's leader, General Musharraf, were mainly conciliatory. Indian military leaders emphasized that any military engagements would have to be limited to such targets as guerrilla train- ing camps and military facilities used by extrem- ists. As an astute analyst put it, "India's way of looking at this is that we're not threatening Pak- istan's core interests, so they would have no incen- tive to launch their weapons."59 Indian leaders made it clear that they intended to pressure Pak- istan to control military intrusions by irregular forces. Pakistan made it clear that its pressure for a Kashmiri settlement would be unremitting. Except to alarmist observers, mainly American, neither side looked as though it would cross or even approach the nuclear threshold. The proposition that nuclear weapons limit the extent of fighting and ultimately preserve peace again found vindica- tion.

Are India and Pakistan worse or better off now that they have nuclear weapons? Are their futures dimmer or brighter? I will surprise no one by

saying "brighter." I have looked in vain for impor- tant differences between the plight of India and Pakistan and that of other nuclear countries. Nu- clear weapons put all countries that possess them in the same boat. South Asia is said to be the "acid test" for deterrence optimists. So far, nuclear de- terrence has passed all of the many tests it has faced.

NOTES 1. These and subsequent estimates are from

Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Con- flict: A Statistical Reference, vol. 2 (London: McFarland & Co., 1992).

2. Stephen P. Cohen, India: An Emerging Power (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001), p. 146.

3. Peter D. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civil- ian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

4. See Julian Schofeld, "Militarized Decision- Making for War in Pakistan: 1947-1971," Armed Forces and Society 27, no. 1 (Fall 2000); Scott D. Sagan, "The Perils of Proliferation: Organization Theory, Deterence Theory, and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons," International Security (Spring 1994); and Sumit Ganguly, The Origins of War in South Asia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986).

5. See George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) , p. 303 and pp. 306-13; Michell Reiss, Bridled Ambition (Washington, D.C.: Wood- row Wilson Center Press, 1995), pp. 183-220; and From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report (New Delhi: Sage, 2000) , pp. 66-67.

6. See Whegru Pal Singh Sidhu, "India's Nuclear Use Doctrine," in Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan and James J. Wirtz, eds., Planning the Unthinkable (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 132-34; Kanti P. Bajpai, P. R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, Stephen P.

Cohen, and Sumit Ganguly, Brasstacks and Be- yond: Perception and Management of Crisis in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), pp. 9-10; and Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb, pp. 239-44.

7. This interpretation of Brasstacks was first pre- sented as a speculative argument based on organization theory predictions in Scott D. Sagan, "Correspondence: Proliferation Pes- simism and Emerging Nuclear Powers," Inter- national Security 22, no. 2 (Fall 1997), p. 195.

8. See Bajpai et al., Brasstacks and Beyond, pp. 28-40 and pp. 127-28, Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation (Cam- bridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1998), pp. 91-116.

9. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Prolifer- ation, p. 92 and p. 106. Also see Bajpai et al., Brasstacks and Beyond, pp. 100-103

10. Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace: The Secret History of India's Quest to Be a Nuclear Power (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), pp. 322-23.

11. P. N. Hoon, Unmasking Secrets of Turbulence (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2000), p. 102.

12. Bajpai et al., Brasstacks and Beyond, pp. 41-42. 13. Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb, p. 208. 14. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Prolifer-

ation, p. 184. 15. John Lancaster, "Kashmir Crisis Was Defused

on Brink of War," Washington Post, July 26, 1999, p. A l ; Thomas W. Lippman, "India Hints at Attack in Pakistan," Washington Past, June 27, 1999, p. A26.

16. Bradley Graham and Nathan Abse, "U.S. Says Pakistan Will Withdraw," Washington Post, July 5, 1999, p. A15. That Clinton's statement on Kashmir was merely a political cover for the withdrawal was later made clear when Clinton revealed that he had told Sharif that he could not come to Washington unless he was willing to withdraw the troops back across the line of control. See "Pak troops withdrew from Kargil at my insistence," The Times of India, June 3, 2001, www.timessofindia.com/030601/ 03worl6.htm.

17. See From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 77 and Maleeha Lodhi, "The Kargil Crisis: Anatomy of a Debacle" Newsline (July 1999), p. 1.

18. Ihtashamul Haque, "Peace Linked to Kash- mir Solution," Dawn Wire Service, June 26, 1999.

19. Sharif later claimed that he was not informed of the operation until just before it began in May 1999. See "Sharif Blames Musharraf for Kargil," Reuters, June 13, 2000, www.times ofindia.com/2000/06/13/blame.html. Also see "Army Rejects Sharif Claim," BBC News, June 13, 2000, news.bbc.co.uk/hi/English/ world/south„asia/newsid_787000/787795 .stm.

20. Pamela Constable, "Pakistan Aims to 'Avoid Nuclear War, '" Washington Post, July 13, 1999, p A14; "U.S. Involvement Essential: P M , " Dawn Wire Service, July 10, 1999.

21. Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad, for ex- ample, proclaimed in May 1999 that Pakistan "will not hesitate to use any weapon in our ar- senal to defend our territorial integrity." See "Any weapon will be used, threatens Pak," The Hindu, June 1, 1999.

22. Bruce Riedel, "American Diplomacy and the 1999 Summit at Blair House," Policy Paper Se- ries 2002, Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania; Raj Chenagappa, "Pakistan Tried Nuclear Blackmail," The

Newspaper Today, January 12, 2000, www.the newspapertoday.com/interview/index.phtml? INTERVIEW-INT_PADC0UNT.

23. Molly More and Karam Khan, "Pakistan Moves Nuclear Weapons," Washington Post, Novem- ber 11, 2001, p. At; Manoj Joshi, "Pak May Have Relocated Nukes to Gilgit," Times of India, November 14, 2001, p. 1; Bill Gertz, "India, Pakistan Prepare Nukes, Troops for War," Washington Times, December 31, 2001, p. A l .

24. See, for example, Seymour M. Hersh, "Watch- ing the Warheads," The New Yorker, Novem- ber 11, 2001.

25. "Army Ready for War, Says Chief," The States- men (India), January 12, 2002.

26. Celia W. Dugger, "Indian General Talks

Bluntly of War and a Nuclear Threat," New York Times, January 12, 2002, p. A l .

27. N. Prasannan, "Spark of Hope," The Week, September 28, 1997.

28. See John Diamond, "Satellite Shows Pakistan's March Toward Nuclear Capability," Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2000, p. 10.

29. Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Seces- sion: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bang- ladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 199, p. 225 (also see p. 309, fn. 45).

30. Asoka Raina, Inside RAW: The Story of India's Secret Service (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1981), pp. 60-61.

31. Shisher Gupta, "Major's Diary Exposes Pak's Involvement," Hindustan Times, July 10, 1999, p. 1; "1st Definite Proof of Pak Army Role," soniagandhi.org/asian30b.htm.; and From Sur- prise to Reckoning, p. 21 and 97.

32. The whole transcript is available at www. ipcs.org/documents/1999/2 -apr-jul.htm#

Tapes. 33. Chengappa, "Pakistan Tried Nuclear Black-

mail" and Gertz, "India, Pakistan Prepare Nukes, Troops for War."

34. The paragraph is based on the following sources, "Doubts over B D L Safety Norms," The Hindu, January 9, 2001; "One Killed as Missile Fires Accidentally," The Hindu, Janu- ary 5, 2001; and "One Killed as Missile Fires During Demonstration," The Times of India, January 5, 2001; and Lalita Iyer, "In House Strike," Trie Week, January 21, 2001, at www. the-week.com/2l/jan21/events6.htm. Similar rocket explosions have occurred with other nuclear powers. For example, in 1960, the commander of the Soviet Union's Strategic Rocket Forces was killed, along with many others, when a space rocket exploded while be- ing inspected prior to launch. See James E. Oberg, Uncovering Soviet Disasters (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 177-83.

35. Herbert L. Abrams, "Human Reliability and Safety in the Handling of Nuclear Weapons," Science and Global Security, vol. 2 (1991), p. 334.

36. Steven Erlanger, "India's Arms Race Isn't Safe Like the Cold War," New York Times, July 12, 1998, section 4, p. 18.

37. David E. Jeremiah, quoted in Tim Weiner, "The World: Naivete at the CIA: Every Nation. Just Another US." (James Woosley made the same point earlier.) Proliferation Threats of the 1990s, Hearing before the Committee on Gov- ernmental Affairs, United States Senate, 103rd Congress, First Session, February 24, 1998, p. 134, and Michael Krepon quoted in John Kifner, "Pakistan Army at Ease, Even in Nu- clear Choice," New York Times, June 23, 1998, p. A3.

38. Quoted in Erlanger, "India's Arms Race Isn't Safe Like the Cold War."

39. K. Subrahmanyam, "Nuclear Force Design and Minimum Deterrence Strategy," in Bharat Karnad, ed., Future Imperiled: India's Security in the 1990s and Beyond (New Delhi: Viking, 1994), pp. 190, 194. Both sides mention differ- ent numbers at different times. The important point is that all of them are low, running around one hundred warheads.

40. Cf. Peter D. Feaver, "Neooptimists and the Enduring Problem of Nuclear Proliferation," Security Studies 6, no. 4 (Summer 1997), pp. 105-20.

41. Strobe Talbott, "Dealing with the Bomb in South Asia," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (March/ Apri l 1999), p. 117.

42. Claudia Dreifus, "Benazir Bhutto," New York Times Magazine, May 15, 1994, p. 39; K. Shankar Bajpai, "Nuclear Exchange," Far Eastern Economic Review, June 24, 1993, p. 24; Shamshad Ahmad, "The Nuclear Subconti- nent: Bringing Stability to South Asia," Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (July/August 1999), p. 125.

43. John F. Burns, "War-Weary Kashmiris Con- template the Price of Peace," New York Times, July 11, 2001, p. A3.

44. Quoted in Jonathan Spence, "Kissinger and the Emperor," New York Review of Books, March 4, 1999, p. 21.

45. Cf. K. Subrahmanyam, "India's Dilemna," in K. Subrahmanyam, ed„ Nuclear Myths and

Realities (New Delhi: ABC Publishing House, 1981), pp. 218-19; Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb, p. 170.

46. Amitabh Mattoo, "India's Nuclear Policy in an Anarchic World," in Mattoo, ed., India's Nu- clear Deterrent: Pokhran II and Beyond (New Delhi; Har-Anand, 1999), p. 22.

47. George Fernandes, quoted in John F. Burns, "Indian Defense Chief Calls U.S. Hypocriti- cal," New York Times, June 18, 1998, p. A6.

48. Kanti Bajpai, "The Fallacy of an Indian Deter- rent," in Amitabh Mattoo, ed„ India's Nuclear Deterrent, p. 183. China does not recognize Arunachal Pradesh or Sikkim as parts of India.

49. Quoted in Erlanger, "India's Arms Race Isn't Safe Like the Cold War."

50. Albert Carnesale, Paul Doty, Stanley Hoffman, Samuel P. Huntington, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and Scott Sagan, Living with Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) p. 44.

51. See, e.g., Mirza Aslam Beg, Development and Security: Thoughts and Reflections (Rawalpindi: Friends, 1994), p. 189; and K. Sundarji cited in Devin T. Hagerty, "Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia: The 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis," p. 109.

52. Raja Menon, A Nuclear Strategy for India (New Delhi: Sage, 2000), p. 116,

53. Karl Kaiser, "Nonproliferation and Nuclear Deterrence, Survival 31, no. 2 (March/April, 1989), p. 125; Arthur G. Rubinoff, "The failure of nuclear deterrence in South Asia," Toronto Globe and Mail, June 1, 1998, p. A17.

54. See Kenneth N. Waltz, "Thoughts about Vir- tual Nuclear Arsenals," Washington Quarterly 20, no. 3 (Summer 1997), p. 158.

55. Peter Vincent Pry, War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink (Wesport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), pp. 33-43. Pry tells other hair-raising tales about provocative ac- tion by both sides,

56. Subrahmanyam, "Nuclear Force Design," p. 192.

57. Ibid., p. 186. 58. This time the commentator is Sam Gardiner,

Colonel, USAF, retired. See his "It Doesn't Start in Kashmir, and It Never Ends Well," Washington Post, January 20, 2002, p. B l .

59. The analyst is Commodore Uday Bhaskar, deputy directory of the Institute for Defense

Studies and Analysis, quoted in Rajiv Chan- drasekaran, "For India, Deterrence May Not Prevent War," Washington Post Foreign Ser- vice, January 17, 2002, p. A l .

J O H N M U E L L E R

The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear

Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World

I t is widely assumed that, for better or worse, the existence of nuclear weapons has profoundly shaped our lives and destinies. Some find the weapons supremely beneficial. Defense analyst Ed- ward Luttwak says, "we have lived since 1945 widi- out another world war precisely because rational minds .. . extracted a durable peace from the very terror of nuclear weapons."1 And Robert Art and Kenneth Waltz conclude, "the probability of war between America and Russia or between NATO and the Warsaw Pact is practically nil precisely be- cause the military planning and deployments of each, together with the fear of escalation to general nuclear war, keep it that way."2 Others argue that, while we may have been lucky so far, the continued existence of the weapons promises eventual calamity; The doomsday clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been pointedly hovering near midnight for over 40 years now, and in his influential bestseller, The Fate, of the Earth, Jonathan Schell dramatically concludes that if we do not "rise up and cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons," we will "sink into the final coma and end it all."3

This article takes issue with both of these points of view and concludes that nuclear weapons

From International Security 13, no. 2 (fall 1988): 55-79. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

neither crucially define a fundamental stability nor threaten severely to disturb it.

The paper is in two parts. In the first it is ar- gued that, while nuclear weapons may have sub- stantially influenced political rhetoric, public discourse, and defense budgets and planning, it is not at all clear that they have had a significant im- pact on the history of world affairs since World War II. They do not seem to have been necessary to deter World War III, to determine alliance pat- terns, or to cause the United States and the Soviet Union to behave cautiously.

In the second part, these notions arc broad- ened to a discussion of stability in the postwar world. It is concluded that there may be a long- term trend away from war among developed coun- tries and that the long peace since World War II is less a peculiarity of the nuclear age than the logical conclusion of a substantial historical process. Seen broadly, deterrence seems to be remarkably firm; major war—a war among developed countries, like World War II or worse—is so improbable as to be obsolescent; imbalances in weapons systems are unlikely to have much impact on anything ex- cept budgets; and the nuclear arms competition may eventually come under control not so much out of conscious design as out of atrophy born of boredom.

342 C H A P T E R 8 W A R A N D S T R I F E

The Impact of Nuclear Weapons

The postwar world might well have turned out much the same even in the absence of nuclear weapons. Without them, world war would have been discouraged by the memory of World War II, by superpower contentment with the postwar sta- tus quo, by the nature of Soviet ideology, and by the fear of escalation. Nor do the weapons seem to have been the crucial determinants of Cold War developments, of alliance patterns, or of the way the major powers have behaved in crises.

D E T E R R E N C E O F W O R L D W A R

It is true that there has been no world war since 1945 and it is also true that nuclear weapons have been developed and deployed in part to deter such a conflict. It does not follow, however, that it is the weapons that have prevented the war—that peace has been, in Winston Churchill's memorable con- struction, "the sturdy child of [nuclear] terror." To assert that the ominous presence of nuclear weapons has prevented a war between the two power blocs, one must assume that there would have been a war had these weapons not existed. This assumption ignores several other important war-discouraging factors in the postwar world.

The Memory of World War II. A nuclear war would certainly be vastly destructive, but for the most part nuclear weapons simply compound and dramatize a military reality that by 1945 had al- ready become appalling. Few with the experience of World War II behind them would contemplate its repetition with anything other than horror. Even before the bomb had been perfected, world war had become spectacularly cosdy and destruc- tive, killing some 50 million worldwide. As former Secretary of State Alexander Haig put it in 1982: "The catastrophic consequences of another world war—with or without nuclear weapons—make deterrence our highest objective and our only rational military strategy."4

Postwar Contentment. For many of the combat- ants, World War I was as destructive as World

War II, but its memory did not prevent another world war. Of course, as will be discussed more fully in the second half of this article, most nations did conclude from the horrors of World War I that such an event must never be repeated. If the only nations capable of starting World War II had been Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States, the war would probably never have oc- curred. Unfortunately other major nations sought direct territorial expansion, and conflicts over these desires finally led to war.

Unlike the situation after World War I, how- ever, the only powers capable of creating another world war since 1945 have been the big victors, the United States and the Soviet Union, each of which has emerged comfortably dominant in its respec- tive sphere. As Waltz has observed, "the United States, and the Soviet Union as well, have more reason to be satisfied with the status quo than most earlier great powers had."5 (Indeed, except for the dismemberment of Germany, even Hitler might have been content with the empire his arch-enemy Stalin controlled at the end of the war.) While there have been many disputes since the war, neither power has had a grievance so es- sential as to make a world war—whether nuclear or not—an attractive means for removing the grievance.

Soviet Ideology, Although the Soviet Union and international communism have visions of chang- ing the world in a direction they prefer, their ideol- ogy stresses revolutionary procedures over major war. The Soviet Union may have hegemonic de- sires as many have argued but, with a few excep- tions (especially the Korean War) to be discussed below, its tactics, inspired by the cautiously prag- matic Lenin, have stressed subversion, revolution, diplomatic and economic pressure, seduction, guerrilla warfare, local uprising, and civil war— levels at which nuclear weapons have little rele- vance. The communist powers have never—be- fore or after the invention of nuclear weapons —subscribed to a Hitler-style theory of direct, Armageddon-risking conquest, and they have been extremely wary of provoking Western powers into

large-scale war. Moreover, if the memory of World War II deters anyone, it probably does so to an ex- treme degree for the Soviets. Officially and unoffi- cially they seem obsessed by the memory of the destruction they suffered. In 1953 Ambassador Averell Harriman, certainly no admirer of Stalin, observed that the Soviet dictator "was determined, if he could avoid it, never again to go through the horrors of another protracted world war."6

The Belief in Escalation. Those who started World Wars I and 11 did so not because they felt that costly wars of attrition were desirable, but because they felt that escalation to wars of attrition could be avoided. In World War I the offensive was be- lieved to be dominant, and it was widely assumed that conflict would be short and decisive.7 In World War II, both Germany and Japan experi- enced repeated success with bluster, short wars in peripheral areas, and blitzkrieg, aided by the coun- terproductive effects of their opponents' appease- ment and inaction.8

World war in the post-1945 era has been pre- vented not so much by visions of nuclear horror as by the generally-accepted belief that conflict can easily escalate to a level, nuclear or not, that the es- sentially satisfied major powers would find intoler ably costly.

To deal with the crucial issue of escalation, it is useful to assess two important phenomena of the early post-war years: the Soviet preponderance in conventional arms and the Korean War.

First, it has been argued that the Soviets would have been tempted to take advantage of their con- ventional strength after World War II to snap up a prize like Western Europe if its chief defender, the United States, had not possessed nuclear weapons. As Winston Churchill put it in 1950, "nothing pre- serves Europe from an overwhelming military at- tack except the devastating resources of the United States in this awful weapon."9

This argument requires at least three question- able assumptions: (1) that the Soviets really think of Western Europe as a prize worth taking risks for; (2) that, even without the atomic bomb to rely on, the United States would have disarmed after

1945 as substantially as it did; and (3) that the So- viets have actually ever had the strength to be quickly and overwhelmingly successful in a con- ventional attack in Western Europe. 1 0

However, even if one accepts these assump- tions, the Soviet Union would in all probability still have been deterred from attacking Western Europe by the enormous potential of the American war machine. Even if the USSR had the ability to blitz Western Europe, it could not have stopped the United States from repeating what it did after 1941; mobilizing with deliberate speed, putting its economy onto a wartime footing, and wearing the enemy down in a protracted conventional major war of attrition massively supplied from its unap- proachable rear base.

The economic achievement of the United States during the war was astounding. While hold- ing off one major enemy, it concentrated with its allies on defeating another, then turned back to the first. Meanwhile, it supplied everybody. With 8 million of its ablest men out of the labor market, it increased industrial production 15 percent per year and agricultural production 30 percent over- all. Before the end of 1943 it was producing so much that some munitions plants were closed down, and even so it ended the war with a sub- stantial surplus of wheat and over $90 billion in surplus war goods. (National governmental expen- ditures in the first peacetime year, 1946, were only about $60 billion.) As Denis Brogan observed at the time, "to the Americans war is a business, not an art."11

If anyone was in a position to appreciate this, it was the Soviets. By various circuitous routes the United States supplied the Soviet Union with, among other things, 409,526 trucks; 12,161 com- bat vehicles (more than the Germans had in 1939); 32,200 motorcycles; 1,966 locomotives; 16,000,000 pairs of boots (in two sizes); and over one-half pound of food for every Soviet soldier for every day of the war (much of it Spam).12 It is the kind of feat that concentrates the mind, and it is extremely difficult to imagine the Soviets willingly taking on this somewhat lethargic, but ultimately hugely ef- fective juggernaut. That Stalin was fully aware of

the American achievement—and deeply impressed by it—is clear. Adam Ulam has observed that Stalin had "great respect for the United States' vast economic and hence military potential, quite apart from the bomb," and that his "whole career as dic- tator had been a testimony to his belief that pro- duction figures were a direct indicator of a given country's power." 1 3 As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it in 1949, " i f there is any single factor today which would deter a nation seeking world domination, it would be the great industrial capacity of this country rather than its armed strength."14 Or, as Hugh Thomas has concluded, " i f the atomic bomb had not existed, Stalin would still have feared the success of the U.S. wartime economy." 1 5

After a successful attack on Western Europe the Soviets would have been in a position similar to that of Japan after Pearl Harbor: they might have gains aplenty, but they would have no way to stop the United States (and its major unapproach- able allies, Canada and Japan) from eventually gearing up for, and then launching, a war of attri- tion. * * *

Second, there is the important issue of the Ko- rean War. Despite the vast American superiority in atomic weapons in 1950, Stalin was willing to or- der, approve, or at least acquiesce in an outright at- tack by a communist state on a non-communist one, and it must be assumed that he would have done so at least as readily had nuclear weapons not existed. The American response was essentially the result of the lessons learned from the experiences of the 1930s: comparing this to similar incursions in Manchuria, Ethiopia, and Czechoslovakia (and pardy also to previous Soviet incursions into neighboring states in East Europe and the Baltic area), Western leaders resolved that such provoca- tions must be nipped in the bud. If they were al- lowed to succeed, they would only encourage more aggression in more important locales later. Conse- quently it seems likely that the Korean War would have occurred in much the same way had nuclear weapons not existed.

For the Soviets the lessons of the Korean War must have enhanced those of World War II: once

again the United States was caught surprised and under-armed, once again it rushed hastily into ac- tion, once again it soon applied itself in a forceful way to combat—in this case for an area that it had previously declared to be of only peripheral con- cern. If the Korean War was a limited probe of Western resolve, it seems the Soviets drew the lessons the Truman administration intended. Un- like Germany, Japan, and Italy in the 1930s, they were tempted to try no more such probes: there have been no Koreas since Korea. It seems likely that this valuable result would have come about re- gardless of the existence of nuclear weapons, and it suggests that the Korean War helped to delimit vividly the methods the Soviet Union would be al- lowed to use to pursue its policy, 1 6

It is conceivable that the USSR, in carrying out its ideological commitment to revolution, might have been tempted to try step-by-step, Hitler-style military probes if it felt these would be reasonably cheap and free of risk. The policy of containment, of course, carrying with it the threat of escalation, was designed precisely to counter such probes. * * *

C O L D W A R A N D CRISIS

If nuclear weapons have been unnecessary to pre- vent world war, they also do not seem to have cru- cially affected other important developments, including * * * the * * * behavior of the super- powers in crisis.

Crisis Behavior. Because of the harrowing image of nuclear war, it is sometimes argued, the United States and the Soviet Union have been notably more restrained than they might otherwise have been, and thus crises that might have escalated to dangerous levels have been resolved safely at low levels.17

There is, of course, no definitive way to refute this notion since we are unable to run the events of the last forty years over, this time without nuclear weapons. And it is certainly the case that decision-

makers are well aware of the horrors of nuclear war and cannot be expected to ignore the possibility that a crisis could lead to such devastation.

However, this idea—that it is the fear of nu- clear war that has kept behavior restrained—looks far less convincing when its underlying assumption is directly confronted: that the major powers would have allowed their various crises to escalate if all they had to fear at the end of the escalatory ladder was something like a repetition of World War II. Whatever the rhetoric in these crises, it is difficult to see why the unaugmented horror of re- peating World War II, combined with considerable comfort with the status quo, wouldn't have been enough to inspire restraint.

Once again, escalation is the key: what deters is the belief that escalation to something intolerable will occur, not so much what the details of the ulti- mate unbearable punishment are believed to be. Where the belief that the conflict will escalate is absent, nuclear countries have been militarily challenged with war—as in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria, and the Falklands.

To be clear: None of this is meant to deny that the sheer horror of nuclear war is impressive and mind-concentratingly dramatic, particularly in the speed with which it could bring about massive de- struction. Nor is it meant to deny that decision- makers, both in times of crisis and otherwise, are fully conscious of how horribly destructive a nu- clear war could be. It is simply to stress that the sheer horror of repeating World War II is not all that much less impressive or dramatic, and that powers essentially satisfied with the status quo will strive to avoid anything that they feel could lead to either calamity. World War II did not cause total destruction in the world, but it did utterly annihi- late the three national regimes that brought it about. It is probably quite a bit more terrifying to think about a jump from the 50th floor than about a jump from the 5th floor, but anyone who finds life even minimally satisfying is extremely unlikely to do either.

Did the existence of nuclear weapons keep the Korean conflict restrained? As noted, the commu- nist venture there seems to have been a limited

probe—though somewhat more adventurous than usual and one that got out of hand with the mas- sive American and Chinese involvement. As such, there was no particular reason—or meaningful military opportunity—for the Soviets to escalate the war further. In justifying their restraint, the Americans continually stressed the danger of esca- lating to a war with the Soviet Union—something of major concern whether or not the Soviets pos- sessed nuclear weapons.

Nor is it clear that the existence of nuclear weapons has vitally influenced other events. For example, President Harry Truman was of the opin- ion that his nuclear threat drove the Soviets out of Iran in 1946, and President Dwight Eisenhower, that his nuclear threat drove the Chinese into pro- ductive discussions at the end of the Korean War in 1953. McGeorge Bundy's reassessment of these events suggests that neither threat was very well communicated and that, in any event, other occur- rences—the maneuverings of the Iranian govern- ment in the one case and the death of Stalin in the other—were more important in determining the outcome.18 But even if we assume the threats were important, it is not clear why the threat had to be peculiarly nuclear—a threat to commit destruction on the order of World War II would also have been notably unpleasant and dramatic.

Much the same could be said about other in- stances in which there was a real or implied threat that nuclear weapons might be brought into play: the Taiwan Straits crises of 1954-55 and 1958, the Berlin blockade of 1948-49, the Soviet-Chinese confrontation of 1969, the Six-day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Cold War disagree- ments over Lebanon in 1958, Berlin in 1958 and 1961, offensive weapons in Cuba in 1962. Al l were resolved, or allowed to dissipate, at rather low rungs on the escalatory ladder. While the horror of a possible nuclear war was doubtless clear to the participants, it is certainly not apparent that they would have been much more casual about escala- tion if the worst they had to visualize was a repeti- tion of World War II. 1 9

Of course nuclear weapons add new elements to international politics: new pieces for the players to

move around the board (missiles in and out of Cuba, for example), new terrors to contemplate. But in counter to the remark attributed to Albert Ein- stein that nuclear weapons have changed everything except our way of thinking, it might be suggested that nuclear weapons have changed little except our way of talking, gesturing, and spending money.

M I C H A E L W . D O Y L E

International Intervention

H ow might the principles of political inde-pendence and territorial integrity be justi-fied? Nonintervention, the dominant norm of international law designed to protect those prin- ciples, has been justified by straightforward appeals to law and order that rest on the value of having rules of the road that reduce the probability of conflicts between those actors who prefer some co- ordination. But abstract ethical considerations such as those fail to include the purposes for which a state engages in or avoids conflict. Nor does ethics give us enough information about who the actors are, their interests, values, environment, and capacities. Political philosophies aim to fill in those blanks. They provide contingent justification for

nonintervention but also permit intervention, though for differing reasons.

Principles of nonintervention and intervention have been justified, though in differing ways, by Realists, by Socialists, by Liberals. A l though these principles never have been formally justified as a single treaty according to set of philosophical pre- cepts, they nonetheless throughout t ime have been justified by scholars, by politicians, by citizens who have sought to provide for us good reasons why we should abide by these conventional principles of classic international law and good reasons why we should, as Vattel suggests, sometimes override them.' * * *

From Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), chap. 11. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

Principles of Nonintervention and Intervention

R E A L I S T S

In many respects the principles of nonintervention can be seen as a summary of the sort of principles that a cautious or "soft" Realist would most want to have govern the international system. For ex- ample, Hobbes demanded that his sovereigns seek peace wherever they safely could. Rousseau, commenting on the peace plan of the Abbi de St- Pierre, argued that responsible statesmen, particu- larly, of course, those who were democratic, would not want to engage in wars of aggression but instead would merely seek the security of their own state. In a speech in 1994 U.S. Senator Richard Lugar sug- gested how a moderate definition of national ambi- tions can limit interventionism. "The American people," he declared, "are not convinced that we have vital interests in invading Haiti, despite immi- gration, which we believe might continue even if Mr . Aristide was restored. . . . And we've really not had a policy of forcing democracy on a country, however despicable that regime might be."2

But if we probe deeper, we can see that these justifications are extremely contingent from an overall Realist point of view. Doubting the efficacy of international law and morality as foundations for an obligation of nonintervention, Realists tend to see all states as caught in a state of war in which the only source of security is self-help. Security drives states then to focus on relative capabilities and a consequent search for predominance that is unrestrained by any factor but prudence.

Thucydides noted a first challenge to noninter- vention coming from what we can describe as a "hard" Realist view, a view espoused by the Athe- nian generals Cleomedes and Tisias in command of the blockade of Melos.3 The generals say that rules are fit only for relations among equals. Among unequals, when the strong confront the weak, the only rules that hold are the will of the strong and the obedience of the weak. And so the generals tell the Melians that they should not hope to be saved by the Spartans, their allies, or be

saved by rules that would restrict the aggressive ac- tions of states. Instead they have to confront the hard face of power, which is the Athenian fleet blockading the island. The generals add that for Athens this conquest is important. Melos may be a small island, but if a small island can successfully resist the might of Athens, other islands might be tempted to engage in similar rebellions. If this challenge were then to spread, Athens would lose its power. In order to deter challenges and enhance Athenian prestige, the generals claim that the Melian borders have to be overridden; the Melians must surrender or be destroyed.

Even though conquering Melos may have seemed the right thing to do in the view of the two Athenian generals, there's good reason for us to believe that this was not necessarily Thucydides's own view. He seemed to think the Athenian disas- ter in Sicily was its just consequence. His own view on intervention was more evident in an earlier debate on the fate of Mytilene, a subordinate ally of Athens. There a group of rebels against the Athenian empire sought to establish a self- determining, independent state. When they did so, they came up against the might of Athens.4

In the Athenian Assembly, Cleon, a hard-liner, lines up against Diodotus, a soft-liner and they de- bate the fate of the Mytileneans. What form of punishment, Cleon asks, is the correct fate for those who rebel against the alliance and law of Athens? He says the punishment must fit the crime; They seek to destroy Athens's power, on which its security, indeed, survival rests. The rebels must be killed—men, women, and children—in order to teach a lesson to all others who might be tempted to imitate them. Diodotus corrects Cleon's demands for vengeance and responds as the better Realist, regretting Cleon's harsh conclu- sion. Diodotus says that thinking about interna- tional politics as a matter of right and wrong, as a matter of just and unjust, legal and unlawful, con- fuses politics with a court of law and interferes with what should be a matter of prudence and ra- tional self-interest. International politics should cover no more than the prudent calculation of long-run security. We have to think of what sort of

message, we, the Athenians, send if we slaughter all of them as Cleon urges. Diodotus warns that we may intimidate the subject cities but we also will stir up resistance elsewhere in the empire or with potential allies. Thus Diodotus argues for a softer course. The soft course is not too soft—it involves the death of about a thousand Mytilinean rebels— but he advocates sparing the rest of the island in hopes of a future of imperial reconciliation and imperial stability.

In addition to considerations of prestige and imperial stability, preventive war provides a third reason to override the nonintervention principle. The great English polymath Francis Bacon, in his essay "Of Empire," provided this rationale and drew the policy implications with eloquence and force, urging "that princes do keep due sentinel that none of their neighbors do overgrow so (by in- crease of territory, by embracing trade, by ap- proaches, or the like) as they become more able to annoy them than they were. . . . [F]or there is no question but a justfear of an imminent danger, though no blow be given, is a lawful cause of war."3

Principles of nonintervention seem to have a thin foundation in Realist ethics, which finds them valuable only to the extent they are useful from a national point of view. One cannot abide by the rules of sovereign equality, sovereign noninterven- tion, when security is at stake. Rousseau thought that security need not be at stake if statesmen iso- lated themselves from one another, as should an ideal Corsica. Cleon and the Athenian generals at Melos had an expansive notion of security that in-

cluded the merest threat to prestige. Bacon in- cluded any threats to the relative balance of power. Diodotus had a less but still-expansive notion of se- curity, including as it did the stability of the empire.

Today, for example, some Israelis argue that the occupied West Bank—a form of long-term in- tervention against the Palestinians—is Israel's bib- lical heritage. Others, Liberals, argue that Israel must respect the right to self-determination of the Palestinians and return authority over the land to die people who inhabit it. Realism enters the de- bate when arguments focus on holding the West Bank as a necessary measure for Israel's security. But other Israelis of course think Realism calls for a recognition that occupation provokes more re- gional hostility, and thus danger, than it assuages. Realist arguments, whether hard or soft, shape a debate either when their underlying assumptions are widely shared or when actions force two sides into a state of war. For when a debate becomes a matter only of "them or us," the Realists say and usually convince us that the answer has to be "us."

SOCIALISTS

Socialists tend to regard international politics, par- ticularly international law, as a mere reflection of the much more fundamental class interests that truly govern international society. International society, according to Socialists, is akin to interna- tional civil war, where capitalists line up against workers, both domestically and internationally. State borders among nations are semifictions and

Views on Intervention

not the fundamental dividing blocks of world poli- tics. Nonetheless, national borders can and have played a progressive role in history. Marx himself saw reasons to support the development of the working class within a national framework. For that development to be successful, one had to ap- preciate the value of national sovereignty and therefore the value of national defense. So he hesi- tates only very rarely to condemn aggressive wars as he sees them occurring in his own times.6

When Marx considers a doctrine that should guide Socialists in their own choices for world pol- itics, he wants to remind them that even though they have a duty to advance to the greatest extent that they can, the processes of Socialism on a worldwide front, this does not include a duty to crusade for Socialism. He warns that the liberation of the working class can be achieved only by the working class. One cannot create revolutions for others by prematurely attempting to put a working-class or union movement in political power. Socialist crusades would create the grounds for an enormous amount of suffering, a great deal of instability, and the defeat of that particular working class at the hands of social forces, capital- ist and others, that it has not yet historically been able to master. Therefore, Marxists of the Second International, the pre-1914 Marxists and the post- 1914 social democrats, often lined up in favor of the principle of nonintervention.

Leninism and Stalinism, by contrast, came to perceive the role of international revolution as an important tool not just in the promotion of Social- ism worldwide but also in die defense of the one Communist state that was the Soviet Union. In the early revolutionary phase, Bolsheviks enthusi- astically adopted an expansive program of revo- lutionary intervention. The Soviet soldiers who conquered Armenia hailed their achievement from the balcony of the Armenian parliament building with these cheers: "Long live Soviet Armenia! Long live Soviet Azerbaijan! Long live Soviet Russia! Georgia wdl soon be a Soviet, too. Turkey will fol- low. Our Red Armies will sweep across Europe. . . . Long live the Third International!"7

In order to defend Socialism in one country,

Lenin and Stalin thought it necessary to adopt two contradictory policies. The first was to weaken the inherently aggressive forces of capitalism directed at the Socialist state. So Lenin on a number of occasions—and Stalin after him—interfered ag- gressively in the domestic politics of other states, not so much with armed force as with attempts at subversion. Some of the strategies adopted were justifiable in Marxist terms, such as the financial aid that the Soviets provided for the British work- ers in the General Strike of 1926. On the other hand, Soviet state and party interests sometimes precluded a revolutionary strategy, such as the Comintern's targeting of German Socialists, whose appeals for help against the growing Nazi move- ment were rejected by the Soviets.8

Once the Soviet Union acquired great power of its own after World War Two, interventionism be- came a practice that then turned into doctrine, the Brezhnev Doctrine. Following the forcible "Stalin- ization" of East European states after 1948 and then the interventions in Germany in 1953, Hun- gary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Brezh- nev declared that the Soviet Union stood in a particularly privileged position as the guardian of the collective interest of the working class world- wide and particularly, of course, within the Soviet bloc. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union thus claimed to act in the name of the worldwide working class in intervening against governments that it claimed were about to "betray" the interests of the working class.

L I B E R A L S : F O R A N D A G A I N S T

Nonintervention has been a particularly important and occasionally disturbing principle for liberal political philosophers. On the one hand, Liberals have provided some of the very strongest reasons to abide by a strict form of the nonintervention doctrine, and on the other hand, those very same principles when applied in different contexts have provided justifications for overriding the principle of nonintervention.

Liberal Nonintervention. Although the principle emerged historically as a practice among the

monarchical sovereigns of Europe, when democra- tic and Liberal governments came to power, they too adopted it. The Liberals contributed two new justifications for nonintervention.

The most important value they saw in the prin- ciple was that it reflected and protected human rights. Nonintervention enabled citizens to deter- mine their own way of life without outside inter- ference. If democratic rights and liberal freedoms were to mean something, they had to be worked out among those who shared them and were mak- ing them through their own participation. The first precondition of democratic government is self- government by one's own people. Kant's "Perpet- ual Peace" made a strong case for respecting the right of nonintervention because it afforded a polity the necessary territorial space and political independence in which free and equal citizens could work out what their way of life would be.9

John Stuart Mi l l provides a second argument for nonintervention, one focusing on likely conse- quences, when he explains in his famous 1859 essay "A Few Words on Nonintervention" that it would be a great mistake to export freedom to a foreign people that was not in a position to win it on its own. 1 0 A people given freedom by a foreign inter- vention would not, he argues, be able to hold on to it. It's only by winning and holding on to freedom through local effort that one acquires a true sense of its value. Moreover, it is only by winning free- dom chat one acquires the political capacities to defend it adequately against threats both at home and abroad. If, on the other hand, Liberal govern- ment were to be introduced into a foreign society, in the "knapsack," so to speak, of a conquering Liberal army, the local Liberals placed in power would find themselves immediately in a difficult situation. Not having been able to win political power on their own, they would have few domestic supporters and many non-Liberal domestic ene- mies. They then would wind up doing one of three different things:

They would (1) begin to rule as did previous governments—that is, repress their opposition. The intervention would have done no good; it sim- ply would have created another oppressive govern-

ment. Or they would (2) simply collapse in an en- suing civil war. Intervention therefore, would have produced not freedom and progress but a civil war with all its attendant violence. Or (3) the inter- venors would have continually to send in foreign support. Rather than having set up a free govern- ment, one that reflected the participation of the citizens of the state, the intervention would have set up a puppet government, one that would reflect the wills and interests of the intervening, the truly sovereign state.11

* * *

Liberal Intervention. Liberal arguments in favor of overriding nonintervention fall into two camps depending on what value they attach to national distinctiveness and on how confident the inter- venors are that foreigners can truly understand the circumstances of another people.

The cosmopolitan Liberals are radically skepti- cal of the principle of nonintervention, almost as much as are the Realists, though of course for dif- ferent reasons. The other group, the national Lib- erals, are firm defenders of nonintervention but would override the principle in certain exceptional circumstances.

The cosmopolitan position portrays noninter- vention as a derivative or instrumental value. It holds only where it seems to protect principles be- lieved to be more fundamental. We can divide these more fundamental principles into right-wing libertarian cosmopolitan principles and left-wing, egalitarian cosmopolitan principles. But both sets share a confident reading of the moral world, a "flat" world, where all is or should be the same, where we can clearly interpret the meaning and priority others attach to values and interest, such that we can directly judge for others just as we judge for ourselves. We can therefore know what are the justifiable ends and means—here, there, and everywhere.

Articulating just such a flat, confident moral universe, right-wing cosmopolitans hold that a morally adequate recognition of equal human free- dom requires freedom from torture, free speech,

privacy rights, and private property. It also de- mands democratic elections and an independent judiciary and, as a safeguard, a right of emigration. The entire package goes together, as Hadley Arkes has eloquently argued.12 The third right, emigra- tion, serves as an obvious safety valve. The second group of political rights—democratic elections and an independent judiciary—serves to protect the basic rights of free speech, privacy, and private property. Free governments are governments that protect all the basic rights and all the political rights. Totalitarian governments violate all those rights. They violate free speech, privacy, private property, democracy, and the independence of the judiciary. Authoritarian governments are not quite as bad as the totalitarians. They nonetheless violate the political rights of democratic elections and a free independent judiciary, while managing to pre- serve (partially) the rights of privacy and private property.13

The rights of cosmopolitan freedom are valu-

able everywhere for all people. Any violation of them should be resisted whenever and wherever it occurs, provided that we can do so proportionally, without causing more harm than we seek to avoid.1 4 Applying these views to the history of American interventionism, Arkes says we jusdy fought in Vietnam to prevent the takeover of a flawed South Vietnamese democracy by totalitar- ian North Vietnamese communism. We jusdy fought, he says, for good ends and used good means, and our only fault was in not sticking it out to protect South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from the terror of oppression that accompanied the communist victories.

Equally cosmopolitan but at the other end of the Liberal political spectrum is the left cosmopoli- tan view. David Luban argues powerfully that we can make an equally clear judgment about basic rights, but his bask rights are different,15 Basic rights include both subsistence rights—that is, rights to food and shelter and clothing—and security

A Comparison of Policy on Empire and Intervention

rights—that is, rights to be free from arbitrary killing, from torture, and from assault. We all have a duty to protect these socially basic rights. They are the rights held by humanity and claimable by all against all human beings.

In international politics, this means that states that fail to protect those rights do not have the right to be free from intervention. The most com- plete form of nonintervention thus is claimable only by states that do not violate basic rights. Moreover, all states have a duty to protect and to intervene, if an intervention is necessary, in order to provide subsistence needs held by all human beings. Both these considerations are subject to standard proportionality: We should never do something that would cause more harm than it saves. One implication of this principle is that if 500 individuals were to die of torture in country X. this year and we could militarily or otherwise in- tervene at a cost of 499 lives or less, intervention would be the right thing to do, and we would have a duty to do it. Correspondingly, if the only way that Haitians could provide subsistence for them- selves is by sailing a boat to Florida, the United States has no right to stop them,

National Liberals, a third group of Liberals, re- ject both cosmopolitan worldviews. They favor a revision and not a radical revolution in the princi- ple of nonintervention. For Michael Walzer, who builds on the argument of John Stuart Mi l l , the moral world is not flat and clearly interpretable by all but a series of moral hills and valleys. The par- ticular values the national community develops are hard for foreigners to perceive. They are the prod- uct not of abstract philosophic judgment but of complicated historical compromises,16 If they are contracts, they are Burkean contracts among the dead, the living, the yet to be born. We cannot freely unpack the compromises that they have made between principle and stability, between jus- tice and security, nor do we as nonparticipants in those packings, in those historical contracts, have a clear right to do so.

J. S. Mi l l argued on those grounds that for "civ- ilized" nations, his principles of consequentialist nonintervention hold. Interventions do more

harm than good, with three now unusual excep- tions.

First, reflecting the imperial metropolitan values of nineteenth-century Britain, M i l l does not think that all peoples are sufficiently "civilized" to be fit for national independence. Some societies are not, he claims, capable of the "reciprocity" on which all legal equality rests partly because of political chaos, partly because these peoples (like children) are inca- pable of postponing gratification. Moreover, they would benefit from the tutelage and commercial de- velopment imperial rule could provide. The only rights such peoples have are the right to be properly educated and the right to become a nation. 1 7

Second, some civil wars become so protracted and so seemingly unresolvable by local struggle that a common sense of humanity and sympathy for the suffering of the populations calls for an outside intervention to halt the fighting in order to see if some negotiated solution might be achieved under the aegis of foreign arms. M i l l here cites the success of outsiders in calling a halt to and help- ing settle the protracted mid-century Portuguese civil war.

Third, in a system-wide internationalized civil war, a "cold war," such as that waged between Protestantism and Catholicism in the sixteenth century, nonintervention can neglect vital transna- tional sources of national security. If one side in- tervenes to spread its ideology, the other has a defensive right to do the same.

Mill 's last three exceptions have been the most influential and have been adopted and developed by Michael Walzer, who, like M i l l , acknowledges that sovereignty and nonintervention ultimately depend upon consent, If the people welcome an intervention or refuse to resist, something less than aggression has occurred, 1 8 But we cannot make those judgments reliably in advance. We should as- sume, he suggests, that foreigners will be resisted, that nationals will protect their state from foreign aggression. For even if the state is not just, it's their state, not ours. We have no standing to decide what their state should be. We do not happen to be engaged full-time, as they are, in the national his- torical project of creating it.

A l l the injustices, therefore, that do justify a domestic revolution do not always justify a foreign intervention. Following M i l l , Walzer says that do- mestic revolutions need to be left to domestic citi- zens. Foreign interventions to achieve a domestic revolution are inauthentic, ineffective, and likely to cause more harm than they eliminate.

But there are some injustices that do justify foreign intervention, for sometimes the national self-determination that nonintervention protects and the harms that nonintervention tries to avoid are overwhelmed by the domestic oppression and suffering that borders permit. Building on John Stuart Mil l ' s classic essay, Walzer offers us three cases in which intervention serves the underlying purposes that nonintervention was designed to uphold. 1 9

The first case occurs when too many nations contest one piece of territory. When an imperial government opposes the independence of a subor- dinate nation or when there are two distinct peoples, one attempting to crush the other, then national self-determination cannot be a reason to shun intervention. Here foreigners can intervene to help the liberation of the oppressed people, once that people has demonstrated through its own "ar- duous struggle" that it truly is another nation. Then decolonization is the principle that should rule, allowing a people to form its own destiny. One model of this might be the American Revolu- tion against Britain; another in Mil l ' s time was the 1848-49 Hungarian rebellion against Austria, and in our time the many anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia that quickly won recognition and, in a few cases, support from the international community,

The second instance in which the principle against intervention should be overridden is coun- terintervention in a civil war. A civil war should be left to the combatants. When conflicting factions of one people are struggling to define what sort of society and government should rule, only that struggle, not foreigners, should decide the out- come. But when an external power intervenes on behalf of one of the participants in a civil war, then another foreign power can counterintervene to

balance the first intervention. This second inter- vention serves the purposes of self-determination, which the first intervention sought to undermine. Even if, M i l l argues, the Hungarian rebellion was not clearly a national rebellion against "a foreign yoke," it was clearly the case that Russia should not have intervened to assist Austria in its suppression, By doing so, Russia gave others a right to counter- intervene.

Third—and perhaps the most controversial case—one can intervene for humanitarian pur- poses, to halt what appears to be a gross violation of the rights to survival of a population, When we see a pattern of massacres, the development of a campaign of genocide, the institutionalization of slavery—violations so horrendous that in the classical phrase they "shock the conscience of mankind"—one has good ground to question whether there is any national connection between the population and the state that is so brutally op- pressing it. Under those circumstances, outsiders can intervene. But the intervener should have a morally defensible motive and share the purpose of ending the slaughter and establishing a self- determining people. (Solely self-serving inter- ventions promote imperialism.) Furthermore, in- terveners should act only as a "last resort," after exploring peaceful resolution. They should then act only when it is clear that they will save more lives than the intervention itself will almost in- evitably wind up costing, and even then with mini- mum necessary force. It makes no moral sense to rescue a village and start World War III or to de- stroy a village in order to save it. Thus, even though one often finds humanitarian intervention abused, Michael Walzer suggests that a reasonable case can be made that the Indian invasion of East Pakistan in 1971, designed to save the people of what became Bangladesh from the massacre that was being inflicted upon them by their own gov- ernment (headquartered in West Pakistan), is a case of legitimate humanitarian intervention. It al- lowed the people of East Pakistan to survive and form their own state,

A right to intervene does not, however, estab- lish a duty to intervene. States retain the duty to

weigh the lives of their own citizens as a special re- sponsibility. If an intervention could be costless, then there might be a strong obligation to inter- vene. But rarely is that so, and statesmen have an obligation not to volunteer their citizens in causes those citizens do not want to undertake. This is the basis of the right of neutrality in most wars. Na- tional interests invariably will come into play and should do so to justify an intervention to the citi- zens whose sons and daughters are likely to bear the casualties. In contradistinction to the Realists, Liberals hold that national interests should not govern when to intervene, just whether a nation should intervene when it has a right to do so.

* * *

Conclusions

Realists, Socialists, and Liberals each defend and each override the principle of nonintervention. The Realists do so to promote the national interest and especially national security; the Marxist, to promote Socialist revolution; the Liberals, to pro- tect and promote human rights. Each of the dif- fering types of Liberal—right-wing cosmopolitan, left-wing cosmopolitan, and national—justifies in- tervention using the same logic and arguments (with sign reversed) that it uses to justify when states should uphold nonintervention. Right-wing cosmopolitans want to protect from intervention democratic capitalist states; left-wing cosmopoli- tans want to protect from intervention all states that guarantee the basic rights of their citizens. The right-wing cosmopolitans justify interventions against any state that violates civil and economic liberties, including radical democratic (non- Liberal, democratic anticapitalist) states; the left- wing cosmopolitans, against those states that violate the basic social welfare rights of their citi- zens, whether Liberal, capitalist, or democratic or all three. The national Liberals raise the hurdles somewhat higher, leaving much more room for national struggle, variation, and oppression. They insist that revolutions are matters for domestic cit- izens. But when one people struggles to be free of

the oppression inflicted by another, when a second state has already intervened in an ongoing civil war (and one needs to intervene to right the balance), and when a state turns against its own citizens and makes all notion of a national community ridicu- lous through its acts of slaughter or slavery, then the principle of nonintervention needs to be over- ridden in order to achieve the very purposes of na- tional self-determination that the rule is designed to protect.

+ * *

When, for the Realists, national survival is threat- ened either by or by not intervening, Realists give simple answers. Liberals tend to agree with them, with the proviso and presumption that no fellow Liberal state could pose such a threat. But where survival is not at stake, Realist arguments tend to rest on contingent assessments of alternative pol- icy outcomes and nebulous estimates of prestige. * * * Liberals then will strongly disagree if the in- tervention violates their principles.

When, for the Liberals, nations need to be lib- erated from foreign yoke, foreign intervention, or genocide, all Liberals respond clearly and together. Realists tend to disagree; those are none of their concerns. When Liberals face powerful oppressors, such as was the USSR or is China, the differences among Liberals disappear. A cosmopolitan inter- vention to promote democracy or basic human rights is unlikely to be proportional except when the authoritarian oppression has led to genocide, and even then it may be so costly as to preclude anything but symbolic action or economic sanc- tions. When faced with a weak oppressor, Liberal differences in policy expand. Proportionality al- lows more room for choice because the costs of intervention are low. * * * [R]escues by dem- ocratic appeal should constitute another broad Liberal exception to nonintervention. Indeed this exception seems now to be emerging as a standard of international law, but only when interventions are approved by multilateral consent.

* * *

NOTES 1. An insightful study of the historical context of

the doctrine of nonintervention is John Vin- cent, Nonintervention and International Order [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974]. For valuable overviews, see Gerald Gra- ham, "The Justice of Intervention," Review of International Studies 13 (1987), pp. 133-46, and Jefferson McMahan, "The Ethics of Inter- national Intervention," in Kenneth Kipnis and Diana Meyers, eds., Political Realism and Inter- national Morality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 75-101.

2. Quoted in the New York Times, September 1, 1994. For more on the role of prudence in lim- iting Realist intervention, see Hoffmann, Du- ties beyond Borders [Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981] and Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger [Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1986], chap. 9.

3. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, V, para. 87-116. For a valuable and more general dis- cussion of Realist ethics, see J. E. Hare and Carey Joynt, Ethics and International Affairs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), chap. 3.

4. Thucydides, 3:1-50, 5. Francis Bacon, "Of Empire," in The Works of

Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding (London: 1870), vol. 6, pp. 420-421.

6. See pp. 64—66 of Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars [New York: Basic Books, 1977] for a compli- cated account of Marx's motives.

7. Reported by Oliver Baldwin, Six Prisons and Two Revolutions (London: 1925), quoted in Lord Kinross, Ataturk: The Birth of a Nation (London: Weidenfeld, 1993), p. 280.

8. R. Craig Nation, Black Earth, Red Star (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 60-67. On p. 70, he notes that the Comintern "encour- aged division on the left."

9. See Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace," partic- ularly the preliminary articles of a perpetual peace in which he spells out the rights of non-

intervention that he hopes will hold among all states even in the state of war. These rights take on an absolute character within the pa- cific union of republican states,

10. John Stuart Mi l l , "A Few Words on Noninter- vention," in Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1973), pp. 368-84.

11. A good discussion of consequentialist issues can be found in Anthony Ellis, "Utilitarianism and International Ethics," in Terry Nardin and David Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 158-79. * * *

12. Hadley Arkes, First Things (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1986), esp. chaps. 11-13. Transformed in a political and expediential way, these views relate to those adopted by the Reagan administration in its defense of global "freedom fighters," See a valuable discussion of this by Charles Beitz, "The Reagan Doctrine in Nicaragua," in Steven Luper-Foy, ed„ Problems of International Justice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 182-95.

13. This distinction has been developed by Jeane Kirkpatrick in "Dictatorships and Double Standards," [in Gettleman, Marvin E., Patrick Lacefield, Louis Menashe, and David Mermel- stein, eds., El Salvador; Central America in the New Cold War (New York: Grove Press, 1987), pp. 14-35,] but it also appears in traditional Liberal discourse.

14. The best discussion of the practical applica- tions of the proportionality issue that I have seen is Richard Ullman, "Human Rights and Economic Power: The United States versus Idi Amin," Foreign Affairs 56, 3 (April 1978), pp. 529-43. The author explains how carefully targeting sanctions on the government and by- passing the people could put pressure on the murderous Amin government.

15. David Luban, "Just War and Human Rights," Philosophy and Public Affairs 9, 2 (Winter 1980), reprinted in Charles Beitz, ed„ Interna- tional Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 195-216.

16. These compromises are part of the "thick" tex- ture of moral and political life that each nation forms for itself. Beyond the "thin" foundation of basic human rights that all nations should share, these "thick" moralities cover such is- sues as form of government, distributions of income, family law, education, and the status of religious practices. See Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and

Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

17. Mill , "Nonintervention," p. 376. 18. Michael Walzer, "The Moral Standing of

States: A Response to Four Critics," in Bertz, ed., International Ethics, ed., p. 221, n, 7.

19. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 106-08, 339-42.

B A R R Y R . P O S E N

The Security Dilemma

and Ethnic Conflict

The end of the Cold War has been accompa-nied by the emergence of nationalist, ethnic and religious conflict in Eurasia. However, the risks and intensity of these conflicts have varied from region to region: Ukrainians and Russians are still getting along relatively well; Serbs and Sloveni- ans had a short, sharp clash; Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims have waged open warfare; and Armenians and Azeris seem destined to fight a slow-motion attrition war. The claim that newly released, age-old antipathies account for this vio- lence fails to explain the considerable variance in observable intergroup relations.

The purpose of this article is to apply a basic concept from the realist tradition of international relations theory, "the security dilemma," to the special conditions that arise when proximate groups of people suddenly find themselves newly responsible for their own security. A group sud- denly compelled to provide its own protection must ask the following questions about any neigh- bouring group: is it a threat? How much of a threat? Wil l the threat grow or diminish over time?

From Survival 35, no. 1 (spring 1993): 27-47. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

Is there anything that must be done immediately? The answers to these questions strongly influence the chances for war.

This article assesses the factors that could pro- duce an intense security dilemma when imperial order breaks down, thus producing an early resort to violence. The security dilemma is then em- ployed to analyse * * * the break-up of Yugo- slavia * * * to illustrate its utility. Finally, some actions are suggested to ameliorate the tendency towards violence.

The Security Dilemma

The collapse of imperial regimes can be profitably viewed as a problem of "emerging anarchy." The longest standing and most useful school of inter- national relations theory—realism—explicitly ad- dresses the consequences of anarchy—-the absence of a sovereign—for political relations among states.1 In areas such as the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, "sovereigns" have disappeared. They leave in their wake a host of groups—eth- nic, religious, cultural—of greater or lesser cohe- sion. These groups must pay attention to the first thing that states have historically addressed—the

problem of security—even though many of these groups still lack many of the attributes of statehood,

Realist theory contends that the condition of anarchy makes security the first concern of states. It can be otherwise only if these political organiza- tions do not care about their survival as indepen- dent entities. As long as some do care, there will be competition for the key to security—power. The competition will often continue to a point at which the competing entities have amassed more power than needed for security and, thus, consequently begin to threaten others. Those threatened will re- spond in turn.

Relative power is difficult to measure and is of- ten subjectively appraised; what seems sufficient to one state's defence will seem, and will often be, of- fensive to its neighbours. Because neighbours wish to remain autonomous and secure, they will react by trying to strengthen their own positions. States can trigger these reactions even if they have no expansionist inclinations. This is the security di- lemma: what one does to enhance one's own secu- rity causes reactions that, in the end, can make one less secure. Cooperation among states to mute these competitions can be difficult because some- one else's "cheating" may leave one in a militarily weakened position. A l l fear betrayal.

Often statesmen do not recognize that this problem exists: they do not empathize with their neighbours; they are unaware that their own ac- tions can seem threatening. Often it does not matter if they know of this problem. The nature of their situation compels them to take the steps they do.

The security dilemma is particularly intense when two conditions hold. First, when offensive and defensive military forces are more or less iden- tical, states cannot signal their defensive intent— that is, their limited objectives—by the kinds of military forces they choose to deploy. Any forces on hand are suitable for offensive campaigns. For example, many believe that armoured forces are the best means of defence against an attack by armoured forces. However, because armour has a great deal of offensive potential, states so out-

fitted cannot distinguish one another's intentions. They must assume the worst because the worst is possible.

A second condition arises from the effective- ness of the offence versus the defence. If offensive operations are more effective than defensive opera- tions, states will choose the offensive if they wish to survive. This may encourage pre-emptive war in the event of a political crisis because the perceived superiority of the offensive creates incentives to strike first whenever war appears likely. In addi- tion, in the situation in which offensive capability is strong, a modest superiority in numbers will ap- pear to provide greatly increased prospects for mil- itary success. Thus, the offensive advantage can cause preventive war if a state achieves a military advantage, however fleeting.

The barriers to cooperation inherent in inter- national politics provide clues to the problems that arise as central authority collapses in multi-ethnic empires. The security dilemma affects relations among these groups, just as it affects relations among states. Indeed, because these groups have the added problem of building new state structures from the wreckage of old empires, they are doubly vulnerable.

Here it is argued that the process of imperial collapse produces conditions that make offensive and defensive capabilities indistinguishable and make the offence superior to the defence. In addi- tion, uneven progress in the formation of state structures will create windows of opportunity and vulnerability. These factors have a powerful influ- ence on the prospects for conflict, regardless of the internal politics of the groups emerging from old empires. Analysts inclined to the view that most of the trouble lies elsewhere, either in the specific na- ture of group identities or in the short-term incen- tives for new leaders to "play the nationalist card" to secure their power, need to understand the se- curity dilemma and its consequences. Across the board, these strategic problems show that very lit- tle nationalist rabble-rousing or nationalistic com- bativeness is required to generate very dangerous situations.

T H E I N D I S T 1 N G U 1 S H A B I L I T Y O F O F F E N C E A N D D E F E N C E

Newly independent groups must first determine whether neighbouring groups are a threat. They will examine one another's military capabilities to do so. Because the weaponry available to these groups will often be quite rudimentary, their of- fensive military capabilities will be as much a func- tion of the quantity and commitment of the soldiers they can mobilize as the particular charac- teristics of the weapons they control. Thus, each group will have to assess the other's offensive mili- tary potential in terms of its cohesion and its past military record.

The nature of military technology and organi- zation is usually taken to be the main factor affect- ing the distinguishability of offence and defence. Yet, clear distinctions between offensive and de- fensive capabilities are historically rare, and they are particularly difficult to make in the realm of land warfare. For example, the force structures of armed neutrals such as Finland, Sweden and Switzerland are often categorized as defensive. These countries rely more heavily on infantry, which is thought to have weak offensive potential, than on tanks and other mechanized weaponry, which are thought to have strong offensive poten- tial. However, their weak offensive capabilities have also been a function of the massive military power of what used to be their most plausible ad- versary, the former Soviet Union. Against states of similar size, similarly armed, all three countries would have considerable offensive capabilities— particularly if their infantries were extraordinarily motivated—as German and French infantry were at the outset of World War I, as Chinese and North Vietnamese infantry were against the Americans and as Iran's infantry was against the Iraqis.

Ever since the French Revolution put the first politically motivated mass armies into the field, strong national identity has been understood by both scholars and practitioners to be a key ingredi- ent of the combat power of armies.2 A group iden- tity helps the individual members cooperate to achieve their purposes. When humans can readily cooperate, the whole exceeds the sum of the parts,

creating a unit stronger relative to those groups with a weaker identity. Thus, the "groupness" of the ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic collec- tivities that emerge from collapsed empires gives each of them an inherent offensive military power.

The military capabilities available to newly in- dependent groups will often be less sophisticated; infantry-based armies will be easy to organize, aug- mented by whatever heavier equipment is inher- ited or seized from the old regime. Their offensive potential will be stronger the more cohesive their sponsoring group appears to be. Particularly in the close quarters in which these groups often find themselves, the combination of infantry-based, or quasi-mechanized, ground forces with strong group solidarity is likely to encourage groups to fear each other. Their capabilities will appear offensive.

The solidarity of the opposing group will strongly influence how each group assesses the magnitude of the military threat of the others. In general, however, it is quite difficult to perform such assessments. One expects these groups to be "exclusive" and, hence, defensive. Frenchmen gen- erally do not want to turn Germans into French- men, or the reverse. Nevertheless, the drive for security in one group can be so great that it pro- duces near-genocidal behaviour towards neigh- bouring groups. Because so much conflict has been identified with "group" identity throughout his- tory, those who emerge as the leaders of any group and who confront the task of self-defence for the first time will be sceptical that the strong group identity of others is benign.

What methods are available to a newly inde- pendent group to assess the offensive implications of another's sense of identity?3 The main mecha- nism that they will use is history: how did other groups behave the last time they were uncon- strained? Is there a record of offensive military ac- tivity by the other? Unfortunately, the conditions under which this assessment occurs suggest that these groups are more likely to assume that their neighbours are dangerous than not.

The reason is that the historical reviews that new groups undertake rarely meet the scholarly

standards that modern history and social science hold as norms (or at least as ideals) in the West. First, the recently departed multi-ethnic empires probably suppressed or manipulated the facts of previous rivalries to reinforce their own rule; the previous regimes in the Soviet Union and Yu- goslavia lacked any systemic commitment to truth in historical scholarship. Second, the members of these various groups no doubt did not forget the record of their old rivalries; it was preserved in oral history. This history was undoubtedly magnified in the telling and was seldom subjected to critical ap- praisal. Third, because their history is mostly oral, each group has a difficult time divining another's view of the past. Fourth, as central authority begins to collapse and local politicians begin to struggle for power, they will begin to write down their ver- sions of history in political speeches. Yet, because the purpose of speeches is domestic political mobi- lization, these stories are likely to be emotionally charged.

The result is a worst-case analysis. Unless proven otherwise, one group is likely to assume that another group's sense of identity, and the co- hesion that it produces, is a danger. Proving it to be otherwise is likely to be very difficult. Because the cohesion of one's own group is an essential means of defence against the possible depredations of neighbours, efforts to reinforce cohesion are likely to be undertaken. Propagandists are put to work writing a politicized history of the group, and the mass media are directed to disseminate that history, The media may either willingly, or under compulsion, report unfolding events in terms that magnify the threat to the group. As neighbouring groups observe this, they do the same.

In sum, the military capability of groups will often be dependent on their cohesion, rather than their meagre military assets. This cohesion is a threat in its own right because it can provide the emotional power for infantry armies to take the of- fensive. An historical record of large-scale armed clashes, much less wholesale mistreatment of un- armed civilians, however subjective, will further the tendency for groups to see other groups as

threats. They will all simultaneously "arm"— militarily and ideologically—against each other.

T H E S U P E R I O R I T Y O F O F F E N S I V E O V E R

D E F E N S I V E A C T I O N

Two factors have generally been seen as affecting the superiority of offensive over defensive action— technology and geography. Technology is usually treated as a universal variable, which affects the military capabilities of all the states in a given com- petition. Geography is a situational variable, which makes offence particularly appealing to specific states for specific reasons. This is what matters most when empires collapse.

In the rare historical cases in which technology has clearly determined the offence-defence bal- ance, such as World War I, soldiers and statesmen have often failed to appreciate its impact. Thus, technology need not be examined further, with one exception: nuclear weapons. If a group inherits a nuclear deterrent, and its neighbours do as well, "groupness" is not likely to affect the security dilemma with as much intensity as would be the case in non-nuclear cases. Because group solidarity would not contribute to the ability of either side to mount a counterforce nuclear attack, nationalism is less important from a military standpoint in a nuclear relationship.

Political geography will frequently create an "offence-dominant world" when empires collapse. Some groups will have greater offensive capabili- ties because they will effectively surround some or all of the other groups. These other groups may he forced to adopt offensive strategies to break the ring of encirclement. Islands of one group's popu - lation are often stranded in a sea of another. Where one territorially concentrated group has "islands" of settlement of its members distributed across the nominal territory of another group (ir- redenta), the protection of these islands in the event of hostile action can seem extremely difficult. These islands may not be able to help one another; they may be subject to blockade and siege, and by virtue of their numbers relative to the surrounding

population and because of topography, they may be militarily indefensible. Thus, the brethren of the stranded group may come to believe that only rapid offensive military action can save their irredenta from a horrible fate.4

The geographic factor is a variable, not a con- stant. Islands of population can be quite large, eco- nomically autonomous and militarily defensible. Alternatively, they can have large numbers of nearby brethren who form a powerful state, which could rescue them in the event of trouble. Poten- tially, hostile groups could have islands of another group's people within their states; these islands could serve as hostages. Alternatively, the brethren of the "island" group could deploy nuclear weap- ons and thus punish the surrounding group if they misbehave. In short, it might be possible to defend irredenta without attacking or to deter would-be aggressors by threatening to retaliate in one way or another.

Isolated ethnic groups—ethnic islands—can produce incentives for preventive war. Theorists argue that perceived offensive advantages make preventive war more attractive: if one side has an advantage that will not be present later and if secu- rity can best be achieved by offensive military ac- tion in any case, then leaders will be inclined to attack during this "window of opportunity."5 For example, if a surrounding population will ulti- mately be able to fend off relief attacks from the home territory of an island group's brethren, but is currently weak, then the brethren will be inclined to attack sooner rather than later.

In disputes among groups interspersed in the same territory, another kind of offensive advantage exists—a tactical offensive advantage. Often the goal of the disputants is to create ever-growing ar- eas of homogeneous population for their brethren. Therefore, the other group's population must be induced to leave. The Serbs have introduced the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe this objective, a term redolent with the horrors of 50 years earlier. The offence has tremendous tactical military ad- vantages in operations such as these. Small military forces directed against unarmed or poorly armed

civilians can generate tremendous terror. This has always been true, of course, but even simple mod- ern weapons, such as machine guns and mortars, increase the havoc that small bands of fanatics can wreak against the defenceless: Consequently, small bands of each group have an incentive to attack the towns of the other in the hopes of driving the peo- ple away.6 This is often quite successful, as the vast populations of war refugees in the world today attest.

The vulnerability of civilians makes it possible for small bands of fanatics to initiate conflict. Be- cause they are small and fanatical, these bands are hard to control. (This allows the political leader- ship of the group to deny responsibility for the ac- tions those bands take.) These activities produce disproportionate political results among the op- posing group—magnifying initial fears by con- firming them. The presence or absence of small gangs of fanatics is thus itself a key determinant of the ability of groups to avoid war as central politi- cal authority erodes. Although almost every society produces small numbers of people willing to en- gage in violence at any given moment, the rapid emergence of organized bands of particularly vio- lent individuals is a sure sign of trouble.

The characteristic behaviour of international organizations, especially the United Nations (UN), reinforces the incentives for offensive action. Thus far, the UN has proven itself unable to anticipate conflict and provide the credible security guaran- tees that would mitigate the security dilemma. Once there is politically salient trouble in an area, the UN may try to intervene to "keep the peace." However, the conditions under which peacekeep- ing is attempted are favourable to the party that has had the most military success. As a general rule, the UN does not make peace: it negotiates cease-fires. Two parties in dispute generally agree to a cease-fire only because one is successful and happy with its gains, while the other has lost, but fears even worse to come. Alternatively, the two sides have fought to a bloody stalemate and would like to rest. The UN thus protects, and to some ex- tent legitimates, the military gains of the winning

side, or gives both a respite to recover. This ap- proach by the international community to inter- vention in ethnic conflict, helps create an incentive for offensive military operations.

W I N D O W S O F V U L N E R A B I L I T Y A N D O P P O R T U N I T Y

Where central authority has recently collapsed, the groups emerging from an old empire must calcu- late their power relative to each other at the time of collapse and make a guess about their relative power in the future. Such calculations must ac- count for a variety of factors. Objectively, only one side can be better off. However, the complexity of these situations makes it possible for many com- peting groups to believe that their prospects in a war would be better earlier, rather than later. In addition, if the geographic situation creates incen- tives of the kind discussed earlier, the temptation to capitalize on these windows of opportunity may be great. These windows may also prove tempting to those who wish to expand for other reasons.

The relative rate of state formation strongly in- fluences the incentives for preventive war. When central authority has collapsed or is collapsing, the groups emerging from the political rubble will try to form their own states. These groups must choose leaders, set up bureaucracies to collect taxes and provide services, organize police forces for in- ternal security and organize military forces for ex- ternal security. The material remnants of the old state (especially weaponry, foreign currency re- serves, raw material stocks and industrial capa- bilities) will be unevenly distributed across the territories of the old empire. Some groups may have had a privileged position in the old system. Others will be less well placed.

The states formed by these groups will thus vary gready in their strength. This will provide im- mediate military advantages to those who are far- ther along in the process of state formation. If those with greater advantages expect to remain in that position by virtue of their superior numbers, then they may see no window of opportunity. However, if they expect their advantage to wane or disappear, then they will have an incentive to solve

outstanding issues while they are much stronger than the opposition.

This power differential may create incentives for preventive expropriation, which can generate a spiral of action and reaction. With military re- sources unevenly distributed and perhaps artifi- cially scarce for some due to arms embargoes, cash shortages or constrained access to the outside world, small caches of armaments assume large importance. Any military depot will be a tempting target, especially for the poorly armed. Better armed groups also have a strong incentive to seize these weapons because this would increase their margin of superiority.

In addition, it matters whether or not the old regime imposed military conscription on all groups in society. Conscription makes arms theft quite easy because hijackers know what to look for and how to move it. Gains are highly cumulative because each side can quickly integrate whatever it steals into its existing forces. High cumulativity of conquered resources has often motivated states in the past to initiate preventive military actions.

Expectations about outside intervention wil l also affect preventive war calculations. Historically, this usually meant expectations about the interven- tion of allies on one side or the other, and the value of such allies. Allies may be explicit or tacit. A group may expect itself or another to find friends abroad. It may calculate that the other group's nat- ural allies are temporarily preoccupied, or a group may calculate that it or its adversary has m a n y other adversaries who wi l l attack in the event of conflict. The greater the number of potent ial allies for all groups, the more complex this ca lcu la t ion wi l l be and the greater the chance for error. T h u s , two opposing groups cou ld both th ink that the ex- pected behaviour of others makes them stronger in the short term.

A broader window-of-opportunity problem has been created by the large number of crises and conflicts that have been precipitated by the end of the Cold War. The electronic media provide free global strategic intelligence about these problems to anyone for the price of a shortwave radio, much less a satellite dish. Middle and great powers, and

international organizations, are able to deal with only a small number of crises simultaneously. States that wish to initiate offensive military ac- tions, but fear outside opposition, may move quickly if they learn that international organiza- tions and great powers are preoccupied momen- tarily with other problems.

Croats and Serbs

Viewed through the lens of the security dilemma, the early stages of Yugoslavia's disintegration were strongly influenced by the following factors. First, the parties identified the re-emerging identities of the others as offensive threats. The last time these groups were free of constraint, during World War II, they slaughtered one another with aban- don. In addition, the Yugoslav military system trained most men for war and distributed infantry armament widely across the country. Second, the offensive appeared to have the advantage, particu- larly against Serbs "marooned" in Croatian and Muslim territory. Third, the new republics were not equally powerful. Their power assets varied in terms of people and economic resources; access to the wealth and military assets of the previous regime; access to external allies; and possible out- side enemies. Preventive war incentives were con- sequently high. Fourth, small bands of fanatics soon appeared on the scene. Indeed, the political and military history of the region stressed the role of small, violent, committed groups; the resistance to the Turks; the Ustashe in the 1930s; and the Us- tashe state and Serbian Chetniks during World War II.

Serbs and Croats both have a terrifying oral history of each other's behaviour. This history goes- back hundreds of years, although the intense Croat-Serb conflict is only about 125 years old. The history of the region is quite warlike: the area was the frontier of the Hapsburg and Turkish em- pires, and Croatia had been an integral part of the military apparatus of the Hapsburg empire. The imposition of harsh Hungarian rule in Croatia in 1868; the Hungarian divide-and-conquer strategy that pitted Croats and Serbs in Croatia against each

other; the rise of the independent Serbian nation- state out of the Ottoman empire, formally recog- nized in Europe in 1878; and Serbian pretensions to speak for all south Slavs were the main origins of the Croat-Serb conflict. When Yugoslavia was formed after World War I, the Croats had a very different vision of the new state than the Serbs. They hoped for a confederal system, while the Serbs planned to develop a centralized nation- state.7 The Croats did not perceive themselves to be treated fairly under this arrangement, and this helped stimulate the development of a violent re- sistance movement, the Ustashe, which collabo- rated with the Fascist powers during the 1930s.

The Serbs had some reasons for assuming the worst about the existence of an independent Croa- tian state, given Croatian behaviour during World War II. Ustashe leadership was established in Croatia by Nazi Germany. The Serbs, both com- munist and non-communist, fought the Axis forces, including the Croats, and each other. (Some Croats also fought in Josef Tito's com- munist partisan movement against the Nazis.) Roughly a million people died in the fighting— some 5.9% of Yugoslavia's pre-war population.8

The Croats behaved with extraordinary brutality towards the Serbs, who suffered nearly 500,000 dead, more than twice as many dead as the Croats.9

(Obviously, the Germans were responsible for many Serbian deaths as well.) Most of these were not killed in battle; they were civilians murdered in large-scale terrorist raids.

The Croats themselves suffered some 200,000 dead in World War II, which suggests that depre- dations were inflicted on many sides. (The non- communist, "nationalist" Chetniks were among the most aggressive killers of Croats, which helps explain why the new Croatian republic is worried by the nationalist rhetoric of the new Serbian re- public.) Having lived in a pre- and post-war Yu- goslavia largely dominated by Serbs, the Croats had reason to suspect that the demise of the Yu- goslavian Communist Party would be followed by a Serbian bid for hegemony. In 1971, the Croatian Communist Party had been purged of leaders who had favoured greater autonomy. In addition, the

historical record of the Serbs during the past 200 years is one of regular efforts to establish an ever larger centralized Serbian national state on the Balkan Peninsula. Thus, Croats had sufficient rea- son to fear the Serbs.

Serbs in Croatia were scattered in a number of vulnerable islands; they could only be "rescued" by offensive action from Serbia. Such a rescue, of course, would have been enormously complicated by an independent Bosnia, which in part explains the Serbian war there. In addition, Serbia could not count on maintaining absolute military superi- ority over the Croats forever: almost twice as many Serbs as Croats inhabit the territory of what was once Yugoslavia, but Croatia is slightly wealthier than Serbia.10 Croatia also has some natural allies within former Yugoslavia, especially Bosnian Muslims, and seemed somewhat more adept at winning allies abroad. As Croatia adopted the trap- pings of statehood and achieved international recognition, its military power was expected to grow. From the Serbian point of view, Serbs in Croatia were insecure and expected to become more so as time went by.

From a military point of view, the Croats prob- ably would have been better off postponing their secession until after they had made additional mil- itary preparations. However, their experience in 1971, more recent political developments and the military preparations of the Yugoslav army proba- bly convinced them that the Serbs were about to strike and that the Croatian leadership would be rounded up and imprisoned or killed if they did not act quickly.

Each side not only had to assess the other's ca- pabilities, but also its intentions, and there were plenty of signals of malign intent. Between 1987 and 1990, Slobodan Milosevic ended the adminis- trative autonomy within Serbia that had been granted to Kosovo and Vojvodina in the 1974 constitution.11 In August 1990, Serbs in the Dal- matia region of Croatia held a cultural autonomy referendum, which they defended with armed roadblocks against expected Croatian interfer- ence.12 By October, the Yugoslav army began to impound all of the heavy weapons stored in

Croatia for the use of the territorial defence forces, thus securing a vast military advantage over the nascent armed forces of the republic.13 The Serbian window of opportunity, already large, grew larger. The Croats accelerated their own military preparations.

It is difficult to tell just how much interference the Croats planned, if any, in the referendum in Dalmatia. However, Croatia had stoked the fires of Serbian secessionism with a series of ominous rul- ings. In the spring of 1990, Serbs in Croatia were redefined as a minority, rather than a constituent nation, and were asked to take a loyalty oath. Ser- bian police were to be replaced with Croats, as were some local Serbian officials. No offer of cul- tural autonomy was made at the time. These Croa- tian policies undoubtedly intensified Serbian fears about the future and further tempted them to ex- ploit their military superiority.

It appears that the Croats overestimated the re- liability and influence of the Federal Republic of Germany as an ally due to some combination of World War II history, the widespread mispercep- tion created by the European media and by Western political leaders of Germany's near- superpower status, the presumed influence of the large Croatian emigre community in Germany and Germany's own diplomacy, which was quite favourable to Croatia even before its fune 1991 declaration of independence.14 These considerations may have encouraged Croatia to secede. Con- versely, Serbian propaganda was quick to stress the German-Croatian connection and to speculate on future German ambitions in the Balkans.15 Fair or not, this prospect would have had an impact on Serbia's preventive war calculus.

Conclusion

Three main conclusions follow from the preceding analysis. First, the security dilemma and realist international relations theory more generally have considerable ability to explain and predict the probability and intensity of military conflict

among groups emerging from the wreckage of em- pires.

Second, the security dilemma suggests that the risks associated with these conflicts are quite high. Several of the causes of conflict and war high- lighted by the security dilemma operate with con- siderable intensity among the groups emerging from empires. The kind of military power that these groups can initially develop and their com- peting versions of history will often produce mu- tual fear and competition. Settlement patterns, in conjunction with unequal and shifting power, will often produce incentives for preventive war. The cumulative effect of conquered resources will en- courage preventive grabs of military equipment and other assets.

Finally, if outsiders wish to understand and perhaps reduce the odds of conflict, they must as- sess the local groups' strategic view of their situa- tion. Which groups fear for their physical security and why? What military options are open to them? By making these groups feel less threatened and by reducing the salience of windows of opportunity, the odds of conflict may be reduced.

Because the international political system as a whole remains a self-help system, it will be difficult to act on such calculations. Outsiders rarely have major material or security interests at stake in re- gional disputes. It is difficult for international institutions to threaten credibly in advance to intervene, on humanitarian grounds, to protect groups that fear for the future. Vague humanitar- ian commitments will not make vulnerable groups feel safe and will probably not deter those who wish to repress them. In some cases, however, such commitments may be credible because the conflict has real security implications for powerful outside actors.

Groups drifting into conflict should be encour- aged to discuss their individual histories of mutual relations. Competing versions of history should be reconciled if possible. Domestic policies that raise bitter memories of perceived past injustices or depredations should be examined. This exercise need not be managed by an international political institution; non-governmental organizations could

play a role. Discussions about regional history would be an intelligent use of the resources of many foundations. A few conferences will not, of course, easily undo generations of hateful, politi- cized history, bolstered by reams of more recent propaganda. The exercise would cost little and, therefore, should be tried.

In some cases, outside powers could threaten not to act; this would discourage some kinds of ag- gressive behaviour. For example, outside powers could make clear that if a new state abuses a mi- nority and then gets itself into a war with that mi- nority and its allies, the abuser will find little sympathy abroad if it begins to lose. To accomplish this, however, outside powers must have a way of detecting mistreatment of minorities.

In other cases, it may be reasonable for outside powers to provide material resources, including ar- maments, to help groups protect themselves. How- ever, this kind of hard-bitten policy is politically difficult for liberal democratic governments now dominating world politics to pursue, even on hu- manitarian grounds. In addition, it is an admit- tedly complicated game in its own right because it is difficult to determine the amount and type of military assistance needed to produce effective de- fensive forces, but not offensive capabilities. Nev- ertheless, considerable diplomatic leverage may be attained by the threat to supply armaments to one side or the other.

* * *

It will frequently prove impossible, however, to arrange military assets, external political commit- ments and political expectations so that all neigh- bouring groups are relatively secure and perceive themselves as such. War is then likely. These wars will confirm and intensify all the fears that led to their initiation. Their brutality will tempt outsiders to intervene, but peace efforts originating from the outside will be unsuccessful if they do not realisti- cally address the fears that triggered the conflicts initially. In most cases, this will require a willing- ness to commit large numbers of troops and sub- stantial amounts of military equipment to troubled areas for a very long time.

NOTES 1. The following realist literature is essential for

those interested in the analysis of ethnic con- flict: Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, M A : Addison Wesley, 1979), Chapters 6 and 8; Robert Jervis, "Cooperation under the security dilemma," World Politics, no. 2, January 1978, pp. 167-213; Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in Interna- tional Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1976), Chapter 3; Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966, 1976), Chap- ters 1 and 6.

2. See Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 591-92; Robert Gilpin, "The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism," in Robert E. Keohane, Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 300-21, especially pp. 304-308.

3. This problem shades into an assessment of "intentions," another very difficult problem for states in international politics. This issue is treated as a capabilities problem because the emergence of anarchy forces leaders to focus on military potential, rather than on inten- tions. Under these conditions, every group will ask whether neighbouring groups have the cohesion, morale and martial spirit to take the offensive if their leaders call on them to do so.

4. It is plausible that the surrounding population will view irredenta in their midst as an offen- sive threat by the outside group. They may be perceived as a "fifth column," that must be controlled, repressed or even expelled.

5. See Stephen Van Evera, "The cult of the offen- sive and the origins of the First World War," International Security, vol. 9, no. 1, Summer 1984, pp. 58-107.

6. Why do they not go to the defence of their own, rather than attack the other? Here, it is

hypothesized that such groups are scarce rela- tive to the number of target towns and villages, so they cannot "defend" their own with any great confidence.

7. James Gow, "Deconstructing Yugoslavia," Sur- vival, vol. 33, no. 4, July/August 1991, p. 292; J.B. Hoptner, Yugoslavia in Crisis 1934-1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), PP- 1-9.

8. Ivo Banac, "Political change and national diversity," Daedalus, vol. 119, no. 1, Winter 1990, pp. 145-150, estimates that 487,000 Serbs, 207,000 Croats, 86,000 Bosnian Mus- lims and 60,000 Jews died in Yugoslavia during the war.

9. Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 103-28. See especially, Chapter 4, "The National State and Genocide: The Ustasha Movement, 1929-1945," especially pp. 120- 27, which vividly describes large-scale Croa- tian murders of Serbs, as well as Jews and Gyp- sies; however, Djilas does not explain how 200,000 Croats also died.

10. See Sabrina Ramet, Nationalism and Federal- ism in Yugoslavia 1962-1991 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2nd ed., 1992), Appendix 2, p. 286.

11. Gow, op. cit. in note 7, p. 294. Vojvodina con- tains the only petroleum and gas in Yugoslavia proximate to Serbia, so this act probably had a strategic motive; see Central Intelligence Agency, Atlas of Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, August 1990), p. 10.

12. International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey 1990-1991 (London: Brassey's for the IISS, 1991), p. 167.

13. Gow, op. cit. in note 7, p. 299. 14. See John Newhouse, "The diplomatic round,"

The New Yorker, 24 August 1992, especially p. 63. See also John Zametica, The Yugoslav Conflict, Adelphi Paper 270 (London: Brassey's for the 1ISS, 1992), pp. 63-65.

15. Ramet, op. cit. in note 10, p. 265.

A U D R E Y K U R T H C R O N I N

Behind the Curve: Globalization and

International Terrorism

The coincidence between the evolving changes of globalization, the inherent weaknesses of the Arab region, and the inadequate Ameri- can response to both ensures that terrorism will continue to be the most serious threat to U.S. and Western interests in the twenty-first century. There has been little creative thinking, however, about how to confront the growing terrorist backlash that has been unleashed. Terrorism is a compli- cated, eclectic phenomenon, requiring a sophisti- cated strategy oriented toward influencing its means and ends over the long term. Few members of die U.S. policymaking and academic communi- ties, however, have the political capital, intellec- tual background, or inclination to work together to forge an effective, sustained response. Instead, the tendency has been to fall back on established bureaucratic mind-sets and prevailing theoretical paradigms that have little relevance for the changes in international security that became obvious after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

As the primary terrorist target, the United States should take the lead in fashioning a forward- looking strategy. As the world's predominant mili- tary, economic, and political power, it has been able to pursue its interests throughout the globe with unprecedented freedom since the breakup of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago. Even in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and especially after the U.S. military action in

From International Security, 27, No. 3 (Winter 2002/03): 30-58. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

Afghanistan, the threat of terrorism, mostly con- sisting of underfunded and ad hoc cells motivated by radical fringe ideas, has seemed unimportant by comparison. U.S. strategic culture has a long tradi- tion of downplaying such atypical concerns in fa- vor of a focus on more conventional state-based military power.1 On the whole, this has been an effective approach: As was dramatically demon- strated in Afghanistan, the U.S. military knows how to destroy state governments and their armed forces, and the American political leadership and public have a natural bias toward using power to achieve the quickest results. Sometimes it is impor- tant to show resolve and respond forcefully.

The United States has been far less impressive, however, in its use of more subtle tools of domestic and international statecraft, such as intelligence, law enforcement, economic sanctions, educational training, financial controls, public diplomacy, coalition building, international law, and foreign aid. In an ironic twist, it is these tools that have be- come central to the security of the United States and its allies since September 11. In an era of glob- alized terrorism, the familiar state-centric threats have not disappeared; instead they have been joined by new (or newly threatening) competing political, ideological, economic, and cultural con- cerns that are only superficially understood, partic- ularly in the West. An examination of the recent evolution of terrorism and a projection of future developments suggest that, in the age of globalized terrorism, old attitudes are not just anachronistic; they are dangerous.

* * *

Definition, Origins, Motivations, and Types of Modern Terrorism

* * *

Definition of Terrorism

Terrorism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because the term has evolved and in part because it is associated with an activity that is designed to be subjective. Generally speaking, the targets of a ter- rorist episode are not the victims who are killed or maimed in the attack, but rather the govern- ments, publics, or constituents among whom the terrorists hope to engender a reaction—such as fear, repulsion, intimidation, overreaction, or radi- calization. Specialists in the area of terrorism stud- ies have devoted hundreds of pages toward trying to develop an unassailable definition of the term, only to realize the fruitlessness of their efforts: Ter- rorism is intended to be a matter of perception and is thus seen differently by different observers.2

Although individuals can disagree over whether particular actions constitute terrorism, there are certain aspects of the concept that are fundamen- tal. First, terrorism always has a political nature. It involves the commission of outrageous acts de- signed to precipitate political change.3 At its root, terrorism is about justice, or at least someone's perception of it, whether man-made or divine. Sec- ond, although many other uses of violence are in- herently political, including conventional war among states, terrorism is distinguished by its non- state character—even when terrorists receive mili- tary, political, economic, and other means of support from state sources. States obviously em- ploy force for political ends: When state force is used internationally, it is considered an act of war; when it is used domestically, it is called various things, including law enforcement, state terror, op- pression, or civil war. Although states can terror- ize, they cannot by definition be terrorists. Third, terrorism deliberately targets the innocent, which also distinguishes it from state uses of force that in-

advertently kill innocent bystanders. In any given example, the latter may or may not be seen as jus- tified; but again, this use of force is different from terrorism. Hence the fact that precision-guided missiles sometimes go astray and kill innocent civilians is a tragic use of force, but it is not terror- ism. Finally, state use of force is subject to interna- tional norms and conventions that may be invoked or at least consulted; terrorists do not abide by in- ternational laws or norms and, to maximize the psychological effect of an attack, their activities have a deliberately unpredictable quality.4

Thus, at a minimum, terrorism has the follow- ing characteristics: a fundamentally political na- ture, the surprise use of violence against seemingly random targets, and the targeting of the innocent by nonstate actors.5 All of these attributes are illus- trated by recent examples of terrorism—from the April 2000 kidnapping of tourists by the Abu Sayyaf group of the Philippines to the various inci- dents allegedly committed by al-Qaeda, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the September 11 attacks, For the purposes of this discussion, the shorthand (and admittedly imperfect) definition of terrorism is the threat or use of seemingly random violence against innocents for political ends by a nonstate actor.

Origins of Terrorism

Terrorism is as old as human history. One of the first reliably documented instances of terrorism, however, occurred in the first century B.C.E The Zealots-Sicarri, Jewish terrorists dedicated to incit- ing a revolt against Roman rule in Judea, murdered their victims with daggers in broad daylight in the heart of Jerusalem, eventually creating such anxi- ety among the population that they generated a mass insurrection.6 Other early terrorists include the Hindu Thugs and the Muslim Assassins, Mod- ern terrorism, however, is generally considered to have originated with the French Revolution.7

The term "terror" was first employed in 1795, when it was coined to refer to a policy systemati- cally used to protect the fledgling French republic government against counterrevolutionaries. Robes-

pierre's practice of using revolutionary tribunals as a means of publicizing a prisoner's fate for broader effect within the population (apart from questions of legal guilt or innocence) can be seen as a nascent example of the much more highly developed, bla- tant manipulation of media attention by terrorist groups in the mid- to late twentieth century.8

Modern terrorism is a dynamic concept, from the outset dependent to some degree on the political and historical context within which it has been employed.

Decolonization and Antiglobalization: Drivers of Terrorism?

Although individual terrorist groups have unique characteristics and arise in specific local contexts, an examination of broad historical patterns reveals that the international system within which such groups are spawned does influence their nature and motivations. A distinguishing feature of mod- ern terrorism has been the connection between sweeping political or ideological concepts and in- creasing levels of terrorist activity internationally. The broad political aim has been against (1) em- pires, (2) colonial powers, and (3) the U.S.-led in- ternational system marked by globalization. Thus it is important to understand the general history of modern terrorism and where the current threat fits within an international context.

David Rapoport has described modern terror- ism such as that perpetuated by al-Qaeda as part of a religiously inspired "fourth wave." This wave follows three earlier historical phases in which ter- rorism was tied to the breakup of empires, decolo- nization, and leftist anti-Westernism.9 Rapoport argues that terrorism occurs in consecutive if somewhat overlapping waves. The argument here, however, is that modern terrorism has been a power struggle along a continuum: central power versus local power, big power versus small power, modern power versus traditional power. The key variable is a widespread perception of opportunity, combined with a shift in a particular political or ideological paradigm. Thus, even though the newest international terrorist threat, emanating largely

from Muslim countries, has more than a modicum of religious inspiration, it is more accurate to see it as part of a larger phenomenon of antiglobaliza- tion and tension between the have and have-not nations, as well as between the elite and underpriv- ileged within those nations. In an era where re- forms occur at a pace much slower than is desired, terrorists today, like those before them, aim to ex- ploit the frustrations of the common people (espe- cially in the Arab world),

* * *

The dissolution of empires and the search for a new distribution of political power provided an opportunity for terrorism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It climaxed in the assassina- tion of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, an event that catalyzed the major powers into taking violent action, not because of the sig- nificance of the man himself but because of the suspicion of rival state involvement in the sponsor- ship of the killing. World War I, the convulsive systemic cataclysm that resulted, ended the first era of modern terrorism, according to Rapoport. 1 0 But terrorism tied to popular movements seeking greater democratic representation and political power from coercive empires has not ceased. C o n - sider, for example, the Balkans after the downfall of the former state of Yugoslavia. The struggle for power among various Balkan ethnic groups can be seen as the final devolution of power from the for- mer Ottoman Empire. This postimperial scramble is also in evidence elsewhere—for example, in Aceh, Chechnya, and Xinjiang, to mention just a few of the trouble spots within vast (former) em- pires. The presentation of a target of opportunity, such as a liberalizing state or regime, frequently evokes outrageous terrorist acts.

According to Rapoport, a second, related phase of modern terrorism associated with the concept of national self-determination developed its greatest predominance after World War I. It also continues to the present day. These struggles for power are another facet of terrorism against larger political powers and are specifically designed to win political independence or autonomy. The mid-

twentieth-century era of rapid decolonization spawned national movements in territories as di- verse as Algeria, Israel, South Africa, and Viet- nam.11 An important by-product was ambivalence toward the phenomenon in the international com- munity, with haggling over the definition of terror- ism reaching a fever pitch in the United Nations by the 1970s.

* * *

Terrorism achieved a firmly international charac- ter during the 1970s and 1980s,12 evolving in part as a result of technological advances and partly in reaction to the dramatic explosion of international media influence. International links were not new, but their centrality was. Individual, scattered na- tional causes began to develop into international organizations with links and activities increasingly across borders and among differing causes. This development was greatly facilitated by the covert sponsorship of states such as Iran, Libya, and North Korea, and of course the Soviet Union, which found the underwriting of terrorist organi- zations an attractive tool for accomplishing clan- destine goals while avoiding potential retaliation for the terrorist attacks.

The 1970s and 1980s represented the height of state-sponsored terrorism. Sometimes the lowest common denominator among the groups was the concept against which they were reacting—for ex- ample, "Western imperialism"—rather than the specific goals they sought. The most important in- novation, however, was the increasing commonal- ity of international connections among the groups. After the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israeli athletes, for example, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its associated groups captured the imaginations of young radi- cals around the world. In Lebanon and elsewhere, the PLO also provided training in the preferred techniques of twentieth-century terrorism such as airline hijacking, hostage taking, and bombing.

Since the September 11 attacks, the world has witnessed the maturation of a new phase of terror- ist activity, the jihad era, spawned by the Iranian

Revolution of 1979 as well as the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan shortly thereafter. The powerful at- traction of religious and spiritual movements has overshadowed the nationalist or leftist revolution- ary ethos of earlier terrorist phases (though many of those struggles continue), and it has become the central characteristic of a growing international trend. It is perhaps ironic that, as Rapoport ob- serves, the forces of history seem to be driving in- ternational terrorism back to a much earlier time, with echoes of the behavior of "sacred" terrorists such as the Zealots-Sicarii clearly apparent in the terrorist activities of organizations such as al- Qaeda and its associated groups. Religious terror- ism is not new; rather it is a continuation of an ongoing modern power struggle between those with power and those without it. Internationally, the main targets of these terrorists are the United States and the U.S.-led global system.

Like other eras of modern terrorism, this latest phase has deep roots. And given the historical pat- terns, it is likely to last at least a generation, if not longer. The jihad era is animated by widespread alienation combined with elements of religious identity and doctrine—a dangerous mix of forces that resonate deep in the human psyche.

What is different about this phase is the urgent requirement for solutions that deal both with the religious fanatics who are the terrorists and the far more politically motivated states, entities, and peo- ple who would support them because they feel powerless and left behind in a globalizing world. Thus if there is a trend in terrorism, it is the exis- tence of a two-level challenge: the hyperreligious motivation of small groups of terrorists and the much broader enabling environment of bad gover- nance, nonexistent social services, and poverty that punctuates much of the developing world. Al-Qaeda, a band driven by religious extremism, is able to do so much harm because of the sec- ondary support and sanctuary it receives in vast areas that have not experienced the political and economic benefits of globalization. Therefore, the prescription for dealing with Osama bin Laden and his followers is not just eradicating a relatively

small number of terrorists, but also changing the conditions that allow them to acquire so much power. * * *

Leftist, Rightist, Ethnonationalist/Separatist, and "Sacred" Terrorism

There are four types of terrorist organizations cur- rently operating around the world, categorized mainly by their source of motivation: left-wing terrorists, right-wing terrorists, ethnonationalist/ separatist terrorists, and religious or "sacred" terrorists. Al l four types have enjoyed periods of relative prominence in the modern era, with left- wing terrorism intertwined with the Communist movement,13 right-wing terrorism drawing its in- spiration from Fascism,14 and the bulk of ethnona- tionalist/separatist terrorism accompanying the wave of decolonization especially in the immediate post-World War II years. Currently, "sacred" ter- rorism is becoming more significant.15 Although groups in all categories continue to exist today, left-wing and right-wing terrorist groups were more numerous in earlier decades. Of course, these categories are not perfect, as many groups have a mix of motivating ideologies—some ethnonation- alist groups, for example, have religious character- istics or agendas16—but usually one ideology or motivation dominates.

Categories are useful not simply because classi- fying the groups gives scholars a more orderly field to study (admittedly an advantage), but also because different motivations have sometimes led to differ- ing styles and modes of behavior. Understanding the type of terrorist group involved can provide in- sight into the likeliest manifestations of its violence and the most typical patterns of its development. At the risk of generalizing, left-wing terrorist organiza- tions, driven by liberal or idealist political concepts, tend to prefer revolutionary, antiauthoritarian, anti- materialistic agendas. (Here it is useful to distin- guish between the idealism of individual terrorists and the frequendy contradictory motivations of

their sponsors.) In line with these preferences, left- wing organizations often engage in brutal criminal- type behavior such as kidnapping, murder, bombing, and arson, often directed at elite targets that symbolize authority. They have difficulty, how- ever, agreeing on their long-term objectives.17 Most left-wing organizations in twentieth-century West- ern Europe, for example, were brutal but relatively ephemeral. Of course, right-wing terrorists can be ruthless, but in their most recent manifestations they have tended to be less cohesive and more im- petuous in their violence than leftist terrorist groups. Their targets are often chosen according to race but also ethnicity, religion, or immigrant status, and in recent decades at least, have been more op- portunistic than calculated.18 This makes them potentially explosive but difficult to track.19 Eth- nonationalist/separatist terrorists are the most conventional, usually having a clear political or territorial aim that is rational and potentially nego- tiable, if not always justifiable in any given case. They can be astoundingly violent, over lengthy peri- ods. At the same time, it can be difficult to distin- guish between goals based on ethnic identity and those rooted in the control of a piece of land. With their focus on gains to be made in the traditional state-oriented international system, ethnonational- ist/separatist terrorists often transition in and out of more traditional paramilitary structures, depending on how the cause is going. In addition, they typically have sources of support among the local populace of the same ethnicity with whom their separatist goals (or appeals to blood links) may resonate. That broader popular support is usually the key to the greater average longevity of ethnonationalist/ separatist groups in the modern era.20

All four types of terrorist organizations are ca- pable of egregious acts of barbarism. But religious terrorists may be especially dangerous to interna- tional security for at least five reasons.

First, religious terrorists often feel engaged in a Manichaean struggle of good against evil, implying an open-ended set of human targets: Anyone who is not a member of their religion or religious sect may be "evil" and thus fair game. * * *

Second, religious terrorists engage in violent behavior directly or indirectly to please the perceived commands of a deity. This has a number of worrisome implications: The whims of the deity may be less than obvious to those who are not members of the religion, so the actions of violent religious organizations can be especially unpre- dictable. Moreover, religious terrorists may not be as constrained in their behavior by concerns about the reactions of their human constituents. (Their audience lies elsewhere.)

Third, religious terrorists consider themselves to be unconstrained by secular values or laws. In- deed the very target of the attacks may be the law- based secular society that is embodied in most modern states. The driving motivation, therefore, is to overturn the current post-Westphalian state system—a much more fundamental threat than is, say, ethnonationalist terrorism purporting to carve out a new secular state or autonomous territory.

Fourth, and related, religious terrorists often display a complete sense of alienation from the ex- isting social system. They are not trying to correct the system, making it more just, more perfect, and more egalitarian. Rather they are trying to replace it. In some groups, apocalyptic images of destruc- tion are seen as a necessity—even a purifying regi- men—and this makes them uniquely dangerous, as was painfully learned on September l l . 2 1

Fifth, religious terrorism is especially worri- some because of its dispersed popular support in civil society. On the one hand, for example, groups such as al-Qaeda are able to find support from some Muslim nongovernmental foundations throughout the world, 2 2 making it truly a global network. On the other hand, in the process of trying to distinguish between the relatively few providers of serious support from the majority of genuinely philanthropic groups, there is the real risk of igniting the very holy war that the terrorists may be seeking in the first instance.

In sum, there are both enduring and new as- pects to modern terrorism. The enduring features center on the common political struggles that have characterized major acts of international terrorism. The newest and perhaps most alarming aspect is

the increasingly religious nature of modern terror- ist groups. Against this historical background, the unique elements in the patterns of terrorist activity surrounding September 11 appear starkly.

Key Trends in Modern Terrorism

By the late 1990s, four trends in modern terrorism were becoming apparent: an increase in the inci- dence of religiously motivated attacks, a decrease in die overall number of attacks, an increase in the lethality per attack, and the growing targeting of Americans.

Statistics show that, even before the Septem- ber 11 attacks, religiously motivated terrorist orga- nizations were becoming more common. The acceleration of this trend has been dramatic: Ac- cording to the RAND-St. Andrews University Chronology of International Terrorism, 2 3 in 1968 none of the identified international terrorist orga- nizations could be classified as "religious"; in 1980, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, there were 2 (out of 64), and that number had expanded to 25 (out of 58) by 1995.24

Careful analysis of terrorism data compiled by the U.S. Department of State reveals other impor- tant trends regarding the frequency and lethality of terrorist attacks. The good news was that there were fewer such attacks in the 1990s than in the 1980s: Internationally, the number of terrorist at- tacks in the 1990s averaged 382 per year, whereas in the 1980s the number per year averaged 543.25

But even before September 11, the absolute num- ber of casualties of international terrorism had in- creased, from a low of 344 in 1991 to a high of 6,693 in 1998.26 The jump in deaths and injuries can be partly explained by a few high-profile inci- dents, including the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in 1998.27 but it is significant that more people became victims of ter- rorism as the decade proceeded. More worrisome, the number of people killed per incident rose sig- nificantly, from 102 killed in 565 incidents in 1991 to 741 killed in 274 incidents in 1998.28 Thus, even though the number of terrorist attacks declined in

the 1990s, the number of people killed in each one increased.

Another important trend relates to terrorist at- tacks involving U.S. targets. The number of such attacks increased in the 1990s, from a low of 66 in 1994 to a high of 200 in the year 2000.30 This is a long-established problem: U.S. nationals consis- tently have been the most targeted since 1968.30

But the percentage of international attacks against U.S. targets or U.S. citizens rose dramatically over the 1990s, from about 20 percent in 1993-95 to al- most 50 percent in 2000." This is perhaps a conse- quence of the increased role and profile of die United States in the world, but the degree of in- crease is nonetheless troubling.

In addition to the evolving motivation and charac- ter of terrorist attacks, there has been a notable dis- persal in the geography of terrorist acts—a trend that is likely to continue. Although the Middle East continues to be die locus of most terrorist activity, Central and South Asia, the Balkans, and the Transcaucasus have been growing in significance over the past decade. International connections themselves are not new: International terrorist organizations inspired by common revolutionary principles date to the early nineteenth century; clan- destine state use of foreign terrorist organizations occurred as early as the 1920s (e.g., the Mussolini government in Italy aided the Croat Ustasha); and complex mazes of funding, arms, and other state support for international terrorist organizations were in place especially in the 1970s and 1980s.32

During the Cold War, terrorism was seen as a form of surrogate warfare and seemed almost palatable to some, at least compared to the potential prospect of major war or nuclear cataclysm,33 What has changed is the self-generating nature of interna- tional terrorism, with its diverse economic means of support allowing terrorists to carry out attacks sometimes far from the organization's base. As a re- sult, there is an important and growing distinction between where a terrorist organization is spawned and where an attack is launched, making the attacks difficult to trace to their source.

Reflecting all of these trends, al-Qaeda and its associated groups3 4 (and individuals) are harbin- gers of a new type of terrorist organization. Even if al-Qaeda ceases to exist (which is unlikely), the dramatic attacks of September 2001, and their po- litical and economic effects, wi l l continue to in- spire similarly motivated groups—particularly if the United States and its allies fail to develop broad-based, effective counterterrorist policies over the long term. Moreover, there is significant evidence that the global links and activities that al- Qaeda and its associated groups perpetuated are not short term or anomalous. Indeed they are changing the nature of the terrorist threat as we move further into the twenty-first century. The re- sulting intersection between the United States, globalization, and international terrorism will de- fine the major challenges to international security.

The United States, Globalization, and

International Terrorism

Whether deliberately intending to or not, the United States is projecting uncoordinated eco- nomic, social, and political power even more sweepingly than it is in military terms. Globaliza- tion,35 in forms including Westernization, secular- ization, democratization, consumerism, and the growth of market capitalism, represents an on- slaught to less privileged people in conservative cultures repelled by the fundamental changes that these forces are bringing—or angered by the dis- tortions and uneven distributions of benefits that result.36 This is especially true of the Arab world. Yet the current U.S. approach to this growing re- pulsion is colored by a kind of cultural naivete, an unwillingness to recognize—let alone appreciate or take responsibility for—the influence of U.S. power except in its military dimension. Even doing nothing in the economic, social, and political policy realms is still doing something, because the United States is blamed by disadvantaged and alienated populations for the powerful Western-

led forces of globalization that are proceeding apace, despite the absence of a focused, coordi- nated U.S. policy. And those penetrating mecha- nisms of globalization, such as the Internet, the media, and the increasing flows of goods and peo- ples, are exploited in return. Both the means and ends of terrorism are being reformulated in the current environment.

* * *

The Means

First, the use of information technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones, and instant messaging has extended the global reach of many terrorist groups. * * *

* * * The tools of the global information age have led to enhanced efficiency in many terrorist- related activities, including administrative tasks, coordination of operations, recruitment of poten- tial members, communication among adherents, and attraction of sympathizers.37 Before the Sep- tember 11 attacks, for example, members of al- Qaeda communicated through Yahoo email; Mohammed Atta, the presumed leader of the at- tacks, made his reservations online; and cell mem- bers went online to do research on subjects such as the chemical-dispersing powers of crop dusters. Although not as dramatic as shutting down a power grid or taking over an air traffic control sys- tem, this practical use of technology has signifi- cantly contributed to the effectiveness of terrorist groups and the expansion of their range.38

The Internet has become an important tool for perpetuating terrorist groups, both openly and clandestinely. Many of them employ elaborate list serves, collect money from witting or unwitting donors, and distribute savvy political messages to a broad audience online. 3 9 Groups as diverse as Aum Shinrikyo, Israel's Kahane Chai, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Kurdistan Worker's Party, and Peru's Shining Path maintain user-friendly official or unofficial websites, and al- most all are accessible in English. 4 0 Clandestine

methods include passing encrypted messages, em- bedding invisible graphic codes using steganogra- phy,4 1 employing the Internet to send death threats, and hiring hackers to collect intelligence such as the names and addresses of law enforce- ment officers from online databases.42 Al l of these measures help to expand and perpetuate trends in terrorism that have already been observed. * * *

More ominous, globalization makes CBNR weapons increasingly available to terrorist groups.43

Information needed to build these weapons has be- come ubiquitous, especially through the internet. Among the groups interested in acquiring CBNR (besides al-Qaeda) are the PLO, the Red Army Fac- tion, Hezbollah, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, German neo-Nazis, and the Chechens.44

Second, globalization has enabled terrorist or- ganizations to reach across international borders, in the same way (and often through the same channels) that commerce and business interests are linked. The dropping of barriers through the North American Free Trade Area and the Euro- pean Union, for instance, has facilitated the smooth flow of many things, good and bad, among countries. This has allowed terrorist organizations as diverse as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and the Egyp- tian al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya to move about freely and establish cells around the world. 4 5 Movement across borders can obviously enable terrorists to carry out attacks and potentially evade capture, but it also complicates prosecution if they are appre- hended, with a complex maze of extradition laws varying greatly from state to state. The increased permeability of the international system has also enhanced the ability of nonstate terrorist organiza- tions to collect intelligence (not to mention evade it); states are not the only actors interested in col- lecting, disseminating, and/or acting on such in- formation. In a sense, then, terrorism is in many ways becoming like any other international enter- prise—an ominous development indeed.

Third, terrorist organizations are broadening their reach in gathering financial resources to fund their operations. This is not just an al-Qaeda phe- nomenon, although bin Laden's organization---- es-

pecially its numerous business interests—figures prominently among the most innovative and wealthy pseudocorporations in the international terrorist network. The list of groups with global fi- nancing networks is long and includes most of the groups identified by the U.S. government as for- eign terrorist organizations, notably Aum Shin- rikyo, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Tamil Tigers. Sources of financing include legal enterprises such as nonprofit organizations and charities (whose il- licit activities may be a small or large proportion of overall finances, known or unknown to donors); legitimate companies that divert profits to illegal activities (such as bin Laden's large network of construction companies); and illegal enterprises such as drug smuggling and production (e.g., the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia— FARC), bank robbery, fraud, extortion, and kid- napping (e.g., the Abu Sayyaf group, Colombia's National Liberation Army, and FARC) . 4 6 Websites are also important vehicles for raising funds. Although no comprehensive data are publicly available on how lucrative this avenue is, the pro- liferation of terrorist websites with links or ad- dresses for contributions is at least circumstantial evidence of their usefulness.

* * *

* * * Globalization does not necessarily require the use of high technology: It often takes the form of traditional practices used in innovative ways across increasingly permeable physical and commercial borders. Terrorist groups, whose assets compara- tively represent only a small fraction of the amount of money that is moved by organized crime groups and are thus much more difficult to track, use everything from direct currency transport (by couriers) to reliance on traditional banks, Islamic banks, money changers (using accounts at legiti- mate institutions), and informal exchange (the hawala or hundi system).

This is by no means a comprehensive presenta- tion of global interpenetration of terrorist means, and some of the connections described above have existed for some time and in other contexts. The

broad strategic picture, however, is of an increas- ing ability of terrorist organizations to exploit the same avenues of communication, coordination, and cooperation as other international actors, including states, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and even in- dividuals,* * *

The Ends

The political incentives to attack major targets such as the United States with powerful weapons have greatly increased. The perceived corruption of indigenous customs, religions, languages, econ- omies, and so on are blamed on an inter- national system often unconsciously molded by American behavior. The accompanying distortions in local communities as a result of exposure to the global marketplace of goods and ideas are increas- ingly blamed on U.S.-sponsored modernization and those who support it. The advancement of technology, however, is not the driving force be- hind the terrorist threat to the United States and its allies, despite what some have assumed.47 Instead, at the heart of this threat are frustrated popula- tions and international movements that are in- creasingly inclined to lash out against U.S.-led globalization.

As Christopher Coker observes, globalization is reducing tendencies toward instrumental violence (i.e., violence between states and even between communities), but it is enhancing incentives for expressive violence (or violence that is ritualistic, symbolic, and communicative).48 The new interna- tional terrorism is increasingly engendered by a need to assert identity or meaning against forces of homogeneity, especially on the part of cultures that are threatened by, or left behind by, the secular fu- ture that Western-led globalization brings.

According to a report recently published by the United Nations Development Programme, the re- gion of greatest deficit in measures of human de- velopment—the Arab world—is also the heart of

the most threatening religiously inspired terror- ism. 4 9 Much more work needs to be done on the significance of this correlation, but increasingly sources of political discontent are arising from dis- enfranchised areas in the Arab world that feel left behind by the promise of globalization and its assurances of broader freedom, prosperity, and access to knowledge. The results are dashed expec- tations, heightened resentment of the perceived U.S.-led hegemonic system, and a shift of focus away from more proximate targets within the re- gion.

Of course, the motivations behind this threat should not be oversimplified: Anti-American ter- rorism is spurred in part by a desire to change U.S. policy in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions as well as by growing antipathy in the developing world vis-a-vis the forces of globalization. It is also crucial to distinguish between the motivations of leaders such as Osama bin Laden and their follow- ers. The former seem to be more driven by calcu- lated strategic decisions to shift the locus of attack away from repressive indigenous governments to the more attractive and media-rich target of the United States. The latter appear to be more driven by religious concepts cleverly distorted to arouse anger and passion in societies full of pent-up frustration. To some degree, terrorism is di- rected against the United States because of its engagement and policies in various regions.50 Anti- Americanism is closely related to antiglobalization, because (intentionally or not) the primary driver of the powerful forces resulting in globalization is the United States.

Analyzing terrorism as something separate from globalization is misleading and potentially dangerous. Indeed globalization and terrorism are intricately intertwined forces characterizing inter- national security in the twenty-first century. The main question is whether terrorism will succeed in disrupting the promise of improved livelihoods for millions of people on Earth. Globalization is not an inevitable, linear development, and it can be dis- rupted by such unconventional means as interna- tional terrorism. Conversely, modern international terrorism is especially dangerous because of the

power that it potentially derives from globaliza- tion—whether through access to CBNR weapons, global media outreach, or a diverse network of fi- nancial and information resources.

Prospects for the Future

Long after the focus on Osama bin Laden has re- ceded and U.S. troops have quit their mission in Afghanistan, terrorism will be a serious threat to the world community and especially to the United States. The relative preponderance of U.S. military power virtually guarantees an impulse to respond asymmetrically. The lagging of the Arab region be- hind the rest of the world is impelling a violent redirection of antiglobalization and antimodern- ization forces toward available targets, particularly the United States, whose scope and policies are engendering rage. Al-Qaeda will eventually be re- placed or redefined, but its successors' reach may continue to grow via the same globalized channels and to direct their attacks against U.S. and Western targets. The current trajectory is discouraging, be- cause as things currently stand, the wellspring of terrorism's means and ends is likely to be renewed; Arab governments will probably not reform peace- fully, and existing Western governments and their supporting academic and professional institutions are disinclined to understand or analyze in depth the sources, patterns, and history of terrorism.

Conclusions and Policy Prescriptions

The characteristics and causes of the current threat can only be analyzed within the context of the deadly collision occurring between U.S. power, globalization, and the evolution of international terrorism. The U.S. government is still thinking in outdated terms, little changed since the end of the Cold War. It continues to look at terrorism as a pe- ripheral threat, with the focus remaining on states

that in many cases are not the greatest threat. The means and the ends of terrorism are changing in fundamental, important ways; but the means and the ends of the strategy being crafted in response are not.

The prescriptions for countering and preventing terrorism should be two-fold: First, the United States and other members of the international community concerned about this threat need to use a balanced assortment of instruments to ad- dress the immediate challenges of the terrorists themselves. Terrorism is a complex phenomenon; it must be met with short-term military action, informed by in-depth, long-term, sophisticated analysis. Thus far, the response has been virtually all the former and little of the latter. Second, the United States and its counterterrorist allies must employ a much broader array of longer-term pol- icy tools to reshape the international environment, which enables terrorist networks to breed and be- come robust. The mechanisms of globalization need to be exploited to thwart the globalization of terrorism.

In the short term, the United States must con- tinue to rely on capable military farces that can sustain punishing air strikes against terrorists and those who harbor them with an even greater ca- pacity for special operations on the ground. This requires not only improved stealthy, long-range power projection capabilities but also agile, highly trained, and lethal ground forces, backed up with greater intelligence, including human intelligence supported by individuals with language skills and cultural training, The use of military force contin- ues to be important as one means of responding to terrorist violence against the West, and there is no question that it effectively preempts and disrupts some international terrorist activity, especially in the short term.5 1

Over time, however, the more effective instru- ments of policy are likely to remain the nonmili- tary ones. Indeed the United States needs to expand and deepen its nonmilitary instruments of power such as intelligence, public diplomacy, co-

operation with allies, international legal instru- ments, and economic assistance and sanctions. George Kennan, in his 1947 description of con- tainment, put forth the same fundamental argu- ment, albeit against an extremely different enemy.52 The strongest response that the United States can muster to a serious threat has to include political, economic, and military capabilities—in that order; yet, the U.S. government consistently structures its policies and devotes its resources in the reverse sequence.

The economic and political roots of terrorism are complex, increasingly worrisome, and de- manding of as much breadth and subtlety in re- sponse as they display in their genesis. The United States must therefore be strategic in its response: An effective grand strategy against terrorism in- volves planning a global campaign with the most effective means available, not just the most mea- surable, obvious, or gratifying, It must also include plans for shaping the global environment after the so-called war on terrorism has ended—or after the current political momentum has subsided.

The United States, working with other major donor nations, needs to create an effective incen- tive structure that rewards "good performers"— those countries with good governance, inclusive education programs, and adequate social pro- grams—and works around "bad performers" and intervenes to assist so-called failed states. Also for the longer term, the United States and its allies need to project a vision of sustainable develop- ment—of economic growth, equal access to basic social needs such as education and health, and good governance—for the developing world. This is particularly true in mostly Muslim countries whose populations are angry with the United States over a perceived double standard regarding its long-standing support for Israel at the expense of Palestinians, policies against the regime of Sad- dam Hussein at the expense of some Iraqi people, and a general abundance of American power, in- cluding the U.S. military presence throughout the Middle East. Whether these policies are right or wrong is irrelevant here; the point is that just as the definition of terrorism can be subjective and value

laden, so too can the response to terrorism take into account perceptions of reality. In an attempt to craft an immediate military response, the U.S. government is failing to put into place an effective long-term grand strategy.

* * *

The globalization of terrorism is perhaps the lead- ing threat to long-term stability in the twenty-first century. But the benefit of globalization is that the international response to terrorist networks has also begun to be increasingly global, with interna- tional cooperation on law enforcement, intelli- gence, and especially financial controls being areas of notable recent innovation. 5 3 If globalization is to continue—and there is nothing foreordained that it will—then the tools of globalization, including especially international norms, the rule of law, and international economic power, must be fully em- ployed against the terrorist backlash. There must be a deliberate effort to move beyond the current episodic interest in this phenomenon: Superficial arguments and short attention spans will continue to result in event-driven policies and ultimately more attacks. Terrorism is an unprecedented, powerful nonstate threat to the international sys- tem that no single state, regardless of how power- ful it may be in traditional terms, can defeat alone, especially in the absence of long-term, serious scholarship engaged in by its most creative minds.

NOTES 1. The issue of U.S. strategic culture and its im-

portance in the response to international ter- rorism is explored in more depth in Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Rethinking Sovereignty: American Strategy in the Age of Terror," Survival, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 119-139.

2. On the difficulty of defining terrorism, see, for example, Omar Malik, Enough of the Definition of Terrorism! Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: RIIA, 2001); and Alex P. Schmid, Political Terrorism: A Research Guide

(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984). Schmid spends more than 100 pages grappling with the question of a definition, only to conclude that none is universally accepted.

3. Saying that terrorism is a political act is not the same as arguing that the political ends toward which it is directed are necessarily negotiable. If violent acts do not have a political aim, then they are by definition criminal acts.

4. The diabolical nature of terrorism has given resonance to Robert Kaplan's view that the world is a "grim landscape" littered with "evil- doers" and requiring Western leaders to adopt a "pagan ethos." But such conclusions deserve more scrutiny than space allows here. See Steven Mufson, "The Way Bush Sees the World," Washington Post, Outlook section, February 17, 2002, p. B l .

5. R.G, Frey and Christopher W. Morris, "Vio- lence, Terrorism, and Justice," in Frey and Morris, eds,, Violence, Terrorism, and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 3.

6. Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (London: Weiden- feld and Nicolson, 1977, reprinted in 1978), pp. 7-8; and David C. Rapoport, "Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions," American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (September 1984), pp. 658-677.

7. David C. Rapoport, "The Fourth Wave: Sep- tember 11 in the History of Terrorism," Cur- rent History, December 2001, pp. 419-424; and David C. Rapoport, "Terrorism," Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict (New York: Academic Press, 1999).

8. Ironically, Robespierre's tactics during the Reign of Terror would not be included in this article's definition of terrorism, because it was state terror.

9. Rapoport, "The Fourth Wave." 10. Ibid., pp. 419-420. 11. Ibid., p. 420. 12. This is not to imply that terrorism lacked in-

ternational links before the 1970s. There were important international ties between anarchist

groups of the late nineteenth century, for ex- ample. See David C. Rapoport, "The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism," in Audrey Kurth Cronin and Jaines Ludes, eds., Attack- ing Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2004).

13. Groups such as the Second of June Movement, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades, the Weathermen, and the Symbionese Libera- tion Army belong in this category.

14. Among right-wing groups would be other neo-Nazi organizations (in the United States and Europe) and some members of American militia movements such as the Christian Patri- ots and the Ku Klux Klan.

15. The list here would be extremely long, includ- ing groups as different as the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Basque separatist party, the PLO, and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its various splinter groups.

16. Bruce Hoffman notes that secular terrorist groups that have a strong religious element include the Provisional IRA, Armenian fac- tions, and perhaps the PLO; however, the political/separatist aspect is the predominant characteristic of these groups. Hoffman, "Ter- rorist Targeting: Tactics, Trends, and Poten- tialities," Technology and Terrorism (London: Frank Cass, 1993), p. 25.

17. An interesting example is France's Action Di- recte, which revised its raison d'etre several times, often altering it to reflect domestic issues in France—anarchism and Maoism, dis- satisfaction with NATO and the Americaniza- tion of Europe, and general anticapitalism. See Michael Dartnell, "France's Action Directe: Terrorists in Search of a Revolution," Terror- ism and Political Violence, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 1990), pp. 457-488.

18. For example, in the 1990s Germany and sev- eral other European countries experienced a rash of random arson attacks against guest houses and offices that provided services to immigrants, many of whom were Middle East- ern in origin. Other examples include the vio-

lence associated with groups such as Europe's "football hooligans." A possible American ex- ample of the opportunistic nature of right- wing terrorism may be the anthrax letter campaign conducted in October 2001. See Su- san Schmidt, "Anthrax Letter Suspect Profiled: FBI Says Author Likely Is Male Loner; Ties to Bin Laden Are Doubted," Washington Post, November 11, 2001, p. A l ; and Steve Fainaru, "Officials Continue to Doubt Hijackers' Link to Anthrax: Fla. Doctor Says He Treated One for Skin Form of Disease," Washington Post, March 24, 2002, p. A23.

19. It is interesting to note that, according to Christopher C. Harmon, in Germany, 1991 was the first year that the number of indige- nous rightist radicals exceeded that of leftists. Harmon, Terrorism Today (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 3.

20. For example, in discussing the longevity of ter- rorist groups, Martha Crenshaw notes only three significant terrorist groups w i th eth- nonationalist ideologies that ceased to exist within ten years of their formation (one of these, EOKA, disbanded because its goal—the liberation of Cyprus—was attained). By con- trast, a majority of the terrorist groups she lists as having existed for ten years or longer have recognizable ethnonationalist ideologies, in- cluding the IRA (in its many forms), S ikh sep- aratist groups, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the various Palestinian nationalist groups, and the Corsican National Liberation Front. See Cren- shaw, "How Terrorism Declines," Terrorism and Political Violence, Vo l . 3, No. I (Spring 1991), pp. 69-87.

21. On the characteristics of modern religious ter- rorist groups, see Bruce Hoffman, Inside Ter- rorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), especially pp. 94-95; and Bruce Hoff- man, "Terrorism Trends and Prospects," in Ian O. Lesser, Bruce Hoffman, John Arguilia, Michelle Zanini, and David Ronfeldt, eds., Countering the Mew Terrorism (Santa Monica, Calif.: R A N D , 1999), especially pp. 19-20. On the peculiar twists of one apocalyptic vision,

see Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).

22. There is a long list of people and organizations sanctioned under Executive Order 13224, signed on September 23, 2001. Designated charitable organizations include the Benevolence Inter- national Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation. The list is available at http://www. treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sanctions/

tl lter.pdf (accessed November 26, 2002). 23. The RAND-St. Andrews University Chronol-

ogy of International Terrorism is a databank of terrorist incidents that begins in 1968 and has been maintained since 1972 at St. Andrews University, Scotland, and the R A N D Corpora- tion, Santa Monica, California.

24. Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, pp. 90-91; and Na- dine Gurr and Benjamin Cole, The New Face of Terrorism; Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 28-29.

25. Statistics compiled from data in U.S. Depart- ment of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism, published annually by the Office of the Coor- dinator for Counterterrorism, U.S. Depart- ment of State.

26. Ibid. For a graphical depiction of this informa- tion, created on the basis of annual data from Patterns of Global Terrorism, see Cronin, "Re- thinking Sovereignty," p. 126.

27. In the 1998 embassy bombings alone, for ex- ample, 224 people were killed (with 12 Ameri- cans among them), and 4,574 were injured (including 15 Americans). U.S. Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1998.

28. Ibid. For a graphical depiction of deaths per incident, created on the basis of annual data from Patterns of Global Terrorism, see Cronin, "Rethinking Sovereignty," p. 128.

29. Ibid. 30. Hoffman, "Terrorist Targeting," p. 24. 31. U.S. Department of State, Patterns of Global

Terrorism, various years. 32. Laqueur, Terrorism, pp. 112-116.

33. Ibid., pp. 115-116. 34. Groups with known or alleged connections to

al-Qaeda include Jemaah Islamiyah (Indone- sia, Malaysia, and Singapore), the Abu Sayyaf group (Philippines), al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Egypt), Harakat ul-Mujahidin (Pakistan), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (Central Asia), Jaish-e-Mohammed (India and Paki- stan), and al-Jihad (Egypt).

35. For the purposes of this article, globalization is a gradually expanding process of interpenetra- tion in the economic, political, social, and se- curity realms, uncontrolled by (or apart from) traditional notions of state sovereignty. Victor D. Cha, "Globalization and the Study of Inter- national Security," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3 (March 2000), pp. 391-393.

36. With respect to the Islamic world, there are numerous books and articles that point to the phenomenon of antipathy with the Western world, either because of broad cultural incompatibility or a specific conflict between Western consumerism and religious funda- mentalism. Among the earliest and most notable are Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Vo l . 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993); Benjamin R. Barber, Ji- had vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy (New York: Random blouse, 1995); and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civi- lizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York Simon and Schuster, 1996),

37. Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Pol- icy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2001), p. 47.

38. Ibid. 39. Dorothy Denning, "Cyberwarriors: Activists

and Terrorists Turn to Cyberspace," Harvard International Review, Vol . 23, No, 2 (Summer 2001), pp, 70-75. See also Brian J. Miller, "Terror.org: An Assessment of Terrorist Inter- net Sites," Georgetown University, Decem- ber 6, 2000.

40. Miller, "Terror.org," pp. 9, 12. 41. Steganography is the embedding of messages

usually in pictures, where the messages are dis-

guised so that they cannot be seen with the naked eye. See Denning, "Cyberwarriors."

42. I am indebted to Dorothy Denning for all of this information. The Provisional IRA hired contract hackers to find the addresses of British intelligence and law enforcment officers. See Denning, "Cyberterrorism"; and Denning, "Cyberwarriors."

43. There are many recent sources on CBNR, Among the best are Jonathan B. Tucker, ed., Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemi- cal and Biological Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); Joshua Lederberg, Biological Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. New- man, and Bradley A. Thayer, America's Achilles' Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemi- cal Terrorism and Covert Attack (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998); Gurr and Cole, The New Face of Terrorism; Jessica Stern, The Ulti- mate Terrorists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Brad Roberts, ed., Terrorism with Chemical and Biological Weap- ons: Calibrating Risks and Responses (Alexan- dria, Va.: Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, 1997).

44. See Falkenrath, Newman, and Thayer, Amer- ica's Achilles' Heel, pp. 31-46.

45. A clear example of this phenomenon was the uncovering in December 2001 of a multinational plot in Singapore by the international terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah to blow up several Western targets, including the U.S. embassy. A videotape of the intended targets (including a de- scription of the plans in Arabic) was discovered in Afghanistan after al-Qaeda members fled. Thus there are clear connections between these organizations, as well as evidence of cooperation and coordination of attacks. See, for example, Dan Murphy, " 'Activated' Asian Terror Web Busted," Christian Science Monitor, January 23, 2002, http://www.csmonitor.com (accessed Jan- uary 23, 2002); and Rajiv Changrasekaran, "Al Qaeda's Southeast Asian Reach," Washington Post, February 3, 2002, p. A l .

46. Rensselaer Lee and Raphael Perl, "Terrorism,

the Future, and U.S. Foreign Policy," issue brief for Congress, received through the C o n - gressional Research Service website, o rder code IB95112, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, July 10, 2002, p. CRS-6 .

47. Many in the United States focus on the tech- nologies of terrorism, with a much less devel- oped interest in the motivations of terrorists. Brian M. Jenkins, "Understanding the Link be- tween Motives and Methods," in Roberts, Ter- rorism with Chemical and Biological Weapons, pp. 43-51. An example of a study that focuses on weapons and not motives is Sidney D. Drell, Abraham D. Sofaer, and George W. W i l - son, eds., The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1999),

48. Christopher Coker, Globalisation and Insecu- rity in the Twenty-first Century: NATO and the Management of Risk, Adelphi Paper 345 ( L o n - don: International Institute for Strategic S t u d - ies, June 2002), p. 40.

49. The indicators studied included respect for human rights and human freedoms, the em- powerment of women, and broad access to and utilization of knowledge. See United Na- tions Development Programme, Arab F u n d for Economic and Social Development, Arab Human Development Report, 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations ( N e w York: United Nations Development P r o - gramme, 2002).

50. Martha Crenshaw, "Why America? The G l o b alization of Civi l War," Current History, December 2001, pp. 425-432.

51. For more discussion on the traditional ele- ments of U.S. grand strategy, especially m i l i - tary strategy, see Barry R. Posen, "The Struggle against Terrorism: Grand Strategy, Strategy, and Tactics," International Security, V o l . 26, No. 3 (Winter 2001/02), pp. 39-55.

52. George F. Kennan, "The Sources of Sovie t Conduct," Foreign Affairs, Vo l . 25, No. 4 (July 1947), pp. 575-576.

53. On these issues, see Cronin and Ludes, Attack- ing Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy.

R O B E R T A . P A P E

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Terrorist organizations are increasingly rely-ing on suicide attacks to achieve major po-litical objectives. For example, spectacular suicide terrorist attacks have recently been em- ployed by Palestinian groups in attempts to force Israel to abandon the West Bank and Gaza, by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to compel the Sri Lankan government to accept an independent Tamil homeland, and by Al Qaeda to pressure the United States to withdraw from the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. Moreover, such attacks are increasing both in tempo and location. Before the early 1980s, suicide terrorism was rare but not unknown (Lewis 1968; O'Neill 1981; Rapoport 1984). However, since the attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in Apri l 1983, there have been at least 188 separate suicide terrorist attacks worldwide, in Lebanon, Israel, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Turkey, Russia and the United States. The rate has increased from 31 in the 1980s, to 104 in the 1990s, to 53 in 2000-2001 alone (Pape 2002). The rise of suicide terrorism is especially remark- able, given that the total number of terrorist inci- dents worldwide fell during the period, from a peak of 666 in 1987 to a low of 274 in 1998, with 348 in 2001 (Department of State 2001).

What accounts for the rise in suicide terrorism, especially, the sharp escalation from the 1990s on- ward? Although terrorism has long been part of international politics, we do not have good expla- nations for the growing phenomenon of suicide terrorism. Traditional studies of terrorism tend to treat suicide attack as one of many tactics that ter- rorists use and so do not shed much light on the recent rise of this type of attack (e.g., Hoffman

From American Political Science Review 97.3 (August 2003): 343-361. Some of the author's notes have been omitted.

1998; Jenkins 1985; Laqueur 1987). The small number of studies addressed explicitly to suicide terrorism tend to focus on the irrationality of the act of suicide from the perspective of the individ- ual attacker. As a result, they focus on individual motives—either religious indoctrination (espe- cially Islamic Fundamentalism) or psychological predispositions that might drive individual suicide bombers (Kramer 1990; Merari 1990; Post 1990).

The first-wave explanations of suicide terror- ism were developed during the 1980s and were consistent with the data from that period. How- ever, as suicide attacks mounted from the 1990s onward, it has become increasingly evident that these initial explanations are insufficient to ac- count for which individuals become suicide ter- rorists and, more importantly, why terrorist organizations are increasingly relying on this form of attack (Institute for Counter-Terrorism 2001). First, although religious motives may matter, mod- ern suicide terrorism is not limited to Islamic Fun- damentalism. Islamic groups receive the most attention in Western media, but the world's leader in suicide terrorism is actually the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group who re- cruits from the predominantly Hindu Tamil popu- lation in northern and eastern Sri Lanka and whose ideology has Marxist/Leninist elements. The LTTE alone accounts for 75 of the 186 suicide ter- rorist attacks from 1980 to 2001. Even among Islamic suicide attacks, groups with secular orien- tations account for about a third of these attacks (Merari 1990; Sprinzak 2000).

Second, although study of the personal charac- teristics of suicide attackers may someday help identify individuals terrorist organizations are likely to recruit for this purpose, the vast spread of suicide terrorism over the last two decades suggests that there may not be a single profile. Unti l re-

cently, the leading experts in psychological profiles of suicide terrorists characterized them as unedu- cated, unemployed, socially isolated, single men in their late teens and early 20s (Merari 1990; Post 1990). Now we know that suicide terrorists can be college educated or uneducated, married or single, men or women, socially isolated or integrated, from age 13 to age 47 (Sprinzak 2000). In other words, although only a tiny number of people be- come suicide terrorists, they come from a broad cross section of lifestyles, and it may be impossible to pick them out in advance.

In contrast to the first-wave explanations, this article shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic. Even if many suicide attackers are irrational or fanatical, the leadership groups that recruit and direct them are not. Viewed from the perspective of the terrorist organization, suicide at- tacks are designed to achieve specific political pur- poses: to coerce a target government to change policy, to mobilize additional recruits and financial support, or both, Crenshaw (1981) has shown that terrorism is best understood in terms of its strate- gic function; the same is true for suicide terrorism. In essence, suicide terrorism is an extreme form of what Thomas Schelling (1966) calls "the rationality of irrationality," in which an act that is irrational for individual attackers is meant to demonstrate credibility to a democratic audience that still more and greater attacks are sure to come. As such, modern suicide terrorism is analogous to instances of international coercion. For states, air power and economic sanctions are often the preferred coer- cive tools (George et al. 1972; Pape 1996, 1997). For terrorist groups, suicide attacks are becoming the coercive instrument of choice.

To examine the strategic logic of suicide terror- ism, this article collects the universe suicide terror- ist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, explains how terrorist organizations have assessed the effec- tiveness of these attacks, and evaluates the limits on their coercive utility.

Five principal findings follow. First, suicide ter- rorism is strategic. The vast majority of suicide ter- rorist attacks are not isolated or random acts by individual fanatics but, rather, occur in clusters as

part of a larger campaign by an organized group to achieve a specific political goal. Groups using sui- cide terrorism consistently announce specific po- litical goals and stop suicide attacks when those goals have been fully or partially achieved.

Second, the strategic logic of suicide terrorism is specifically designed to coerce modern democra- cies to make significant concessions to national self-determination. In general, suicide terrorist campaigns seek to achieve specific territorial goals, most often the withdrawal of the target state's mil- itary forces from what the terrorists see as national homeland. From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, every suicide terrorist cam- paign from 1980 to 2001 has been waged by terror- ist groups whose main goal has been to establish or maintain self-determination for their community's homeland by compelling an enemy to withdraw. Further, every suicide terrorist campaign since 1980 has been targeted against a state that had a democratic form of government.

Third, during the past 20 years, suicide terror- ism has been steadily rising because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish govern- ment to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. Terrorist groups did not achieve their full objectives in all these cases. However, in all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Leaders of terrorist groups have consistently credited suicide operations with contributing to these gains. These assessments are hardly unreasonable given the timing and circum- stances of many of the concessions and given that other observers within the terrorists' national community, neutral analysts, and target govern- ment leaders themselves often agreed that suicide operations accelerated or caused the concession. This pattern of making concessions to suicide ter- rorist organizations over the past two decades has

probably encouraged terrorist groups to pursue even more ambitious suicide campaigns.

Fourth, although moderate suicide terrorism led to moderate concessions, these more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are not likely to achieve still greater gains and may well fail completely. In general, suicide terrorism relies on the threat to inflict low to medium levels of punishment on civilians. In other circumstances, this level of pun- ishment has rarely caused modern nation states to surrender significant political goals, partly because modern nation states are often willing to counte- nance high costs for high interests and partly because modern nation states are often able to mit- igate civilian costs by making economic and other adjustments. Suicide terrorism does not change a nation's willingness to trade high interests for high costs, but suicide attacks can overcome a country's efforts to mitigate civilian costs. Accordingly, sui- cide terrorism may marginally increase the punish- ment that is inflicted and so make target nations somewhat more likely to surrender modest goals, but it is unlikely to compel states to abandon im- portant interests related to the physical security or national wealth of the state. National governments have in fact responded aggressively to ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns in recent years, events which confirm these expectations.

Finally, the most promising way to contain sui- cide terrorism is to reduce terrorists' confidence in their ability to carry out such attacks on the target society. States that face persistent suicide terrorism should recognize that neither offensive military ac- tion nor concessions alone are likely to do much good and should invest significant resources in border defenses and other means of homeland security.

The Logic of Suicide Terrorism

Most suicide terrorism is undertaken as a strategic effort directed toward achieving particular political goals; it is not simply the product of irrational in- dividuals or an expression of fanatical hatreds. The main purpose of suicide terrorism is to use the

threat of punishment to coerce a target govern- ment to change policy, especially to cause demo- cratic states to withdraw forces from territory terrorists view as their homeland. The record of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2001 exhibits ten- dencies in the timing, goals, and targets of attack that are consistent with this strategic logic but not with irrational or fanatical behavior.

Defining Suicide Terrorism

Terrorism involves the use of violence by an orga- nization other than a national government to cause intimidation or fear among a target audience (De- partment of State 1983-2001; Reich 1990; Schmid and Jongman 1988). Although one could broaden the definition of terrorism so as to include the ac- tions of a national government to cause terror among an opposing population, adopting such a broad definition would distract attention from what policy makers would most like to know; how to combat the threat posed by subnational groups to state security. Further, it could also create ana- lytic confusion. Terrorist organizations and state governments have different levels of resources, face different kinds of incentives, and are susceptible to different types of pressures. Accordingly, the deter- minants of their behavior are not likely to be the same and, thus, require separate theoretical investigations.

In general, terrorism has two purposes—to gain supporters and to coerce opponents. Most terrorism seeks both goals to some extent, often aiming to affect enemy calculations while simulta- neously mobilizing support for the terrorists' cause and, in some cases, even gaining an edge over ri- val groups in the same social movement (Bloom 2002). However, there are trade-offs between these objectives and terrorists can strike various balances between them. These choices represent different forms of terrorism, the most important of which are demonstrative, destructive, and suicide terrorism,

Demonstrative terrorism is directed mainly at gaining publicity, for any or all of three reasons; to recruit more activists, to gain attention to griev-

ances from softliners on the other side, and to gain attention from third parties who might exert pres- sure on the other side. Groups that emphasize ordinary, demonstrative terrorism include the Orange Volunteers (Northern Ireland), National Liberation Army (Columbia), and Red Brigades (Italy) (Clutterbuck 1975; Edler Baumann 1973; St. John 1991). Hostage taking, airline hijacking, and explosions announced in advance are generally in- tended to use the possibility of harm to bring is sues to the attention of the target audience. In these cases, terrorists often avoid doing serious harm so as not to undermine sympathy for the po- litical cause. Brian Jenkins (1975, 4) captures the essence of demonstrative terrorism with his well- known remark, "Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead."

Destructive terrorism is more aggressive, seek- ing to coerce opponents as well as mobilize sup- port for the cause. Destructive terrorists seek to inflict real harm on members of the target audi- ence at the risk of losing sympathy for their cause. Exactly how groups strike the balance between harm and sympathy depends on the nature of the political goal. For instance, the Baader-Meinhoft group selectively assassinated rich German indus- trialists, which alienated certain segments of Ger- man society but not others. Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s often sought to kill as many Israelis as possible, fully alienating Jewish society but still evoking sympathy from Muslim communities. Other groups that emphasize destructive terrorism include the Irish Republican Army, the Revolu- tionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the nineteenth-century Anarchists (Elliott 1998; Rapoport 1971; Tuchman 1966).

Suicide terrorism is the most aggressive form of terrorism, pursuing coercion even at the expense of losing support among the terrorists' own com- munity. What distinguishes a suicide terrorist is that the attacker does not expect to survive a mis- sion and often employs a method of attack that re- quires the attacker's death in order to succeed (such as planting a car bomb, wearing a suicide vest, or ramming an airplane into a building). In essence, a suicide terrorist kills others at the same

time that he kills himself.1 In principle, suicide ter- rorists could be used for demonstrative purposes or could be limited to targeted assassinations.2 In practice, however, suicide terrorists often seek sim- ply to kill the largest number of people. Although this maximizes the coercive leverage that can be gained from terrorism, it does so at the greatest cost to the basis of support for the terrorist cause. Maximizing the number of enemy killed alienates those in the target audience who might be sympa- thetic to the terrorists cause, while the act of sui- cide creates a debate and often loss of support among moderate segments of the terrorists' com- munity, even if also attracting support among rad- ical elements. Thus, while coercion is an element in all terrorism, coercion is the paramount objective of suicide terrorism.

The Coercive Logic of Suicide Terrorism

At its core, suicide terrorism is a strategy of coer- cion, a means to compel a target government to change policy. The central logic of this strategy is simple: Suicide terrorism attempts to inflict enough pain on the opposing society to overwhelm their interest in resisting the terrorists' demands and, so, to cause either the government to concede or the population to revolt against the govern- ment. The common feature of all suicide terrorist campaigns is that they inflict punishment on the opposing society, either directly by kil l ing civilians or indirectly by killing military personnel in cir- cumstances that cannot lead to meaningful battle- field victory. As we shall see, suicide terrorism is rarely a one time event but often occurs in a series of suicide attacks, As such, suicide terrorism gener- ates coercive leverage both from the immediate panic associated with each attack and from the risk of civilian punishment in the future.

Suicide terrorism does not occur in the same circumstances as military coercion used by states, and these structural differences help to explain the logic of the strategy. In virtually all instances of in- ternational military coercion, the coercer is the stronger state and the target is the weaker state;

otherwise, the coercer would likely be deterred or simply unable to execute the threatened military operations (Pape 1996). In these circumstances, coercers have a choice between two main coercive strategies, punishment and denial. Punishment seeks to coerce by raising the costs or risks to the target society to a level that overwhelms the value of the interests in dispute. Denial seeks to coerce by demonstrating to the target state that it simply cannot win the dispute regardless of its level of ef- fort, and therefore fighting to a finish is point- less—for example, because the coercer has the ability to conquer the disputed territory. Hence, al- though coercers may initially rely on punishment, they often have the resources to create a formida- ble threat to deny the opponent victory in battle and, if necessary, to achieve a brute force military victory if the target government refuses to change its behavior. The Allied bombing of Germany in World War II, American bombing of North Viet- nam in 1972, and Coalition attacks against Iraq in 1991 all fit this pattern.

Suicide terrorism (and terrorism in general) occurs under the reverse structural conditions. In suicide terrorism, the coercer is the weaker actor and the target is the stronger. Although some ele- ments of the situation remain the same, flipping the stronger and weaker sides in a coercive dispute has a dramatic change on the relative feasibility of punishment and denial. In these circumstances, denial is impossible, because military conquest is ruled out by relative weakness. Even though some groups using suicide terrorism have received im- portant support from states and some have been strong enough to wage guerrilla military cam- paigns as well as terrorism, none have been strong enough to have serious prospects of achieving their political goals by conquest. The suicide terrorist group with the most significant military capacity has been the LTTE, but it has not had a real prospect of controlling the whole of the homeland that it claims, including Eastern and Northern Provinces of Sri Lanka.

As a result, the only coercive strategy available to suicide terrorists is punishment. Although the element of "suicide" is novel and the pain inflicted

on civilians is often spectacular and gruesome, the heart of the strategy of suicide terrorism is the same as the coercive logic used by states when they employ air power or economic sanctions to punish an adversary: to cause mounting civilian costs to overwhelm the target state's interest in the issue in dispute and so to cause it to concede the terrorists' political demands. What creates the coercive lever- age is not so much actual damage as the expecta- tion of future damage. Targets may be economic or political, military or civilian, but in all cases the main task is less to destroy the specific targets than to convince the opposing society that they are vul- nerable to more attacks in the future. These fea- tures also make suicide terrorism convenient for retaliation, a tit-for-tat interaction that generally occurs between terrorists and the defending gov- ernment (Crenshaw 1981).

The rhetoric of major suicide terrorist groups reflects the logic of coercive punishment, Abdel Karim, a leader of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a mil- itant group linked to Yasir Arafat's Fatah move- ment, said the goal of his group was "to increase losses in Israel to a point at which the Israeli public would demand a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip" (Greenberg 2002). The infamous fatwa signed by Osama Bin Laden and others against the United States reads, "The ruling to kil l the Americans and their allies—civilians and mili- tary—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Mus- lim" (World Islamic Front 1998).

Suicide terrorists' willingness to die magnifies the coercive effects of punishment in three ways. First, suicide attacks are generally more destructive than other terrorist attacks. An attacker who is willing to die is much more likely to accomplish the mission and to cause maximum damage to the target. Suicide attackers can conceal weapons on their own bodies and make last-minute adjust- ments more easily than ordinary terrorists. They are also better able to infiltrate heavily guarded tar-

gets because they do not need escape plans or res- cue teams. Suicide attackers are also able to use certain especially destructive tactics such as wear- ing "suicide vests" and ramming vehicles into tar- gets. The 188 suicide terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2001 killed an average of 13 people each, not counting the unusually large number of fatalities on September 11 and also not counting the attack- ers themselves. During the same period, there were about 4,155 total terrorist incidents worldwide, which killed 3,207 people (also excluding Septem- ber 11), or less than one person per incident. Over- all, from 1980 to 2001, suicide attacks amount to 3% of all terrorist attacks but account for 48% of total deaths due to terrorism, again excluding Sep- tember 11 (Department of State 1983-2001).

Second, suicide attacks are an especially con- vincing way to signal the likelihood of more pain to come, because suicide itself is a costly signal, one that suggests that the attackers could not have been deterred by a threat of costly retaliation. Organi- zations that sponsor suicide attacks can also delib- erately orchestrate the circumstances around the death of a suicide attacker to increase further ex- pectations of future attacks. This can be called the "art of martyrdom" (Schalk 1997). The more sui- cide terrorists justify their actions on the basis of religious or ideological motives that match the be- liefs of a broader national community, the more the status of terrorist martyrs is elevated, and the more plausible it becomes that others will follow in their footsteps. Suicide terrorist organizations commonly cultivate "sacrificial myths" that in- clude elaborate sets of symbols and rituals to mark an individual attacker's death as a contribution to the nation. Suicide attackers' families also often re- ceive material rewards both from the terrorist or- ganizations and from other supporters. As a result, the art of martyrdom elicits popular support from the terrorists' community, reducing the moral backlash that suicide attacks might otherwise pro- duce, and so establishes the foundation for credible signals of more attacks to come.

Third, suicide terrorist organizations are better positioned than other terrorists to increase expec- tations about escalating future costs by deliberately

violating norms in the use of violence. They can do this by crossing thresholds of damage, by breach- ing taboos concerning legitimate targets, and by broadening recruitment to confound expectations about limits on the number of possible terrorists. The element of suicide itself helps increase the credibility of future attacks, because it suggests that attackers cannot be deterred. Although the capture and conviction of Timothy McVeigh gave reason for some confidence that others with similar polit- ical views might be deterred, the deaths of the Sep- tember 11 hijackers did not, because Americans would have to expect that future Al Qaeda attack- ers would be equally willing to the.

The Record of Suicide Terrorism, 1980 to 2001

To characterize the nature of suicide terrorism, this study identified every suicide terrorist attack from 1980 to 2001 that could be found in Lexis Nexis's on-line database of world news media (Pape 2002).3 Examination of the universe shows that suicide terrorism has three properties that are consistent with the above strategic logic but not with irrational or fanatical behavior: (1) timing— nearly all suicide attacks occur in organized, coher- ent campaigns, not as isolated or randomly timed incidents; (2) nationalist goals—suicide terrorist campaigns are directed at gaining control of what the terrorists see as their national homeland terri- tory, specifically at ejecting foreign forces from that territory; and (3) target selection—all suicide terrorist campaigns in the last two decades have been aimed at democracies, which make more suitable targets from the terrorists' point of view. Nationalist movements that face nondemocratic opponents have not resorted to suicide attack as a means of coercion.

TIMING.

As Table 1 indicates, there have been 188 separate suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2001. Of these, 179, or 95%, were parts of organized, coher- ent campaigns, while only nine were isolated or

Table 1. Suicide Terrorist Campaigns, 1980-2001

No. of No. Date Terrorist Group Terrorists' Goal Attacks Killed Target Behavior

Completed Campaigns

1. Apr-Dec 1983 Hezbollah U.S./France out of Lebanon 6 384 Complete withdrawal 2. Nov 1983-Apr 1985 Hezbollah Israel out of Lebanon 6 96 Partial withdrawal 3. June 1985-June 1986 Hezbollah Israel out of Lebanon

security zone 16 179 No change

4. July 1990-Nov 1994 LTTE Sri Lanka accept Tamil state 14 164 Negotiations 5. Apr 1995-Oct 2000 LTTE Sir Lanka accept Tamil state 54 629 No change 6. Apr 1994 Hamas Israel out of Palestine 2 15 Partial withdrawal 6. Apr 1994

from Gaza 7. Oct 1994-Aug 1995 Hamas Israel out of Palestine 7 65 Partial withdrawal

from West Bank 8. Feb-Mar 1996 Hamas Retaliation for Israeli

assassination 4 58 No change

9. Mar-Sept 1997 Hamas Israel out of Palestine 3 24 Hamas leader released

10. June-Oct 1996 PKK Turkey accept Kurd autonomy 3 17 No change 11. Mar-Aug 1999 PKK Turkey release jailed leader 6 0 No change

Ongoing Campaigns, as of December 2001

12. 1996- Al Qaeda U.S. out of Saudi Peninsula 6 3,329 TBD 13. 2000- Chechen Rebels Russia out of Chechnya 4 53 TBD 14. 2000- Kashmir Rebels India out of Kashmir 3 45 TBD 15. 2001- LTTE Sri Lanka accept Tamil state 6 51 TBD 16. 2000- Several Israel out of Palestine 39 177 TBD Total incidents 188

No. in campaigns 179 No. isolated 9

Source: Pape (2002). To be determined.

random events. Seven separate disputes have led to suicide terrorist campaigns: the presence of Ameri- can and French forces in Lebanon, Israeli occupa- tion of West Bank and Gaza, the independence of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, the independence of the Kurdish region of Turkey, Russian occupa- tion of Chechnya, Indian occupation of Kashmir, and the presence of American forces on the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. Overall, however, there have been 16 distinct campaigns, because in certain dis- putes the terrorists elected to suspend operations one or more times either in response to conces- sions or for other reasons. Eleven of the campaigns

have ended and five were ongoing as of the end of 2001. The attacks comprising each campaign were organized by the same terrorist group (or, some- times, a set of cooperating groups as in the ongo- ing "second intifada" in Israel/Palestine), clustered in time, publically justified in terms of a specified political goal, and directed against targets related to that goal.

The most important indicator of the strategic orientation of suicide terrorists is the timing of the suspension of campaigns, which most often occurs based on a strategic decision by leaders of the ter rorist organizations that further attacks would be

counterproductive to their coercive purposes—for instance, in response to full or partial concessions by the target state to the terrorists' political goals. Such suspensions are often accompanied by public explanations that justify the decision to opt for a "cease-fire." Further, the terrorist organizations' discipline is usually fairly good; although there are exceptions, such announced ceasefires usually do stick for a period of months at least, normally until the terrorist leaders take a new strategic decision to resume in pursuit of goals not achieved in the ear- lier campaign. This pattern indicates that both ter- rorist leaders and their recruits are sensitive to the coercive value of the attacks.

As an example of a suicide campaign, consider Hamas's suicide attacks in 1995 to compel Israel to withdraw from towns in the West Bank. Hamas leaders deliberately withheld attacking during the spring and early summer in order to give PLO ne- gotiations with Israel an opportunity to finalize a withdrawal. However, when in early July, Hamas leaders came to believe that Israel was backsliding and delaying withdrawal, Hamas launched a series of suicide attacks. Israel accelerated the pace of its withdrawal, after which Hamas ended the cam- paign. Mahmud al-Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, announced, following the cessation of suicide at- tacks in October 1995:

We must calculate the benefit and cost of continued armed operations. If we can fulfill our goals without violence, we will do so. Violence is a means, not a goal. Hamas's decision to adopt self-restraint does not contradict our aims, which include the estab- lishment of an Islamic state instead of Israel We will never recognize Israel, but it is possible that a truce could prevail between us for days, months, or years. (Mishal and Sela 2000, 71)

If suicide terrorism were mainly irrational or even disorganized, we would expect a much differ- ent pattern in which either political goals were not articulated (e.g., references in news reports to "rogue" attacks) or the stated goals varied consid- erably even within the same conflict. We would also expect the timing to be either random or, per- haps, event-driven, in response to particularly

provocative or infuriating actions by the other side, but little if at all related to the progress of ne- gotiations over issues in dispute that the terrorists want to influence.

NATIONALIST GOALS.

Suicide terrorism is a high-cost strategy, one that would only make strategic sense for a group when high interests are at stake and, even then, as a last resort. The reason is that suicide terrorism maxi- mizes coercive leverage at the expense of support among the terrorists' own community and so can be sustained over time only when there already ex- ists a high degree of commitment among the po- tential pool of recruits. The most important goal that a community can have is the independence of its homeland (population, property, and way of life) from foreign influence or control. As a result, a strategy of suicide terrorism is most likely to be used to achieve nationalist goals, such as gaining control of what the terrorists see as their national homeland territory and expelling foreign military forces from that territory,

In fact, every suicide campaign from 1980 to 2001 has had as a major objective—or as its central objective—coercing a foreign government that has military forces in what they see as their homeland to take those forces out. Table 2 summarizes the disputes that have engendered suicide terrorist campaigns, Since 1980, there has not been a sui- cide terrorist campaign directed mainly against do- mestic opponents or against foreign opponents who did not have military forces in the terrorists homeland. Although attacks against civilians are often the most salient to Western observers, actu- ally every suicide terrorist campaign in the past two decades has included attacks directly against the foreign military forces in the country, and most have been waged by guerrilla organizations that also use more conventional methods of attack against those forces.

liven Al Qaeda fits this pattern. Although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se and the terrorists have political objectives

Table 2. Motivation and Targets of Suicide Terrorist Campaigns, 1980-2001

Region Dispute Homeland Status Terrorist Goal Target a Democracy?

Lebanon, 1983-86 West Bank/Gaza, 1994- Tamils in Sri Lanka, 1990— Kurds in Turkey, 1990s Chechnya, 2000- Kashmir, 2000- Saudi Peninsula, 1996-

US/F/IDF military presence IDF military presence SL military presence Turkey military presence Russia military presence Indian military presence US military presence

US/F/IDF withdrawal IDF withdrawal SL withdrawal Turkey withdrawal Russian withdrawal Indian withdrawal US withdrawal

Yes Yes Yes (1950)a

Yes (1983)a

Yes (1993)a

Yes Yes

Source: Pape (2002). Przeworski et al. 2000 identifies four simple rules for determining regime type: (1) The chief executive must be elected, (2) the legislature must be elected, (3) there must be more than one party, and (4) there must be at least one peaceful transfer of power. By these criteria all the targets of suicide terrorism were and are democracies. Przeworski et al, codes only from 1950 to 1990 and is updated to 1999 by Boix and Rosato 2001. Freedom House also rates countries as "free," "partly free," and "not free," using criteria for degree of political rights and civil liberties. According to Freedom House's mea- sures, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Russia were all partly free when they were the targets of suicide terrorism, which puts them ap- proximately in the middle of all countries, a score that is actually biased against this study since terrorism itself lowers a country's civil liberties rating (freedomhouse.org) aDate estabished as a democracy (if not always a democracy).

against the Saudi regime and others, one major ob- jective of Al Qaeda is the expulsion of U.S. troops from the Saudi Peninsula and there have been attacks by terrorists loyal to Osama Bin Laden against American troops in Saudi Arabia. To be sure, there is a major debate among Islamists over the morality of suicide attacks, but within Saudi Arabia there is little debate over Al Qaeda's objec- tion to American forces in the region and over 95% of Saudi society reportedly agrees with Bin Laden on this matter (Sciolino 2002).

Still, even if suicide terrorism follows a strate- gic logic, could some suicide terrorist campaigns be irrational in the sense that they are being waged for unrealistic goals? The answer is that some suicide terrorist groups have not been realistic in expecting the full concessions demanded of the target, but this is normal for disputes involving overlapping nationalist claims and even for coer- cive attempts in general. Rather, the ambitions of terrorist leaders are realistic in two other senses. First, suicide terrorists' political aims, if not their methods, are often more mainstream than ob- servers realize; they generally reflect quite com- mon, straightforward nationalist self-determination claims of their community. Second, these groups often have significant support for their policy goals

versus the target state, goals that are typically much the same as those of other nationalists within their community. Differences between the terrorists and more "moderate" leaders usually concern the use- fulness of a certain level of violence and—some- times—the legitimacy of attacking additional targets besides foreign troops in the country, such as attacks in other countries or against third parties and civilians. Thus, it is not that the terrorists pur- sue radical goals and then seek others' support. Rather, the terrorists are simply the members of their societies who are the most optimistic about the usefulness of violence for achieving goals that many, and often most, support.

The behavior of Hamas illustrates the point. Hamas terrorism has provoked Israeli retaliation that has been costly for Palestinians, while pursu- ing the—apparently unrealistic—goal of abolish- ing the state of Israel. Although prospects of establishing an Arab state in all of "historic Pales- tine" may be poor, most Palestinians agree that it would be desirable if possible. Hamas's terrorist vi- olence was in fact carefully calculated and con- trolled. In April 1994, as its first suicide campaign was beginning, Hamas leaders explained that "martyrdom operations" would be used to achieve intermediate objectives, such as Israeli withdrawal

from the West Bank and Gaza, while the final ob- jective of creating an Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean may require other forms of armed resistance (Shiqaqi 2002; Hroub 2000; Nusse 1998).

DEMOCRACIES AS THE TARGETS.

Suicide terrorism is more likely to be employed against states with democratic political systems than authoritarian governments for several rea- sons. First, democracies are often thought to be especially vulnerable to coercive punishment. Domestic critics and international rivals, as well as terrorists, often view democracies as "soft," usually on the grounds that their publics have low thresh- olds of cost tolerance and high ability to affect state policy. Even if there is little evidence that democra- cies are easier to coerce than other regime types (Horowitz and Reiter 2001), this image of democ- racy matters. Since terrorists can inflict only moderate damage in comparison to even small interstate wars, terrorism can be expected to coerce only if the target state is viewed as especially vul- nerable to punishment. Second, suicide terrorism is a tool of the weak, which means that, regardless of how much punishment the terrorists inflict, the target state almost always has the capacity to retali- ate with far more extreme punishment or even by exterminating the terrorists' community. Accord- ingly, suicide terrorists must not only have high interests at stake, drey must also be confident that their opponent will be at least somewhat re- strained. While there are infamous exceptions, democracies have generally been more restrained in their use of force against civilians, at least since World War II. Finally, suicide attacks may also be harder to organize or publicize in authoritarian police states, although these possibilities are weak- ened by the fact that weak authoritarian states are also not targets.

In fact, the target state of every modern sui- cide campaign has been a democracy. The United States, France, Israel, India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Russia were all democracies when they were at- tacked by suicide terrorist campaigns, even though

the last three became democracies more recently than the others. To be sure, these states vary in the degree to which they share "liberal" norms that re- spect minority rights; Freedom House rates Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Russia as "partly free" (3.5-4.5 on a seven-point scale) rather than "free" during the relevant years, partly for this reason and partly because terrorism and civil violence themselves lowers the freedom rating of these states. Still, all these states elect their chief executives and legisla- tures in multiparty elections and have seen at least one peaceful transfer of power, making them solidly democratic by standard criteria (Boix and Rosato 2001; Huntington 1991; Przeworski et al. 2000).

The Kurds, which straddle Turkey and Iraq, il- lustrate the point that suicide terrorist campaigns are more likely to be targeted against democracies than authoritarian regimes. Although Iraq has been far more brutal toward its Kurdish popula- tion than has Turkey, violent Kurdish groups have used suicide attacks exclusively against democratic Turkey and not against the authoritarian regime in Iraq. There are plenty of national groups Living under authoritarian regimes with grievances that could possibly inspire suicide terrorism, but none have. Thus, the fact that rebels have resorted to this strategy only when they face the more suitable type of target counts against arguments that suicide terrorism is a nonstrategic response, motivated mainly by fanaticism or irrational hatreds.

Terrorists' Assessments of Suicide terrorism

The main reason that suicide terrorism is growing is that terrorists have learned that it works. Even more troubling, the encouraging lessons that ter- rorists have learned from the experience of the 1980s and 1990s are not, for the most part, prod- ucts of wild-eyed interpretations or wishful think- ing. They are, rather, quite reasonable assessments of the outcomes of suicide terrorist campaigns during this period.

To understand how terrorists groups have as-

sessed the effectiveness of suicide terrorism * * *, it is important to assess whether the lessons that the terrorists drew were reasonable conclusions from the record. The crucial cases are the Hamas and Is- lamic Jihad campaigns against Israel during the 1990s, because they are most frequently cited as aimed at unrealistic goals and therefore as basically irrational.

* * *

The Apparent Success of Suicide Terrorism

Perhaps the most striking aspect of recent suicide terrorist campaigns is that they are associated with gains for the terrorists' political cause about half the time. As Table 1 shows, of the 11 suicide ter- rorist campaigns that were completed during 1980-2001, six closely correlate with significant policy changes by the target state toward the terrorists' major political goals. In one case, the terrorists' territorial goals were fully achieved (Hezbollah v. US/F, 1983); in three cases, the ter- rorists territorial aims were partly achieved (Hezbollah v. Israel, 1983-85; Hamas v. Israel, 1994; and Hamas v. Israel, 1994-95); in one case, the target government to entered into sovereignty negotiations with the terrorists (LTTE v. Sri Lanka, 1993-94); and in one case, the terrorist organiza- tion's top leader was released from prison (Hamas v. Israel, 1997). Five campaigns did not lead to noticeable concessions (Hezbollah's second effort against Israel in Lebanon, 1985-86; a Hamas cam- paign in 1996 retaliating for an Israeli assassina- tion; the LTTE v. Sri Lanka, 1995-2002; and both PKK campaigns). Coercive success is so rare that even a 50% success rate is significant, because in- ternational military and economic coercion, using the same standards as above, generally works less than a third of the time (Art and Cronin 2003).

There were limits to what suicide terrorism ap- peared to gain in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the gains for the terrorists' cause were modest, not in- volving interests central to the target countries' security or wealth, and most were potentially re-

vocable. For the United States and France, Leba- non was a relatively minor foreign policy interest. Israel's apparent concessions to the Palestinians from 1994 to 1997 were more modest than they might appear. Although Israel withdrew its forces from parts of Gaza and the West Bank and released Sheikh Yassin, during the same period Israeli set- dement in the occupied territories almost doubled, and recent events have shown that Israel is not de- terred from sending force back in when necessary. In two disputes, the terrorists achieved initial suc- cess but failed to reach greater goals. Although Is- rael withdrew from much of Lebanon in June 1985, it retained a six-mile security buffer zone along the southern edge of the country for another 15 years from which a second Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign failed to dislodge it. The Sri Lankan government did conduct apparently seri- ous negotiations with the LTTE from November 1994 to April 1995, but did not concede the Tamil's main demand, for independence, and since 1995, the government has preferred to prose- cute the war rather than consider permitting Tamil secession.

Still, these six concessions, or at least apparent concessions, help to explain why suicide terrorism is on the rise. * * *

* * *

The Crucial Case of Hamas

The Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide campaigns against Israel in 1994 and 1995 are crucial tests of the reasonableness of terrorists' assessments. In each case, Israel made significant concessions in the direction of the terrorists' cause and terrorist leaders report that these Israeli concessions in- creased their confidence in the coercive effective- ness of suicide attack. However, there is an important alternative explanation for Israeli's con- cessions in these cases—the Israeli government's obligations under the Oslo Accords, Accordingly, evaluating the reasonableness of the terrorists' as- sessments of these cases is crucial because many observers characterize Hamas and Islamic Jihad as

fanatical, irrational groups, extreme both within Palestinian society and among terrorists groups in general (Kramer 1996). Further, these campaigns are also of special interest because they helped to encourage the most intense ongoing campaign, the second intifada against Israel, and may also have helped to encourage Al Qaeda's campaign against the United States.

Examination of these crucial cases demon- strates that the terrorist groups came to the con- clusion that suicide attacks accelerated Israeli's withdrawal in both cases. Although the Oslo Ac- cords formally committed to withdrawing the IDF from Gaza and the West Bank, Israel routinely missed key deadlines, often by many months, and the terrorists came to believe that Israel would not have withdrawn when it did, and perhaps not at all, had it not been for the coercive leverage of sui- cide attack. Moreover, this interpretation of events was hardly unique. Numerous other observers and key Israeli government leaders themselves came to the same conclusion. To be clear, Hamas may well have had motives other than coercion for launch- ing particular attacks, such as retaliation (De Figueredo and Weingast 1998), gaining local sup- port (Bloom 2002), or disrupting negotiated out- comes it considered insufficient (Kydd and Walter 2002). However, the experience of observing how the target reacted to the suicide campaigns appears to have convinced terrorist leaders of the coercive effectiveness of this strategy.

To evaluate these cases, we need to know (1) the facts of each case, (2) how others inter- preted the events, and (3) how the terrorists inter- preted these events. Each campaign is discussed in turn.

ISRAEL'S WITHDRAWAL FROM GAZA, MAY 1994.

The Facts. Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Or- ganization signed the Oslo Accords on Septem- ber 13, 1993. These obligated Israel to withdraw its military forces from the Gaza Strip and West Bank town of Jericho beginning on December 13 and ending on April 13, 1994. In fact, Israel missed both deadlines. The major sticking points during

the implementation negotiations in Fall and Winter of 1993-94 were the size of the Palestin- ian police force (Israel proposed a limit of 1,800, while the Palestinians demanded 9,000) and juris- diction for certain criminal prosecutions, espe- cially whether Israel could retain a right of hot pursuit to prosecute Palestinian attackers who might flee into Palestinian ruled zones. As of April 5, 1994, these issues were unresolved. Hamas then launched two suicide attacks, one on Apri l 6 and another on Aprd 13, killing 15 Israeli civilians. On April 18, the Israeli Knesset voted to withdraw, effectively accepting the Palestinian positions on both disputed issues. The suicide attacks then stopped and the withdrawal was actually con- ducted in a few weeks starting on May 4, 1994.4

These two suicide attacks may not originally have been intended as coercive, since Hamas lead- ers had announced them in March 1994 as part of a planned series of five attacks in retaliation for the February 24th Hebron massacre in which an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians and had strong reservations about negotiating a compromise settlement with Israel (Kydd and Walter 2002), However, when Israel agreed to withdraw more promptly than expected, Hamas decided to forgo the remaining three planned attacks. There is thus a circumstantial case that these attacks had the ef- fect of coercing the Israelis into being more forth- coming in the withdrawal negotiations and both Israeli government leaders and Hamas leaders publically drew this conclusion.

Israeli and Other Assessments. There are two main reasons to doubt that terrorist pressure accelerated Israel's decision to withdraw. First, one might think that Israel would have withdrawn in any case, as it had promised to do in the Oslo Accords of September 1993, Second, one might argue that Hamas was opposed to a negotiated settlement with Israel. Taking both points together, therefore, Hamas' attacks could not have contributed to Is- rael's withdrawal.

The first of these arguments, however, ignores the facts that Israel had already missed the origi- nally agreed deadline and, as of early A p r i l 1994,

did not appear ready to withdraw at all if that meant surrendering on the size of the Palestinian police force and legal jurisdiction over terrorists. The second argument is simply illogical. Although Hamas objected to surrendering claims to all of historic Palestine, it did value the West Bank and Gaza as an intermediate goal, and certainly had no objection to obtaining this goal sooner rather than later.

Most important, other observers took explana- tions based on terrorist pressure far more seri- ously, including the person whose testimony must count most, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. On A p r i l 13, 1994, Rabin said,

I can't recall in the past any suicidal terror acts by the PLO. We have seen by now at least six acts of this type by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. . . . The only response to them and to the enemies of peace on the part of Israel is to accelerate the negotiations. (Makovsky and Pinkas 1994).

On A p r i l 18, 1994, Rabin went further, giving a major speech in the Knesset explaining why the withdrawal was necessary:

Members of the Knessett: I want to tell the truth. For 27 years we have been dominating another people against its will. For 27 years Palestinians in the terri- tories . . . get up in the morning harboring a fierce hatred for us, as Israelis and Jews. Each morning they get up to a hard life, for which we are also, but not solely responsible. We cannot deny that our continuing control over a foreign people who do not want us exacts a painful price. .. . For two or three years we have been facing a phenomenon of extrem- ist Islamic terrorism, which recalls Hezbollah, which surfaced in Lebanon and perpetrated attacks, in- cluding suicide missions. . . . There is no end to the targets Hamas and other terrorist organizations have among us. Each Israeli, in the territories and inside sovereign Israel, including united Jerusalem, each bus, each home, is a target for their murder- ous plans. Since there is no separation between the two populations, the current situation creates endless possibilities for Hamas and the other organi- zations.

Independent Israeli observers also credited suicide terrorism with considerable coercive effec-

tiveness. The most detailed assessment is by Efrairn Inbar(1999, 141-42):

A significant change occurred in Rabin's assessment of the importance of terrorist activities. . . . Reacting to the April 1994 suicide attack in Afula, Rabin rec- ognized that terrorists activities by Hamas and other Islamic radicals were "a form of terrorism different from what we once knew from the PLO terrorist or- ganizations. . . ." Rabin admitted that there was no "hermitic" solution available to protect Israeli citizens against such terrorist attacks. . . . He also understood that such incidents intensified the do- mestic pressure to freeze the Palestinian track of the peace process. Islamic terrorism thus initially con- tributed to the pressure for accelerating the negotia- tions on his part.

Arab writers also attributed Israeli accommo- dation to the suicide attacks. Mazin Hammad wrote in an editorial in a Jordanian newspaper:

It is unprecedented for an Israeli official like Y. Ra- bin to clearly state that there is no future for the set- tlements in the occupied territories. . . . He would not have said this (yesterday) if it was not for the collapse of the security Israel. . . . The martyrdom operation in Hadera shook the faith of the settlers in the possibility of staying in the West Bank and Gaza and increased their motivation to pack their belong- ings and dismantle their settlements. ("Hamas Op- erations" 1994)

Terrorists' Assessments. Even though the favorable result was apparently unexpected by Hamas lead- ers, given the circumstances and the assessments voiced by Rabin and others, it certainly would have been reasonable for them to conclude that suicide terrorism had helped accelerate Israeli withdrawal, and they did.

Hamas leader Ahmed Bakr (1995) said that "what forced the Israelis to withdraw from Gaza was the intifada and not the Oslo agreement," while Imad al-Faluji judged that

all that has been achieved so far is the consequence of our military actions. Without the so-called peace process, we would have gotten even more. . . , We would have got Gaza and the West Bank without this agreement.... Israel can beat all Arab Armies. However, it can do nothing against a youth with a

knife or an explosive charge on his body. Since it was unable to guarantee security within its borders, Israel entered into negotiations with the P L O . . . . If the Israelis want security, they will have to abandon their settlements . . . in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. ("Hamas Leader" 1995)

Further, these events appear to have persuaded terrorists that future suicide attacks could eventu- ally produce still greater concessions. Fathi al- Shaqaqi (1995), leader of Islamic Jihad, said,

Our jihad action has exposed the enemy weakness, confusion, and hysteria, It has become clear that the enemy can be defeated, for if a small faithful group was able to instill all this horror and panic in the en- emy through confronting it in Palestine and south- ern Lebanon, what will happen when the nation confronts it with all its potential.... Martyrdom ac- tions will escalate in the face of all pressures . . . [they| are a realistic option in confronting the un- equal balance of power. If we are unable to effect a balance of power now, we can achieve a balance of horror.

I S R A E L ' S WITHDRAWAL FROM WEST BANK TOWNS,

DECEMBER 1995.

The second Hamas case, in 1995, tells essentially the same story as the first. Again, a series of suicide attacks was associated with Israeli territorial con- cessions to the Palestinians, and again, a significant fraction of outside observers attributed the conces- sions to the coercive pressure of suicide terrorism, as did the terrorist leaders themselves.

The Facts. The original Oslo Accords scheduled Is- rael to withdraw from the Palestinian populated areas of the West Bank by July 13, 1994, but after the delays over Gaza and Jericho all sides recog- nized that this could not be met. From October 1994 to April 1995, Hamas, along with Islamic Ji- had, carried out a series of seven suicide terrorist attacks that were intended to compel Israel to make further withdrawals and suspended attacks temporarily at the request of the Palestinian Authority after Israel agreed on March 29, 1995, to begin withdrawals by July 1. Later, however, the Israelis announced that withdrawals could not

begin before Apri l 1996 because bypass roads needed for the security of Israeli settlements were not ready. Hamas and Islamic Jihad then mounted new suicide attacks on July 24 and Au- gust 21, 1995, kdling 11 Israeli civilians. In Sep- tember, Israel agreed to withdraw from the West Bank towns in December (Oslo II) even though the roads were not finished. The suicide attacks then stopped and the withdrawal was actually car- ried out in a few weeks starting on December 12, 1995.5

Israeli and Other Assessments. Although Israeli gov- ernment spokesmen frequently claimed that sui- cide terrorism was delaying withdrawal, this claim was contradicted by, among others, Prime Minis - ter Rabin. Rabin (1995) explained that the decision for the second withdrawal was, like the first in 1994, motivated in part by the goal of reducing suicide terrorism:

Interviewer: Mr. Rabin, what is the logic of with- drawing from towns and villages when you know that terror might continue to strike at us from there? Rabin: What is the alternative, to have double the amount of terror? As for the issue of terror, take the suicide bombings. Some 119 Israelis. . . have been killed or murdered since 1st January 1994, 77 of them in suicide bombings perpetrated by Islamic radical fanatics.... All the bombers were Palestini- ans who came from areas under our control.

* * *

Terrorists' Assessments, As in 1994, Hamas and Is- lamic Jihad came to the conclusion that suicide terrorism was working, Hamas's spokesman in Jordan explained that new attacks were necessary to change Israel's behavior:

Hamas, leader Muhammad Nazzal said, needed mil- itary muscle in order to negotiate with Israel from a position of strength. Arafat started from a position of weakness, he said, which is how the Israelis man- aged to push on him the solution and get recogni- tion of their state and settlements without getting anything in return. (Theodoulou 1995)

After the agreement was signed, Hamas leaders also argued that suicide operations contributed to

the Israeli withdrawal. Mahmud al-Zahhar (1996), a spokesman for Hamas, said,

The Authority told us that military action embar- rasses the PA because it obstructs the redeployment of the Israeli's forces and implementation of the agreement. . . . We offered many martyrs to attain freedom.... Any fair person knows that the military action was useful for the Authority during negotia- tions.

* * *

The bottom line is that the ferocious escalation of the pace of suicide terrorism that we have wit- nessed in the past several years cannot be con- sidered irrational or even surprising. Rather, it is simply the result of the lesson that terrorists have quite reasonably learned from their experi- ence of the previous two decades: Suicide terror- ism pays.

The Limits of Suicide Terrorism

Despite suicide terrorists' reasons for confidence in the coercive effectiveness of this strategy, there are sharp limits to what suicide terrorism is likely to accomplish in the future. During the 1980s and 1990s, terrorist leaders learned that moderate punishment often leads to moderate concessions and so concluded that more ambitious suicide campaigns would lead to greater political gains. However, today's more ambitious suicide terrorist campaigns are likely to fail. Although suicide ter- rorism is somewhat more effective than ordinary coercive punishment using air power or economic sanctions, it is not drastically so.

Suicide Terrorism Is Unlikely to Achieve Ambitious Goals

In international military coercion, threats to inflict military defeat often generate more coercive lever- age than punishment. Punishment, using anything short of nuclear weapons, is a relatively weak coer- cive strategy because modern nation states gener- ally will accept high costs rather than abandon

important national goals, while modern adminis- trative techniques and economic adjustments over time often allow states to minimize civilian costs. The most punishing air attacks with conventional munitions in history were the American B-29 raids against Japan's 62 largest cities from March to August 1945. Although these raids killed nearly 800,000 Japanese civilians—almost 10% died on the first day, the March 9, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo, which killed over 85,000—the conventional bombing did not compel the Japanese to surrender.

Suicide terrorism makes adjustment to reduce damage more difficult than for states faced with military coercion or economic sanctions. However, it does not affect the target state's interests in the issues at stake. As a result, suicide terrorism can coerce states to abandon limited or modest goals, such as withdrawal from territory of low strategic importance or, as in Israel's case in 1994 and 1995, a temporary and partial withdrawal from a more important area. However, suicide terrorism is un- likely to cause targets to abandon goals central to their wealth or security, such as a loss of territory that would weaken the economic prospects of the state or strengthen the rivals of the state.

* * *

The data on suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2001 support this conclusion. While suicide terrorism has achieved modest or very limited goals, it has so far failed to compel target democracies to abandon goals central to national wealth or security. When the United States withdrew from Lebanon in 1984, it had no important security, economic, or even ideological interests at stake. Lebanon was largely a humanitarian mission and not viewed as central to the national welfare of the United States. Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon in June 1985 but remained in a security buffer on the edge of south- ern Lebanon for more than a decade afterward, de- spite the fact that 17 of 22 suicide attacks occurred in 1985 and 1986. Israel's withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995 occurred at the same time that settlements increased and did little to hinder the IDF's return, and so these con- cessions were more modest than they may appear.

Sri Lanka has suffered more casualties from suicide attack than Israel but has not acceded to demands that it surrender part of its national territory. Thus, the logic of punishment and the record of suicide terrorism suggests that, unless suicide terrorists ac- quire far more destructive technologies, suicide at- tacks for more ambitious goals are likely to fail and will continue to provoke more aggressive military responses.

Policy Implications for Containing Suicide Terrorism

While the rise in suicide terrorism and the reasons behind it seem daunting, there are important pol- icy lessons to learn. The current policy debate is misguided. Offensive military action or conces- sions alone rarely work for long. For over 20 years, the governments of Israel and other states targeted by suicide terrorism have engaged in extensive mil- itary efforts to kill , isolate, and jail suicide terrorist leaders and operatives, sometimes with the help of quite good surveillance of the terrorists' communi- ties. Thus far, they have met with meager success. Although decapitation of suicide terrorist organi- zations can disrupt their operations temporarily, it rarely yields long-term gains. Of the 11 major sui- cide terrorist campaigns that had ended as of 2001, only one—the PKK versus Turkey—did so as a re- sult of leadership decapitation, when the leader, in Turkish custody, asked his followers to stop. So far, leadership decapitation has also not ended Al Qaeda's campaign. Although the United States successfully toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan in December 2001, Al Qaeda launched seven success- ful suicide terrorist attacks from April to Decem- ber 2002, killing some 250 Western civilians, more than in the three years before September 11, 2001, combined.

Concessions are also not a simple answer. Con- cessions to nationalist grievances that are widely held in the terrorists' community can reduce pop- ular support for further terrorism, making it more difficult to recruit new suicide attackers and im- proving the standing of more moderate nationalist elites who are in competition with the terrorists.

Such benefits can be realized, however, only if the concessions really do substantially satisfy the na- tionalist or self-determination aspirations of a large fraction of the community.

Partial, incremental, or deliberately staggered concessions that are dragged out over a substantial period of time are likely to become the worst of both worlds. Incremental compromise may ap- pear—or easily be portrayed—to the terrorists' community as simply delaying tactics and, thus, may fail to reduce, or actually increase, their dis- trust that their main concerns will ever be met. Further, incrementalism provides time and oppor- tunity for the terrorists to intentionally provoke the target state in hopes of derailing the smooth progress of negotiated compromise in the short term, so that they can reradicalize their own com- munity and actually escalate their efforts toward even greater gains in the long term. Thus, states that are willing to make concessions should do so in a single step if at all possible.

Advocates of concessions should also recognize that, even if they are successful in undermining the terrorist leaders' base of support, almost any con- cession at all will tend to encourage the terrorist leaders further about their own coercive effec- tiveness. Thus, even in the aftermath of a real settlement with the opposing community, some terrorists will remain motivated to continue at- tacks and, for the medium term, may be able to do so, which in turn would put a premium on com- bining concessions with other solutions.

Given the limits of offense and of concessions, homeland security and defensive efforts generally must be a core part of any solution. Undermining the feasibility of suicide terrorism is a difficult task. After all, a major advantage of suicide attack is that it is more difficult to prevent than other types of attack. However, the difficulty of achieving perfect security should not keep us from taking serious measures to prevent would-be terrorists from eas- ily entering their target society. As Chaim Kauf- mann (1996) has shown, even intense ethnic civil wars can often be stopped by demographic separa- tion because if greatly reduces both means and in- centives for the sides to attack each other. This

logic may apply with even more force to the related problem of suicide terrorism, since, for suicide at- tackers, gaining physical access to the general area of the target is the only genuinely demanding part of an operation, and as we have seen, resent- ment of foreign occupation of their national homeland is a key part of the motive for suicide terrorism.

The requirements for demographic separation depend on geographic and other circumstances that may not be attainable in all cases. For exam- ple, much of Israel's difficulty in containing suicide terrorism derives from the deeply intermixed set- tlement patterns of the West Bank and Gaza, which make the effective length of the border between Palestinian and Jewish settled areas practically infinite and have rendered even very in- tensive Israeli border control efforts ineffective (Kaufmann 1998). As a result, territorial conces- sions could well encourage terrorists leaders to strive for still greater gains while greater repres- sion may only exacerbate the conditions of occu- pation that cultivate more recruits for terrorist organizations. Instead, the best course to improve Israel's security may well be a combined strategy: abandoning territory on the West Bank along with an actual wall that physically separates the poptdations.

Similarly, if Al Qaeda proves able to continue suicide attacks against the American homeland, the United States should emphasize improving its domestic security. In the short term, the United States should adopt stronger border controls to make it more difficult for suicide attackers to enter the United States, In the long term, the United States should work toward energy independence and, thus, reduce the need for American troops in the Persian Gulf countries where their presence has helped recruit suicide terrorists to attack America. These measures will not provide a perfect solution, but they may make it far more difficult for Al Qaeda to continue attacks in the United States, es- pecially spectacular attacks that require elaborate coordination.

Perhaps most important, the close association between foreign military occupations and the

growth of suicide terrorist movements in the occu- pied regions should give pause to those who favor solutions that involve conquering countries in or- der to transform their political systems. Conquer- ing countries may disrupt terrorist operations in the short term, but it is important to recognize that occupation of more countries may well increase the number of terrorists coming at us.

NOTES 1. A suicide attack can be defined in two ways, a

narrow definition limited to situations in which an attacker kills himself and a broad definition that includes any instance when an attacker fully expects to be killed by others during an at- tack. My research relies on the narrow defini- tion, partly because this is the common practice in the literature and partly because there are so few instances in which it is clear that an attacker expected to be killed by others that adding this category of events would not change my find- ings.

2. Hunger strikes and self-immolation are not or- dinarily considered acts of terrorism, because their main purpose is to evoke understanding and sympathy from the target audience, and not to cause terror (Niebuhr 1960).

3. This survey sought to include every instance of a suicide attack in which the attacker killed himself except those explicitly authorized by a state and carried out by the state government apparatus.

4. There were no suicide attacks from Apri l to Oc- tober 1994.

5. There were no suicide attacks from August 1995 to February 1996, There were four suicide at- tacks in response to an Israeli assassination from February 25 to March 4, 1996, and then none until March 1997.

9 INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

Within international political economy there is a plethora of different issues criti- cal to understanding international relations in the twenty-first century. To explain these issues, Essentials of International Relations shows how contemporary policy debates are embedded in the contending liberal, realist, and radical theoretical ap- proaches to international political economy. The first selection excerpted here, from U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (1975), is now considered a clas- sic in which Princeton University's Robert Gilpin clearly and concisely discusses the relationship between economics and politics. He examines the three basic concep- tions of political economy (liberalism, radicalism, and mercantilism), comparing them along a number of dimensions, including their perspectives on the nature of economic relations, actors, and goals of economic relations; their theories of change; and how they characterize the relationship between economics and poli- tics. In the second selection, Stephen D. Krasner, writing in 1976, explicitly uses the international political theory of realism to explain international economic affairs. In particular, he addresses the relationship between the power of major states and trade openness. Based on an analysis of historical data, he argues that hege- mony (or a leading state) is critical for the creation and maintenance of free trade.

The last three selections move away from an explicitly theoretical orientation and address contemporary political economy issues. Describing the international political economy as a "great divide," Bruce R. Scott of the Harvard Business School explains that economic globalization depends not only on free market pricing, but also on the legal and administrative capability of the state. Getting in- stitutions "right" is necessary for economies to prosper. One of those institutions is the World Bank. Former Managing Director of the bank, Jessica Einhorn illustrates how the bank has expanded its mission over the decades, moving into new non-economic arenas. Its missions have become, in her words, unachievable. Like Einhorn and Scott, Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, former vice

president and chief economist at the World Bank, is concerned with making insti- tutions "right." Admitting that economic globalization is not closing the develop- ment gap, Stiglitz proposes specific reforms for intergovernmental institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. The chapter in this section is from his book Globalization and Its Discontents (2002).

R O B E R T G I L P I N

The Nature of Political Economy

The international corporations have evidently de- clared ideological war on the "antiquated" nation state. . . . The charge that materialism, moderniza- tion and internationalism is the new liberal creed of corporate capitalism is a valid one. The implication is clear: the nation state as a political unit of demo- cratic decision-making must, in the interest of "progress," yield control to the new mercantile mini-powers.1

While the structure of the multinational corporation is a modern concept, designed to meet the require- ments of a modern age, the nation state is a very old- fashioned idea and badly adapted to serve the needs of our present complex world.2

T h e s e two statements—the first by Kari Levitt, a C a n a d i a n nationalist, the second by George Ball, a f o r m e r United States undersecretary of state— express a dominant theme of contemporary wr i t i ngs on international relations. International socie ty , we are told, is increasingly rent between its e conomic and its political organization. On the o n e hand, powerful economic and technological forces are creating a highly interdependent world economy, thus diminishing the traditional signifi- c a n c e of national boundaries. On the other hand, t h e nation-state continues to command men's loy-

From Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1975), chap. 1.

alties and to be the basic unit of political decision making. As one writer has put the issue, "The con- flict of our era is between ethnocentric nationalism and geocentric technology."3

Ball and Levitt represent two contending posi- tions with respect to this conflict. Whereas Ball advocates the diminution of the power of the na- tion-state in order to give full rein to the produc- tive potentialities of the multinational corporation, Levitt argues for a powerful nationalism which could counterbalance American corporate domi- nation. What appears to one as the logical and de- sirable consequence of economic rationality seems to the other to be an effort on the part of American imperialism to eliminate all contending centers of power.

Although the advent of the multinational corpo- ration has put the question of the relationship be- tween economics and politics in a new guise, it is an old issue. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was this issue that divided classical liberals like John Stuart M i l l from economic nationalists, represented by Georg Friedrich List. Whereas the former gave primacy in the organization of society to economics and the production of wealth, the latter emphasized the political determination of economic relations. As this issue is central both to the contemporary de- bate on the multinational corporation and to the ar- gument of this study, this chapter analyzes the three

major treatments of the relationship between eco- nomics and politics—that is, the three major ide- ologies of political economy.

The Meaning of Political Economy

The argument of this study is that the relationship between economics and politics, at least in the modern world, is a reciprocal one. On the one hand, politics largely determines the framework of economic activity and channels it in directions in- tended to serve the interests of dominant groups; the exercise of power in all its forms is a major de- terminant of the nature of an economic system. On the other hand, the economic process itself tends to redistribute power and wealth; it trans- forms the power relationships among groups. This in turn leads to a transformation of the political system, thereby giving rise to a new structure of economic relationships. Thus, the dynamics of in- ternational relations in the modern world is largely a function of the reciprocal interaction between economics and politics.

First of all, what do I mean by "politics" or "economics"? Charles Kindleberger speaks of eco- nomics and politics as two different methods of al- locating scarce resources: the first through a market mechanism, the latter through a budget.4

Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, in an excellent analysis of international political economy, define economics and politics in terms of two levels of analysis: those of structure and of process.5 Politics is the domain "having to do with the establishment of an order of relations, a structure... "6 Econom- ics deals with "short-term allocative behavior (i.e., holding institutions, fundamental assumptions, and expectations constant). . . ." 7 Like Kindle- berger's definition, however, this definition tends to isolate economic and political phenomena ex- cept under certain conditions, which Keohane and Nye define as the "politicization" of the economic system. Neither formulation comes to terms ade- quately with the dynamic and intimate nature of the relationship between the two.

In this study, the issue of the relationship be-

tween economics and politics translates into that between wealth and power. According to this state- ment of the problem, economics takes as its province the creation and distribution of wealth; politics is the realm of power. I shall examine their relationship from several ideological perspectives, including my own. But what is wealth? What is power?

In response to the question, What is wealth?, an economist-colleague responded, "What do you want, my thirty-second or thirty-volume answer?" Basic concepts are elusive in economics, as in any field of inquiry. No unchallengeable definitions are possible. Ask a physicist for his definition of the nature of space, time, and matter, and you will not get a very satisfying response. What you will get is an operational definition, one which is usable: it permits the physicist to build an intellectual edifice whose foundations would crumble under the scru- tiny of the philosopher.

Similarly, the concept of wealth, upon which the science of economics ultimately rests, cannot be clarified in a definitive way. Paul Samuelson, in his textbook, doesn't even try, though he provides a clue in his definition of economics as "the study of how men and society choose... to employ scarce productive resources . . . to produce various commodities . . . and distribute them for con- sumption."8 Following this lead, we can say that wealth is anything (capital, land, or labor) that can generate future income; it is composed of physical assets and human capital (including embodied knowledge).

The basic concept of political science is power. Most political scientists would not stop here; they would include in the definition of political science the purpose for which power is used, whether this be the advancement of the public wel- fare or the domination of one group over another. In any case, few would dissent from the following statement of Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kap- lan:

The concept of power is perhaps the most funda- mental in the whole of political science: the political process is the shaping, distribution, and exercise of

power (in a wider sense, of all the deference values, or of influence in general.).9

Power as such is not the sole or even the prin- cipal goal of state behavior. Other goals or values constitute the objectives pursued by nation-states: welfare, security, prestige. But power in its several forms (military, economic, psychological) is ulti- mately the necessary means to achieve these goals. For this reason, nation-states are intensely jealous of and sensitive to their relative power position. The distribution of power is important because it profoundly affects the ability of states to achieve what they perceive to be their interests.

The nature of power, however, is even more elusive than that of wealth. The number and vari- ety of definitions should be an embarrassment to political scientists. Unfortunately, this study can- not bring the intradisciplinary squabble to an end. Rather, it adopts the definition used by Hans Mor- genthau in his influential Politics Among Nations: "man's control over the minds and actions of other men." 1 0 Thus, power, like wealth, is the capacity to produce certain results.

Unlike wealth, however, power can not be quantified; indeed, it cannot be overemphasized that power has an important psychological dimen- sion. Perceptions of power relations are of critical importance; as a consequence, a fundamental task of statesmen is to manipulate the perceptions of other statesmen regarding the distribution of power. Moreover, power is relative to a specific sit- uation or set of circumstances; there is no single hierarchy of power in international relations, Power may take many forms—military, economic, or psychological—though, in the final analysis, force is the ultimate form of power. Finally, the in- ability to predict the behavior of others or the out- come of events is of great significance. Uncertainty regarding the distribution of power and the ability of the statesmen to control events plays an impor- tant role in international relations. Ultimately, the determination of the distribution of power can be made only in retrospect as a consequence of war. It is precisely for this reason that war has had, unfor-

tunately, such a central place in the history ot in- ternational relations. In short, power is an elusive concept indeed upon which to erect a science of politics.

* * *

The distinction * * * between economics as the science of wealth and politics as the science of power is essentially an analytical one. In the real world, wealth and power are ultimately joined. This, in fact, is the basic rationale for a political economy of international relations. But in order to develop the argument of this study, wealth and power will be treated, at least for the moment, as analytically distinct.

To provide a perspective on the nature of polit- ical economy, the next section of the chapter will discuss the three prevailing conceptions of political economy: liberalism, Marxism, and mercantilism. Liberalism regards politics and economics as rela- tively separable and autonomous spheres of activi- ties; I associate most professional economists as well as many other academics, businessmen, and American officials with this outiook. Marxism re- fers to the radical critique of capitalism identified with Karl Marx and his contemporary disciples; ac- cording to this conception, economics determines politics and political structure. Mercantilism is a more questionable term because of its historical as- sociation with the desire of nation-states for a trade surplus and for treasure (money). One must distinguish, however, between the specific form mercantilism took in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries and the general outlook of mer- cantilistic thought. The essence of the mercantilistic perspective, whether it is labeled economic nation- alism, protectionism, or the doctrine of the Ger- man Historical School, is the subservience of the economy to the state and its interests—interests that range from matters of domestic welfare to those of international security. It is this more gen- eral meaning of mercantilism that is implied by the use of the term in this study.

* * *

Three Conceptions of Political Economy

The three preyailing conceptions of political economy differ on many points. Several critical differences will be examined in this brief compari- son. (See Table)

THE NATURE OF E C O N O M I C RELATIONS

The basic assumption of liberalism is that the na- ture of international economic relations is essen- tially harmonious. Herein lay the great intellectual innovation of Adam Smith. Disputing his mercan- tilist predecessors, Smith argued that international economic relations could be made a positive-sum game; that is to say, everyone could gain, and no one need lose, from a proper ordering of economic relations, albeit the distribution of these gains may not be equal. Following Smith, liberalism assumes that there is a basic harmony between true national interest and cosmopolitan economic interest. Thus, a prominent member of this school of thought has written, in response to a radical cri- tique, that the economic efficiency of the sterling standard in the nineteenth century and that of the dollar standard in the twentieth century serve "the cosmopolitan interest in a national form." 1 1

Although Great Britain and the United States gained the most from the international role of their

respective currencies, everyone else gained as well. Liberals argue that, given this underlying iden-

tity of national and cosmopolitan interests in a free market, the state should not interfere with eco- nomic transactions across national boundaries. Through free exchange of commodities, removal of restrictions on the flow of investment, and an international division of labor, everyone wil l bene- fit in the long run as a result of a more efficient utilization of the world's scarce resources. The na- tional interest is therefore best served, liberals maintain, by a generous and cooperative attitude regarding economic relations with other countries. In essence, the pursuit of self-interest in a free, competitive economy achieves the greatest good for the greatest number in international no less than in the national society.

Both mercantilists and Marxists, on the other hand, begin with the premise that the essence of economic relations is conflictual. There is no under- lying harmony, indeed, one group's gain is an- other's loss. Thus, in the language of game theory, whereas liberals regard economic relations as a non- zero-sum game, Marxists and mercantilists view economic relations as essentially a zero-sum game.

THE GOAL OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

For the liberal, the goal of economic acdvity is the optimum or efficient use of the world's scarce re-

Comparison of the Three Conceptions of Political Economy

Liberalism Marxism Mercantilism

sources and the maximization of world welfare. While most liberals refuse to make value judg- ments regarding income distribution, Marxists and mercantilists stress the distributive effects of eco- nomic relations. For the Marxist the distribution of wealth among social classess is central; for the mercantilist it is the distribution of employment, industry, and military power among nation-states that is most significant. Thus, the goal of economic (and political) activity for both Marxists and mercantilists is the redistribution of wealth and power.

THE STATE AND PUBLIC POLICY

These three perspectives differ decisively in their views regarding the nature of the economic actors. In Marxist analysis, the basic actors in both do- mestic and international relations are economic classes; the interests of the dominant class deter- mine the foreign policy of the state. For mercan- tilists, the real actors in international economic relations are nation-states; national interest deter- mines foreign policy. National interest may at times be influenced by the peculiar economic in- terests of classes, elites, or other subgroups of the society; but factors of geography, external configurations of power, and the exigencies of na- tional survival are primary in determining foreign policy. Thus, whereas liberals speak of world wel- fare and Marxists of class interests, mercantilists recognize only the interests of particular nation- states.

Although liberal economists such as David Ri- cardo and Joseph Schumpeter recognized the im- portance of class conflict and neoclassical liberals analyze economic growth and policy in terms of national economies, the liberal emphasis is on the individual consumer, firm, or entrepreneur. The liberal ideal is summarized in the view of Harry Johnson that the nation-state has no meaning as an economic entity.12

Underlying these contrasting views are differ- ing conceptions of the nature of the state and pub- lic policy. For liberals, the state represents an aggregation of private interests: public policy is but

the outcome of a pluralistic struggle among inter- est groups. Marxists, on the other hand, regard the state as simply the "executive committee of the ruling class," and public policy reflects its inter- ests. Mercantilists, however, regard the state as an organic unit in its own right: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Public policy, therefore, embodies the national interest or Rousseau's "general wil l" as conceived by the polit- ical elite.

T H E R E L A T I O N S H I P B E T W E E N E C O N O M I C S A N D

POLITICS; T H E O R I E S O F C H A N G E

Liberalism, Marxism, and mercantilism also have differing views on the relationship between eco- nomics and politics. And their differences on this issue are directly relevant to their contrasting theo- ries of international political change.

Although the liberal ideal is the separation of economics from politics in the interest of maxi- mizing world welfare, the fulfillment of this ideal would have important political implications. The classical statement of these implications was that of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.13 Economic growth, Smith argued, is primarily a function of the extent of the division of labor, which in turn is dependent upon the scale of the market. Thus he attacked the barriers erected by feudal principali- ties and mercantilistic states against the exchange of goods and the enlargement of markets. If men were to multiply their wealth, Smith argued, the contradiction between political organization and economic rationality had to be resolved in favor of the latter. That is, the pursuit of wealth should de- termine the nature of the political order.

Subsequently, from nineteenth-century eco- nomic liberals to twentieth-century writers on eco- nomic integration, there has existed "the dream . . . of a great republic of world commerce, in which national boundaries would cease to have any great economic importance and the web of trade would bind all the people of the world in the prosperity of peace."14 For liberals the long-term trend is toward world integration, wherein functions, authority, and loyalties will be transferred from "smaller

units to larger ones; from states to federalism; from federalism to supranational unions and from these to superstates."15 The logic of economic and technological development, it is argued, has set mankind on an inexorable course toward global political unification and world peace.

In Marxism, the concept of the contradiction between economic and political relations was enacted into historical law. Whereas classical liberals—although Smith less than others—held that the requirements of economic rationality ought to determine political relations, the Marxist position was that the mode of production does in fact determine the superstructure of political rela- tions. Therefore, it is argued, history can be under- stood as the product of the dialectical process—the contradiction between the evolving techniques of production and the resistant sociopolitical system.

Although Marx and Engels wrote remarkably little on international economics, Engels, in his fa- mous polemic, Anti-Duhring, explicitly considers whether economics or politics is primary in deter- mining the structure of international relations.16

E. K. Duhring, a minor figure in the German His- torical School, had argued, in contradiction to Marxism, that property and market relations re- sulted less from the economic logic of capitalism than from extraeconomic political factors; "The basis of the exploitation of man by man was an his- torical act of force which created an exploitative economic system for the benefit of the stronger man or class."17 Since Engels, in his attack on Duhring, used the example of the unification of Germany through the Zollverein or customs union of 1833, his analysis is directly relevant to this dis- cussion of the relationship between economics and political organization.

Engels argued that when contradictions arise between economic and political structures, politi- cal power adapts itself to the changes in the bal- ance of economic forces; politics yields to the dictates of economic development. Thus, in the case of nineteenth-century Germany, the require- ments of industrial production had become in- compatible with its feudal, politically fragmented

structure. "Though political reaction was victori- ous in 1815 and again in 1848," he argued, "it was unable to prevent the growth of large-scale indus- try in Germany and the growing participation of German commerce in the world market."18 In summary, Engels wrote, "German unity had be- come an economic necessity."19

In the view of both Smith and Engels, the nation-state represented a progressive stage in hu- man development, because it enlarged the political realm of economic activity. In each successive economic epoch, advances in technology and an increasing scale of production necessitate an en- largement of political organization. Because the city-state and feudalism restricted the scale of pro- duction and the division of labor made possible by the Industrial Revolution, they prevented the effi- cient utilization of resources and were, therefore, superseded by larger political units. Smith consid- ered this to be a desirable objective; for Engels it was an historical necessity. Thus, in the opinion of liberals, the establishment of the Zollverein was a movement toward maximizing world economic welfare;20 for Marxists it was the unavoidable tri- umph of the German industrialists over the feudal aristocracy.

Mercantilist writers from Alexander Hamilton to Frederich List to Charles de Gaulle, on the other hand, have emphasized the primacy of polities; politics, in this view, determines economic organi- zation. Whereas Marxists and liberals have pointed to the production of wealth as the basic determi- nant of social and political organization, the mercantilists of the German Historical School, for example, stressed the primacy of national secu- rity, industrial development, and national senti- ment in international political and economic dynamics.

In response to Engels's interpretation of the unification of Germany, mercantilists would no doubt agree with Jacob Viner that "Prussia engi- neered the customs union primarily for political reasons, in order to gain hegemony or at least in- fluence over the lesser German states. It was largely in order to make certain that the hegemony should be Prussian and not Austrian that Prussia con-

tinually opposed Austrian entry into the Union, either openly or by pressing for a customs union tariff lower than highly protectionist Austria could stomach."21 In pursuit of this strategic inter- est, it was "Prussian might, rather than a common zeal for political unification arising out of economic partnership, (that)... played the major role."2 2

In contrast to Marxism, neither liberalism nor mercantilism has a developed theory of dynamics. The basic assumption of orthodox economic analysis (liberalism) is the tendency toward equi- librium; liberalism takes for granted the existing social order and given institutions. Change is as- sumed to be gradual and adaptive—a continuous process of dynamic equilibrium. There is no neces- sary connection between such political phenomena as war and revolution and the evolution of the eco- nomic system, although they would not deny that misguided statesmen can blunder into war over economic issues or that revolutions are conflicts over the distribution of wealth; but neither is in- evitably linked to the evolution of the productive system. As for mercantilism, it sees change as tak- ing place owing to shifts in the balance of power; yet, mercantilist writers such as members of the German Historical School and contemporary po- litical realists have not developed a systematic the- ory of how this shift occurs.

On the other hand, dynamics is central to Marxism; indeed Marxism is essentially a theory of social change. It emphasizes the tendency toward disequilibrium owing to changes in the means of production, and the consequent effects on the everpresent class conflict. When these tendencies can no longer be contained, the sociopolitical sys- tem breaks down through violent upheaval. Thus war and revolution are seen as an integral part of the economic process, Politics and economics are intimately joined.

W H Y AN INTERNATIONALECONOMY?

From these differences among the three ideologies, one can get a sense of their respective explanations for the existence and functioning of the interna- tional economy.

An interdependent world economy constitutes the normal state of affairs for most liberal econo- mists. Responding to technological advances in transportation and communications, the scope of the market mechanism, according to this analysis, continuously expands. Thus, despite temporary setbacks, the long-term trend is toward global eco- nomic integration. The functioning of the inter- national economy is determined primarily by considerations of efficiency. The role of the dollar as the basis of the international monetary system, for example, is explained by the preference for it among traders and nations as the vehicle of inter- national commerce.2 3 The system is maintained by the mutuality of the benefits provided by trade, monetary arrangements, and investment.

A second view—one shared by Marxists and mercantilists alike—is that every interdependent international economy is essentially an imperial or hierarchical system. The imperial or hegemonic power organizes trade, monetary, and investment relations in order to advance its own economic and political interests. In the absence of the economic and especially the political influence of the hege- monic power, the system would fragment into au- tarkic economies or regional blocs. Whereas for liberalism maintenance of harmonious interna- tional market relations is the norm, for Marxism and mercantilism conflicts of class or national in- terests are the norm.

* * *

NOTES 1. Kari Levitt, "The Hinterland Economy,"

Canadian Forum 50 (July-August 1970): 163. 2. George W. Ball, "The Promise of die Multina-

tional Corporation," Fortune, June 1,1967, p. 80. 3. Sidney Rolfe, "Updating Adam Smith," Inter-

play (November 1968): 15. 4. Charles Kindleberger, Power and Money: The

Economics of International Politics and the Poli- tics of International Economics (New York: Ba- sic Books, 1970), p. 5.

5. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, "World Poli- tics and the International Economic System," in The Future of the International Economic Order: An Agenda for Research, ed. C. Fred Bergsten (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973), p. 116.

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 117. 8. Paul Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory

Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 5.

9. Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 75.

10. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), p. 26. For a more complex but essentially identical view, see Robert Dahl, Modem Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

11. Kindleberger, Power and Money, p. 227. 12. For Johnson's critique of economic nation-

alism, see Harry Johnson, ed., Economic Na- tionalism in Old and New States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

13. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937).

14. J. B. Condliffe, The Commerce of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 136.

15. Amitai Etzioni, "The Dialectics of Superna- tional Unification" in International Political Communities (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 147.

16. The relevant sections appear in Ernst Wanger- man, ed., The Role of Force in History: A Study of Bismarck's Policy of Blood and Iron, trans. Jack Cohen (New York: International Publish- ers, 1968).

17. Ibid., p. 12. 18. Ibid., p. 13. 19. Ibid., p. 14, 20. Gustav Stopler, The German Economy (New

York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 11.

21. Jacob Viner, The Customs Union Issue, Studies in the Administration of International Law and Organization, no. 10 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1950), pp. 98-99.

22. Ibid., p. 101. 23. Richard Cooper, "Eurodollars, Reserve Dol-

lars, and Asymmetries in the International Monetary System," Journal of International Economics 2 (September 1972): 325-44.

S T E P H E N D . K R A S N E R

State Power and the Structure

of International Trade

Introduction In recent years, students of international relations have multinationalized, transnationalized, bureau-

From World Politics (April 1976): 317-47.

cratized, and transgovernmentalized the state until it has virtually ceased to exist as an analytic con- struct. Nowhere is that trend more apparent than in the study of the politics of international economic relations. The basic conventional assumptions have

been undermined by assertions that the state is trapped by a transnational society created not by sovereigns, but by nonstate actors. Interdependence is not seen as a reflection of state policies and state choices (the perspective of balance-of-power the- ory), but as the result of elements beyond the con- trol of any state or a system created by states.

This perspective is at best profoundly mislead- ing. It may explain developments within a particu- lar international economic structure, but it cannot explain the structure itself. That structure has many institutional and behavioral manifestations. The central continuum along which it can be de- scribed is openness. International economic struc- tures may range from complete autarky (if all states prevent movements across their borders), to complete openness (if no restrictions exist). In this paper I will present an analysis of one aspect of the international economy—the structure of interna- tional trade; that is, the degree of openness for the movement of goods as opposed to capital, labor, technology, or other factors of producdon.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, this structure has gone through several changes. These can be explained, albeit imperfectly, by a state-power theory: an approach that begins with the assumption that the structure of international trade is determined by the interests and power of states acting to maximize national goals. The first step in this argument is to relate four basic state interests—aggregate national income, social stabil- ity, political power, and economic growth—to the degree of openness for the movement of goods. The relationship between these interests and open- ness depends upon the potential economic power of any given state. Potential economic power is op- erationalized in terms of the relative size and level of economic development of the state. The second step in the argument is to relate different distri- butions of potential power, such as multipolar and hegemonic, to different international trading structures. The most important conclusion of this theoretical analysis is that a hegemonic distribu- tion of potential economic power is likely to result in an open trading structure. * * *

The Causal Argument: State Interests, State Power, and International Trading Structures

Neoclassical trade theory is based upon the as- sumption that states act to maximize their aggre- gate economic utility, This leads to the conclusion that maximum global welfare and Pareto optimal- ity are achieved under free trade. While particular countries might better their situations through protectionism, economic theory has generally looked askance at such policies, * * * Neoclassi- cal theory recognizes that trade regulations can also be used to correct domestic distortions and to promote infant industries,1 but these are excep- tions or temporary departures from policy conclu- sions that lead logically to the support of free trade.

STATE P R E F E R E N C E S

Historical experience suggests that policy makers are dense, or that the assumptions of the conven- tional argument are wrong. Free trade has hardly been the norm. Stupidity is not a very interesting analytic category. An alternative approach to ex- plaining international trading structures is to as- sume that states seek a broad range of goals. At least four major state interests affected by the structure of international trade can be identified. They are: political power, aggregate national in- come, economic growth, and social stability, The way in which each of these goals is affected by the degree of openness depends upon the potential economic power of the state as defined by its rela- tive size and level of development.

Let us begin with aggregate national income because it is most straightforward. Given the ex- ceptions noted above, conventional neoclassical theory demonstrates that the greater the degree of openness in the international trading system, the greater the level of aggregate economic income. This conclusion applies to all states regardless of their size or relative level of development. The static economic benefits of openness are, however, generally inversely related to size. Trade gives small

states relatively more welfare benefits than it gives large ones. Empirically, small states have higher ra- tios of trade to national product. They do not have the generous factor endowments or potential for national economies of scale that are enjoyed by larger—particularly continental—states.

The impact of openness on social stability runs in the opposite direction. Greater openness ex- poses the domestic economy to the exigencies of the world market. That implies a higher level of factor movements than in a closed economy, be- cause domestic production patterns must adjust to changes in international prices. Social instability is thereby increased, since there is friction in moving factors, particularly labor, from one sector to an- other. The impact will be stronger in small states than in large, and in relatively less developed than in more developed ones. Large states are less in- volved in the international economy: a smaller per- centage of their total factor endowment is affected by the international market at any given level of openness. More developed states are better able to adjust factors: skilled workers can more easily be moved from one kind of production to another than can unskilled laborers or peasants. Hence so- cial stability is, ceteris paribus, inversely related to openness, but the deleterious consequences of exposure to the international trading system are mitigated by larger size and greater economic development,

The relationship between political power and the international trading structure can be analyzed in terms of the relative opportunity costs of closure for trading partners.2 The higher the relative cost of closure, the weaker the political position of the state. Hirschman has argued that this cost can be measured in terms of direct income losses and the adjustment costs of reallocating factors.3 These will be smaller for large states and for relatively more developed states. Other things being equal, utility costs will be less for large states because they gener- ally have a smaller proportion of their economy engaged in the international economic system. Re- allocation costs will be less for more advanced states because their factors are more mobile. Hence a state that is relatively large and more developed

will find its political power enhanced by an open system because its opportunity costs of closure are less. The large state can use the threat to alter the system to secure economic or noneconomic objec- tives. Historically, there is one important exception to this generalization—the oil-exporting states. The level of reserves for some of these states, par- ticularly Saudi Arabia, has reduced the economic opportunity costs of closure to a very low level de- spite their lack of development.

The relationship between international eco- nomic structure and economic growth is elusive. For small states, economic growth has generally been empirically associated with openness.4 Expo- sure to the international system makes possible a much more efficient allocation of resources. Open- ness also probably furthers the rate of growth of large countries with relatively advanced technolo- gies because they do not need to protect infant in- dustries and can take advantage of expanded world markets. In the long term, however, openness for capital and technology, as well as goods, may ham- per the growth of large, developed countries by diverting resources from the domestic economy, and by providing potential competitors with the knowledge needed to develop their own industries. Only by maintaining its technological lead and continually developing new industries can even a very large state escape the undesired consequences of an entirely open economic system. For medium- size states, the relationship between international trading structure and growth is impossible to spec- ify definitively, either theoretically or empirically. On the one hand, writers from the mercantilists through the American protectionists and the Ger- man historical school, and more recently analysts of depenclencia, have argued that an entirely open system can undermine a state's effort to develop, and even lead to underdevelopment.5 On the other hand, adherents of more conventional neoclassical positions have maintained that exposure to inter- national competition spurs economic transforma- tion. 6 The evidence is not yet in. A l l that can confidently be said is that openness furthers the economic growth of small states and of large ones so long as they maintain their technological edge.

Chart I. Probability of an Open Trading Structure with Different Distributions of Potential Economic Power

Size of States

Level of Development of States

RELATIVELY EQUAL V E R Y U N E Q U A L

SMALL LARGE

EQUAL Moderate- Low- High High Moderate

High

UNEQUAL Moderate Low Moderate- High

F R O M S T A T E P R E F E R E N C E S T O I N T E R N A T I O N A L

T R A D I N G S T R U C T U R E S

The next step in this argument is to relate particu- lar distributions of potential economic power, de- fined by the size and level of development of individual states, to the structure of the interna- tional trading system, defined in terms of open- ness.

Let us consider a system composed of a large number of small, highly developed states. Such a system is likely to lead to an open international trading structure. The aggregate income and eco- nomic growth of each state are increased by an open system. The social instability produced by ex- posure to international competition is mitigated by the factor mobility made possible by higher levels of development. There is no loss of political power from openness because the costs of closure arc symmetrical for all members of the system.

Now let us consider a system composed of a few very large, but unequally developed states. Such a distribution of potential economic power is likely to lead to a closed structure. Each state could increase its income through a more open system, but the gains would be modest. Openness would create more social instability in the less developed countries. The rate of growth for more backward areas might be frustrated, while that of the more advanced ones would be enhanced. A more open structure would leave the less developed states in a politically more vulnerable position, because their greater factor rigidity would mean a higher relative

cost of closure. Because of these disadvantages, large but relatively less developed states are un- likely to accept an open trading structure. More advanced states cannot, unless they are militarily much more powerful, force large backward coun- tries to accept openness.

Finally, let us consider a hegemonic system— one in which there is a single state that is much larger and relatively more advanced than its trad- ing partners. The costs and benefits of openness are not symmetrical for all members of the system. The hegemonic state will have a preference for an open structure. Such a structure increases its ag- gregate national income. It also increases its rate of growth during its ascendency—that is, when its relative size and technological lead are increasing. Further, an open structure increases its political power, since the opportunity costs of closure are least for a large and developed state. The social in- stability resulting from exposure to the interna- tional system is mitigated by the hegemonic power's relatively low level of involvement in the international economy, and the mobility of its fac- tors.

What of the other members of a hegemonic system? Small states are likely to opt for openness because the advantages in terms of aggregate in- come and growth are so great, and their political power is bound to be restricted regardless of what they do. The reaction of medium-size states is hard to predict; it depends at least in part on the way in which the hegemonic power utilizes its resources. The potentially dominant state has symbolic, eco-

nomic, and military capabilities that can be used to entice or compel others to accept an open trading structure.

At the symbolic level, the hegemonic state stands as an example of how economic develop- ment can be achieved. Its policies may be emu- lated, even if they are inappropriate for other states. Where there are very dramatic asymmetries, military power can be used to coerce weaker states into an open structure. Force is not, however, a very efficient means for changing economic poli- cies, and it is unlikely to be employed against medium-size states.

Most importantly, the hegemonic state can use its economic resources to create an open structure. In terms of positive incentives, it can offer access to its large domestic market and to its relatively cheap exports. In terms of negative ones, it can withhold foreign grants and engage in competition, poten- tially ruinous for the weaker state, in third-country markets. The size and economic robustness of the hegemonic state also enable it to provide the confi- dence necessary for a stable international monetary system, and its currency can offer the liquidity needed for an increasingly open system.

In sum, openness is most likely to occur during periods when a hegemonic state is in its ascen- dency. Such a state has the interest and the re- sources to create a structure characterized by lower tariffs, rising trade proportions, and less regional- ism. There are other distributions of potential power where openness is likely, such as a system composed of many small, highly developed states. But even here, that potential might not be realized because of the problems of creating confidence in a monetary system where adequate liquidity would have to be provided by a negotiated international reserve asset or a group of national currencies. Fi- nally, it is unlikely that very large states, particu- larly at unequal levels of development, would accept open trading relations.

These arguments, and the implications of other ideal typical configurations of potential economic power for the openness of trading structures, are summarized in the [above] chart.

The Dependent Variable: Describing the Structure of the International Trading System The structure of international trade has both be- havioral and institutional attributes. The degree of openness can be described both by the flow of goods and by the policies that are followed by states with respect to trade barriers and international payments. The two are not unrelated, but they do not coincide perfectly.

In common usage, the focus of attention has been upon institutions. Openness is associated with those historical periods in which tariffs were substantially lowered: the third quarter of the nine- teenth century and the period since the Second World War.

Tariffs alone, however, are not an adequate indi- cator of structure. They are hard to operationalize quantitatively. Tariffs do not have to be high to be effective. If cost functions are nearly identical, even low tariffs can prevent trade, Effective tariff rates may be much higher than nominal ones. Non-tariff barriers to trade, which are not easily compared across states, can substitute for duties. An underval- ued exchange rate can protect domestic markets from foreign competition. Tariff levels alone cannot describe the structure of international trade.7

A second indicator, and one which is behav- ioral rather than institutional, is trade propor- tions—the ratios of trade to national income for different states. Like tariff levels, these involve de- scribing the system in terms of an agglomeration of national tendencies. A period in which these ratios are increasing across time for most states can be described as one of increasing openness.

A third indicator is the concentration of trade within regions composed of states at different lev- els of development. The degree of such regional encapsulation is determined not so much by com- parative advantage (because relative factor endow- ments would allow almost any backward area to trade with almost any developed one), but by po- litical choices or dictates. Large states, attempting to protect themselves from the vagaries of a global system, seek to maximize their interests by creating

regional blocs. Openness in the global economic system has in effect meant greater trade among the leading industrial states. Periods of closure are as- sociated with the encapsulation of certain ad- vanced states within regional systems shared with certain less developed areas.

A description of the international trading sys- tem involves, then, an exercise that is comparative rather than absolute. A period when tariffs are falling, trade proportions are rising, and regional trading patterns are becoming less extreme will be defined as one in which the structure is becoming more open.

T A R I F F L E V E L S

The period from the 1820's to 1879 was basically one of decreasing tariff levels in Europe. The trend began in Great Britain in the 1820's, with reduc- tions of duties and other barriers to trade. In 1846 the abolition of the Corn Laws ended agricultural protectionism. France reduced duties on some in- termediate goods in the 1830's, and on coal, iron, and steel in 1852. The Zollverein established fairly low tariffs in 1834. Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Pied- mont, Norway, Switzerland, and Sweden lowered imposts in the 1850's. The golden age of free trade began in 1860, when Britain and France signed the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty, which virtually elimi- nated trade barriers. This was followed by a series of bilateral trade agreements between virtually all European states. It is important to note, however, that the United States took little part in the general movement toward lower trade barriers.8

The movement toward greater liberality was reversed in the late 1870's. Austria-Hungary in- creased duties in 1876 and 1878, and Italy also in 1878; but the main breach came in Germany in 1879. France increased tariffs modestly in 1881, sharply in 1892, and raised them still further in 1910, Other countries followed a similar pattern. Only Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland continued to follow free-tracle policies through the 1880's. Although Britain did not her- self impose duties, she began establishing a system of preferential markets in her overseas Empire in

1898.9 The United States was basically protection- ist throughout the nineteenth century. The high tariffs imposed during the Civil War continued with the exception of a brief period in the 1890's. There were no major duty reductions before 1914,

During the 1920's, tariff levels increased fur- ther. Western European states protected their agrarian sectors against imports from the Danube region, Australia, Canada, and the United States, where the war had stimulated increased output. Great Britain adopted some colonial preferences in 1919, imposed a small number of tariffs in 1921, and extended some wartime duties. The successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire imposed duties to achieve some national self-sufficiency. The British dominions and Latin America pro- tected industries nurtured by wartime demands. In the United States the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922 increased protectionism. The October Revolution removed Russia from the Western trading system.10

Dramatic closure in terms of tariff levels began with the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the United States in 1930. Britain raised tariffs in 1931 and definitively abandoned free trade at the Ottawa Conference of 1932, which introduced ex- tensive imperial preferences. Germany and Japan established trading blocs within their own spheres of influence. Al l other major countries followed protectionist policies.11

Significant reductions in protection began after the Second World War; the United States had fore- shadowed the movement toward greater liberality with the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agree- ments Act in 1934. Since 1945 there have been seven rounds of multilateral tariff reductions. The first, held in 1947 at Geneva, and the Kennedy Round, held during the 1960's, have been the most significant, They have substantially reduced the level of protection.12

* * *

In sum, after 1820 there was a general trend to- ward lower tariffs (with the notable exception of the United States), which culminated between

1860 and 1879; higher tariffs from 1879 through the interwar years, with dramatic increases in the 1930's; and less protectionism from 1945 through the conclusion of the Kennedy Round in 1967.

T R A D E P R O P O R T I O N S

With the exception of one period, ratios of trade to aggregate economic activity followed the same general pattern as tariff levels. Trade proportions increased from the early part of the nineteenth century to about 1880. Between 1880 and 1900 there was a decrease, sharper if measured in cur- rent prices than constant ones, but apparent in both statistical series for most countries. Between 1900 and 1913—and here is the exception from the tariff pattern—there was a marked increase in the ratio of trade to aggregate economic activity. This trend brought trade proportions to levels that have generally not been reattained. During the 1920's and 1930's the importance of trade in national eco-

• nomic activity declined. After the Second World War it increased.

There are considerable differences in the movement of trade proportions among states. They hold more or less constant for the United States; Japan, Denmark, and Norway are unaf- fected by the general decrease in the ratio of trade to aggregate economic activity that takes place af- ter 1880. The pattern does, however, hold for Great Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, and Italy.

Because of the boom in commodity prices that occurred in the early 1950's, the ratio of trade to gross domestic product was relatively high for larger states during these years, at least in current prices. It then faltered or remained constant until about 1960. From the early 1960's through 1972, trade proportions rose for all major states except Japan. Data for 1973 and 1974 show further in- creases. For smaller countries the trend was more erratic, with Belgium showing a more or less steady increase, Norway vacillating between 82 and 90 per cent, and Denmark and the Netherlands showing higher figures for the late 1950's than for more re- cent years, There is then, in current prices, a gener- ally upward trend in trade proportions since 1960,

particularly for larger states. This movement is more pronounced if constant prices are used. 1 3

R E G I O N A L T R A D I N G P A T T E R N S

The final indicator of the degree of openness of the global trading system is regional bloc concentra- tion. There is a natural affinity for some states to trade with others because of geographical pro- pinquity or comparative advantage. In general, however, a system in which there are fewer mani- festations of trading within given blocs, particu- larly among specific groups of more and less developed states, is a more open one. Over time there have been extensive changes in trading pat- terns between particular areas of the world whose relative factor endowments have remained largely the same.

Richard Chadwick and Karl Deutsch have col- lected extensive information on international trad- ing patterns since 1890. Their basic datum is the relative acceptance indicator (RA), which mea- sures deviations from a null hypothesis in which trade between a pair of states, or a state and a re- gion, is precisely what would be predicted on the basis of their total share of international trade.14

When die null hypothesis holds, the RA indicator is equal to zero. Values less than zero indicate less trade than expected, greater than zero more trade than expected. For our purposes the critical issue is whether, over time, trade tends to become more concentrated as shown by movements away from zero, or less as shown by movements toward zero.

[F]igures for the years 1890, 1913, 1928, 1938, 1954, and 1958 through 1968, the set collected by Chadwick and Deutsch, [are considered] for the following pairs of major states and regions: Commonwealth-United Kingdom; United States- Latin America; Russia-Eastern Europe; and France-French speaking Africa. The region's per- centage of exports to the country, and the coun- try's percentage of imports from the region, are included along with RA indicators to give some sense of the overall importance of the particular trading relationship.

There is a general pattern. In three of the four cases, the RA value closest to zero—that is the least regional encapsulation—occurred in 1890, 1913, or 1928; in the fourth case (France and French West Africa), the 1928 value was not bettered until 1964. In every case there was an increase in the RA indicator between 1928 and 1938, reflecting the breakdown of international commerce that is asso- ciated with the depression. Surprisingly, the RA in- dicator was higher for each of the four pairs in 1954 than in 1938, an indication that regional pat- terns persisted and even became more intense in the postwar period. With the exception of the So- viet Union and Eastern Europe, there was a general trend toward decreasing RA's for the period after 1954. They still, however, show fairly high values even in the late 1960's.

If we put all three indicators—tariff levels, trade proportions, and trade patterns—together, they suggest the following periodization.

Period I (1820-1879): Increasing openness —tariffs are generally lowered; trade propor- tions increase. Data are not available for trade patterns. However, it is important to note that this is not a universal pattern. The United States is largely unaffected: its tariff levels re- main high (and are in fact increased during the early 1860's) and American trade proportions remain almost constant.

Period II (1879-1900): Modest closure- tariffs are increased; trade proportions decline modestly for most states. Data are not available for trade patterns.

Period III (1900-1913): Greater openness- tariff levels remain generally unchanged; trade proportions increase for all major trading states except the United States. Trading pat- terns become less regional in three out of the four cases for which data are available.

Period IV (1918-1939): Closure—tariff lev- els are increased in the 1920's and again in the 1930's; trade proportions decline. Trade be- comes more regionally encapsulated.

Period V (1945-c. 1970): Great openness- tariffs are lowered; trade proportions increase,

particularly after 1960. Regional concentration- ments are limited to non-Communist areas of the world.

The Independent Variable: Describing the Distribution of Potential Economic Power Among States

Analysts of international relations have an almost pro forma set of variables designed to show the distribution of potential power in the international political system. It includes such factors as gross national product, per capita income, geographical position, and size of armed forces. A similar set of indicators can be presented for the international economic system.

Statistics are available over a long time period for per capita income, aggregate size, share of world trade, and share of world investment. They demonstrate that, since the beginning of the nine- teenth century, there have been two first-rank eco- nomic powers in the world economy—Britain and the United States. The United States passed Britain in aggregate size sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century and, in the 1880's, became the largest producer of manufactures. America's lead was particularly marked in technologically ad- vanced industries turning out sewing machines, harvesters, cash registers, locomotives, steam pumps, telephones, and petroleum.15 Until the First World War, however, Great Britain had a higher per capita income, a greater share of world trade, and a greater share of world investment than any other state. The peak of British ascendance oc- curred around 1880, when Britain's relative per capita income, share of world trade, and share of investment flows reached their highest levels. Britain's potential dominance in 1880 and 1900 was particularly striking in the international eco- nomic system, where her share of trade and foreign investment was about twice as large as that of any other state.

It was only after the First World War that the United States became relatively larger and more

developed in terms of all four indicators. This po- tential dominance reached new and dramatic heights between 1945 and 1960. Since then, the rel- ative position of the United States has declined, bringing it quite close to West Germany, its nearest rival, in terms of per capita income and share of world trade. The devaluations of the dollar that have taken place since 1972 are reflected in a con- tinuation of this downward trend for income and aggregate size.

* * *

In sum, Britain was the world's most important trading state from the period after the Napoleonic Wars until 1913. Her relative position rose until about 1880 and fell thereafter. The United States became the largest and most advanced state in eco- nomic terms after the First World War, but did not equal the relative share of world trade and invest- ment achieved by Britain in the 1880's until after the Second World War.

Testing the Argument

The contention that hegemony leads to a more open trading structure is fairly well, but not per- fectly, confirmed by the empirical evidence pre- sented in the preceding sections. The argument explains the periods 1820 to 1879, 1880 to 1900, and 1945 to 1960 * * *

Unlike Britain in the nineteenth century, the United States after World War II operated in a bipolar political structure. Free trade was pre- ferred, but departures such as the Common Mar- ket and Japanese import restrictions were accepted to make sure that these areas remained within the general American sphere of influence.16 Domesti- cally the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, first passed in 1934, was extended several times after the war. Internationally the United States sup- ported the framework for tariff reductions pro- vided by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. American policy makers used their eco- nomic leverage over Great Britain to force an end to the imperial preference system,17 The monetary system established at Bretton Woods was basically an American creation. In practice, liquidity was provided by the American deficit; confidence by the size of the American economy. Behind the eco- nomic veil stood American military protection for other industrialized market economies—an over- whelming incentive for them to accept an open system, particularly one which was in fact relatively beneficial.

The argument about the relationship between hegemony and openness is not as satisfactory for the years 1900 to 1913, 1919 to 1939, and 1960 to the present.

1945-1960. [One] period that is neatly explained by the argument that hegemony leads to an open trading structure is the decade and a-half after the Second World War, characterized by the ascendancy of the United States. During these years the structure of the international trading sys- tem became increasingly open. Tariffs were low- ered; trade proportions were restored well above interwar levels. Asymmetrical regional trading pat- terns did begin to decline, although not until the late 1950's. America's bilateral rival, the Soviet Union, remained—as the theory would predict— encapsulated within its own regional sphere of influence.

1960-present. The final period not adequately dealt with by a state-power explanation is the last decade or so. In recent years, the relative size and level of development of the U.S. economy has fallen. This decline has not, however, been accom- panied by a clear turn toward protectionism. The Trade Expansion Act of 1962 was extremely liberal and led to the very successful Kennedy Round of multilateral tariff cuts during the mid-sixties. The protectionist Burke-Hartke Bill did not pass. The 1974 Trade Act does include new protectionist as- pects, particularly in its requirements for review of the removal of non-tariff barriers by Congress and for suffer requirements for the imposition of coun-

tervailing duties, but it still maintains the mecha- nism of presidential discretion on tariff cuts that has been the keystone of postwar reductions. While the Voluntary Steel Agreement, the August 1971 economic policy, and restrictions on agricul- tural exports all show a tendency toward protec- tionism, there is as yet no evidence of a basic turn away from a commitment to openness.

In terms of behavior in the international trad- ing system, the decade of the 1960's was clearly one of greater openness. Trade proportions increased, and traditional regional trade patterns became weaker. A state-power argument would predict a downturn or at least a faltering in these indicators as American power declined.

In sum, although the general pattern of the structure of international trade conforms with the predictions of a state-power argument—two pe- riods of openness separated by one of closure— corresponding to periods of rising British and American hegemony and an interregnum, the whole pattern is out of phase. British commitment to openness continued long after Britain's position had declined. American commitment to openness did not begin until well after the United States had become the world's leading economic power and has continued during a period of relative American decline. The state-power argument needs to be amended to take these delayed reactions into account.

Amending the Argument

The structure of the international trading system does not move in lockstep with changes in the dis- tribution of potential power among states. Systems are initiated and ended, not as a state-power theory would predict, by close assessments of the interests of the state at every given moment, but by external events—usually cataclysmic ones. The closure that began in 1879 coincided with the Great Depression of the last part of the nineteenth century. The final dismantling of the nineteenth-century interna- tional economic system was not precipitated by a change in British trade or monetary policy, but by the First World War and the Depression. * * *

Once policies have been adopted, they are pur- sued until a new crisis demonstrates that they are no longer feasible. States become locked in by the impact of prior choices on their domestic political structures. * * *

Institutions created during periods of rising as- cendancy remained in operation when they were no longer appropriate. * * * The British state was unable to free itself from the domestic struc- tures that its earlier policy decisions had created, and continued to follow policies appropriate for a rising hegemony long after Britain's star had begun to fall.

Similarly, earlier policies in the United States begat social structures and institutional arrange- ments that trammeled state policy. After protecting import-competing industries for a century, the United States was unable in the 1920's to opt for more open policies, even though state interests would have been furthered thereby. Institutionally, decisions about tariff reductions were taken pri- marily in congressional committees, giving virtu- ally any group seeking protection easy access to the decision-making process, When there were con- flicts among groups, they were resolved by raising the levels of protection for everyone. It was only after the cataclysm of the depression that the decision-making processes for trade policy were changed. The Presidency, far more insulated from the entreaties of particular societal groups than congressional committees, was then given more power.18 * * *

Having taken the critical decisions that created an open system after 1945, the American Govern- ment is unlikely to change its policy until it con- fronts some external event that it cannot control, such as a worldwide deflation, drought in the great plains, or the malicious use of petrodollars. * * *

The structure of international trade changes in fits and starts; it does not flow smoothly with the redistribution of potential state power. Neverthe- less, it is the power and the policies of states that create order where there would otherwise be chaos or at best a Lockian state of nature. The existence of various transnational, multinational, transgovern- mental, and other nonstate actors that have riveted

scholarly attention in recent years can only be un- derstood within the context of a broader structure that ultimately rests upon the power and interests of states, shackled though they may be by the soci- etal consequences of their own past decisions.

NOTES 1. See, for instance, Everett Hagen, "An Eco-

nomic Justification of Protectionism," Quar- terly Journal of Economics, Vol . 72 (November 1958), 496-514; Harry Johnson, "Optimal Trade Intervention in the Presence of Domes- tic Distortions," in Robert Baldwin and others, Trade, Growth and the Balance of Payments; Es- says in Honor of Gottfried Haberler (Chicago: Rand McNally 1965), 3-34; and Jagdish Bhag- wati, Trade, Tariffs, and Growth (Cambridge: MIT Press 1969), 295-308.

2. This notion is reflected in Albert O. Hirsch- man, National Power and the Structure of For- eign Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press 1945); Robert W. Tucker, The New Isola- tionism: Threat or Promise? (Washington: Po- tomac Associates 1972); and Kenneth Waltz, "The Myth of Interdependence," in Charles P. Kindleberger, ed., The International Corpora- tion (Cambridge: MIT Press 1970), 205-23.

3. Hirschman (fn. 2), 13-34. 4. Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth:

Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven: Yale University Press 1966), 302.

5. See David P. Calleo and Benjamin Rowland, America and the World Political Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1973), Part II, for a discussion of American thought; Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism (New York: Macmillan 1955); and D. C. Coleman, ed., Re- visions in Mercantilism (London: Methuen 1969), for the classic discussion and a collec- tion of recent articles on mercantilism; Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelop- ment or Revolution (New York: Monthly Review 1969); Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade

(New York: Monthly Review 1972); and Johan Galtung, "A Structural Theory of Imperial- ism," Journal of Peace Research, VIII, No. 2 (1971), 81-117, for some representative argu- ments about the deleterious effects of free trade.

6. See Gottfried Haberler, International Trade and Economic Development (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt 1959); and Carlos F. Diaz- Alejandro, "Latin America: Toward 2000 A.D.," in Jagdish Bhagwati, ed., Economics and World Order from the 1970s to the 1990s (New York: Macmillan 1972), 223-55, for some arguments concerning the benefits of trade.

7. See Harry Johnson, Economic Policies Toward Less Developed Countries (New York: Praeger 1967), 90-94, for a discussion of nominal ver- sus effective tariffs; Bela Belassa, Trade Liberal- ization among Industrial Countries (New York- McGraw-Hill 1967), chap. 3, for the problems of determining the height of tariffs; and Hans O. Schmitt, "International Monetary System: Three Options for Reform," International Af- fairs, L (April 1974), 200, for similar effects of tariffs and undervalued exchange rates.

8. Charles P. Kindleberger, "The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe 1820-1875," The Journal of Economic History, X X X V (March 1975), 20-55; Sidney Pollard, European Economic Integration 1815-1970 (London: Thames and Hudson 1974), 117; J. B. Condliffe, The Commerce of Nations (New York: Norton 1950), 212-23, 229-30.

9. Charles P. Kindleberger, "Group Behavior and International Trade," Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 59 (February 1951), 33; Condliffe (fn. 8), 498: Pollard (fn. 8), 121; and Peter A. Gourevitch, "International Trade, Domestic Coalitions, and Liberty: Compara- tive Responses to the Great Depression of 1873-1896," paper delivered at the Interna- tional Studies Association Convention, Wash- ington, 1973.

10. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depres- sion (Berkeley: University of California Press 1973), 171; Condliffe (fn. 8), 478-81.

11. Condliffe (fn. 8), 498; Robert Gilpin, "The Polities of Transnational Economic Relations," International Organization, X X V (Summer 1971), 407; Kindleberger (fn. 10), 132, 171.

12. John W. Evans, The Kennedy Round in Ameri- can Trade Policy (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press 1971), 10-20,

13. Figures are available in United Nations, Year- book of National Account Statistics, various years.

14. Richard I. Savage and Karl W. Deutsch, "A Statistical Model of the Gross Analysis of Transaction Flows," Econometrica, XXVIII (July 1960), 551-72. Richard Chadwick and Karl W. Deutsch, in "International Trade and Economic Integration; Further Developments in Trade Matrix Analysis," Comparative Politi- cal Studies, VI (April 1973), 84-109, make some amendments to earlier methods of cal- culation when regional groupings are being analyzed. * * *

15. League of Nations, Industrialization and For- eign Trade (1945, II.A.10), 13; Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1970), 45-65.

16. Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic (Engle- wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1973), 191; Gilpin (fn. 11), 409-12; Calleo and Rowland (fn. 5), chap. 3.

17. Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1964), 389; Gilpin (fn. 11), 409.

18. This draws from arguments made by Theodore Lowi, particularly his "Four Systems of Policy, Politics and Choice," Public Admin- istration Review, XXXII (July-August 1972), 298-310. See also E. E. Schattschneider, Poli- tics, Pressures and the Tariff: A Study of Free Enterprise in Pressure Politics as Shown in the 1929-1930 Revision of the Tariff (New York: Prentice-Hall 1935),

B R U C E R . S C O T T

The Great Divide in the Global Village

Incomes are Diverging

Mainstream economic thought promises that glob- alization will lead to a widespread improvement in average incomes. Firms will reap increased economies of scale in a larger market, and incomes will converge as poor countries grow more rapidly than rich ones. In this "win-win" perspective, the importance of

From Foreign Affairs 80 no, 1 (January/February 2001): 160-177.

nation-states fades as the "global village" grows and market integration and prosperity take hold.

But the evidence paints a different picture. Av- erage incomes have indeed been growing, but so has the income gap between rich and poor coun- tries. Both trends have been evident for more than 200 years, but improved global communications have led to an increased awareness among the poor of income inequalities and heightened the pressure to emigrate to richer countries. In response, the in- dustrialized nations have erected higher barriers

against immigration, making the world economy seem more like a gated community than a global village. And although international markets for goods and capital have opened up since World War II and multilateral organizations now articu- late rules and monitor the world economy, eco- nomic inequality among countries continues to increase. Some two billion people earn less than $2 per day.

At first glance, there are two causes of this di- vergence between economic theory and reality. First, the rich countries insist on barriers to immi- gration and agricultural imports. Second, most poor nations have been unable to attract much for- eign capital due to their own government failings. These two issues are fundamentally linked: by forc- ing poor people to remain in badly governed states, immigration barriers deny those most in need the opportunity to "move up" by "moving out." In turn, that immobility eliminates a poten- tial source of pressure on ineffective governments, thus facilitating their survival.

Since the rich countries are unlikely to lower their agricultural and immigration barriers signifi- cantly, they must recognize that politics is a key cause of economic inequality. And since most developing countries receive little foreign invest- ment, the wealthy nations must also acknowledge that the "Washington consensus," which assumes that free markets will bring about economic con- vergence, is mistaken. If they at least admit these realities, they will abandon the notion that their own particular strategies are the best for all coun- tries. In turn, they should allow poorer countries considerable freedom to tailor development strate- gies to their own circumstances. In this more prag- matic view, the role of the state becomes pivotal.

Why have economists and policymakers not come to these conclusions sooner? Since the barri- ers erected by rich countries are seen as vital to po- litical stability, leaders of those countries find it convenient to overlook them and focus instead on the part of the global economy that has been liberalized. The rich countries' political power in multilateral organizations makes it difficult for de- veloping nations to challenge this self-serving

world-view. And standard academic solutions may do as much harm as good, given their focus on economic stability and growth rather than on the institutions that underpin markets. Economic the- ory has ignored the political issues at stake in mod- ernizing institutions, incorrectly assuming that market-based prices can allocate resources appro- priately.

The fiasco of reform in Russia has farced a be- lated reappraisal of this blind trust in markets. Many observers now admit that the transition economies needed appropriate property rights and an effective state to enforce those rights as much as they needed the liberalization of prices. Indeed, liberalization without property rights turned out to be the path to gangsterism, not capitalism. China, with a more effective state, achieved much greater success in its transition than did Russia, even though Beijing proceeded much more slowly with liberalization and privatization.

This was indeed the case before World War I, but it has not been so since World War II.

But the question of direct investment, which typically brings technologies and know-how as well as financial capital, is more complicated than theo- ries would predict. The total stock of foreign direct investment did rise almost sevenfold from 1980 to 1997, increasing from 4 percent to 12 percent of world GDP during that period. But very little has gone to the poorest countries. In 1997, about 70 percent went from one rich country to another, 8 developing countries received about 20 percent, and the remainder was divided among more than 100 poor nations. According to the World Bank, the truly poor countries received less than 7 percent of the foreign direct investment to all developing countries in 1992-98. At the same time, the unre- stricted opening of capital markets in developing countries gives larger firms from rich countries the opportunity for takeovers that are reminiscent of colonialism. It is not accidental that rich countries insist on open markets where they have an advan- tage and barriers in agriculture and immigration, where they would be at a disadvantage.

As for the Asian "tigers," their strong growth is due largely to their high savings rate, not foreign

capital. Singapore stands out because it has en- joyed a great deal of foreign investment, but it has also achieved one of the highest domestic-savings rates in the world, and its government has been a leading influence on the use of these funds. China is now repeating this pattern, with a savings rate of almost 40 percent of GDP. This factor, along with domestic credit creation, has been its key motor of economic growth. China now holds more than $100 billion in low-yielding foreign-exchange re- serves, the second largest reserves in the world.

In short, global markets offer opportunities for ah, but opportunities do not guarantee results. Most poor countries have been unable to avail themselves of much foreign capital or to take ad- vantage of increased market access. True, these countries have raised their trade ratios (exports plus imports) from about 35 percent of their GDP in 1981 to almost 50 percent in 1997. But without the Asian tigers, developing-country exports re- main less than 25 percent of world exports.

Part of the problem is that the traditional ad- vantages of poor countries have been in primary commodities (agriculture and minerals), and these categories have shrunk from about 70 percent of world trade in 1900 to about 20 percent at the end of the century. Opportunities for growth in the world market have shifted from raw or semi- processed commodities toward manufactured goods and services—and, within these categories, toward more knowledge-intensive segments. This trend ob- viously favors rich countries over poor ones, since most of the latter are still peripheral players in the knowledge economy. (Again, the Asian tigers are the exception. In 1995, they exported as much in high-technology goods as did France, Germany, Italy, and Britain combined—which together have three times the population of the tigers.)

One Country, Two Systems

Why is the performance of poor countries so un- even and out of sync with theoretical forecasts? Systemic barriers at home and abroad inhibit the economic potential of poorer nations, the most

formidable of these obstacles being their own domestic political and administrative problems. These factors, of course, lie outside the framework of mainstream economic analysis. A useful analogy is the antebellum economy of the United States, which experienced a similar set of impediments.

Like today's "global village," the U.S. economy before the Civil War saw incomes diverge as the South fell behind the North. One reason for the Confederacy's secession and the resulting civil war was Southern recognition that it was falling behind in both economic and political power, while the richer and more populous North was attracting more immigrants. Half of the U.S. population lived in the North in 1780; by 1860, this share had climbed to two-thirds. In 1775, incomes in the five original Southern states equaled those in New En- gland, even though wealth (including slaves) was disproportionately concentrated in the South, By 1840, incomes in the northeast were about 50 per- cent higher than those in the original Southern states; the North's railroad mileage was about 40 percent greater (and manufacturing investment four times higher) than the South's. As the econo- mist Robert Fogel has pointed out, the South was not poor—in 1860 it was richer than all European states except England—but Northern incomes were still much higher and increasing,

Why had Southern incomes diverged from those in the North under the same government, laws, and economy? Almost from their inception, the Southern colonies followed a different path from the North—specializing in plantation agri- culture rather than small farms with diversified crops—due to geography and slavery. Thanks to slave labor, Southerners were gaining economies of scale and building comparative advantage in agriculture, exporting their goods to world mar- kets and the North, Gang labor outproduced "free" (paid) labor. But the North was building even greater advantages by developing a mid- dle class, a manufacturing sector, and a more modern social and political culture, With plans to complete transcontinental railroads pending, the North was on the verge of achieving economic and political dominance and the capacity to shut off

further expansion of slavery in the West. The South chose war over Northern domination—and modernization.

Although the Constitution guaranteed free trade and free movement of capital and labor, the institution of slavery meant that the South had much less factor mobility than the North. It also ensured less development of its human resources, a less equal distribution of income, a smaller market for manufactures, and a less dynamic economy. It was less attractive to both European immigrants and external capital. With stagnant incomes in the older states, it was falling behind. In these respects, it was a forerunner of many of today's poor coun- tries, especially those in Latin America.

What finally put the South on the path to eco- nomic convergence? Four years of civil war with a total of 600,000 deaths and vast destruction of property were only a start. Three constitutional amendments and twelve years of military "recon- struction" were designed to bring equal rights and due process to the South. But the reestablishment of racial segregation following Reconstruction led to sharecropping as former slaves refused to return to the work gangs. Labor productivity dropped so much that Southern incomes fell to about half of the North's in 1880. In fact, income convergence did not take off until the 1940s, when a wartime boom in the North's industrial cities attracted Southern migrants in search of better jobs. At the same time, the South began drawing capital as firms sought lower wages, an anti-union environ- ment, and military contracts in important congres- sional districts. But this process did not fully succeed until the 1960s, as new federal laws and federal troops brought full civil rights to the South and ensured that the region could finally modernize.

The Great Divide

Although slavery is a rarity today, the traditional U.S. divide between North and South provides a good model for understanding contemporary cir- cumstances in many developing countries. In the

American South, voter intimidation, segregated housing, and very unequal schooling were the rule, not the exception—and such tactics are repeated today by the elites in today's poor countries. Brazil, Mexico, and Peru had abundant land relative to population when the Europeans arrived, and their incomes roughly approximated those in North America, at least until 1700. The economists Stan- ley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff have pointed out that these states, like the Confederacy, devel- oped agricultural systems based on vast landhold- ings for the production of export crops such as sugar and coffee. Brazil and many Caribbean is- lands also adapted slavery, while Peru and Mexico relied on forced indigenous labor rather than African slaves.

History shows that the political development of North America and developing nations—most of which were colonized by Europeans at some point—was heavily influenced by mortality. In colonies with tolerable death rates (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States), the colonists soon exerted pressure for British-style protections of persons and property. But elsewhere (most of Africa, Latin America, Indonesia, and to a lesser degree, India), disease caused such high mortality rates that the few resident Europeans were permitted to exploit a disenfranchised labor- ing class, whether slave or free. When the colonial era ended in these regions, it was followed by "lib- erationist" regimes (often authoritarian and in- competent) that maintained the previous system of exploitation for the advantage of a small domestic elite. Existing inequalities within poor countries continued; policies and institutions rarely pro- tected individual rights or private initiative for the bulk of the population and allowed elites to skim off rents from any sectors that could bear it. The economist Hernando de Soto has shown how gov- ernments in the developing world fail to recognize poor citizens' legal titles to their homes and busi- nesses, thereby depriving them of the use of their assets for collateral. The losses in potential capital to these countries have dwarfed the cumulative capital inflows going to these economies in the last century.

The legacy of these colonial systems also tends to perpetuate the unequal distribution of income, wealth, and political power while limiting capital mobility. Thus major developing nations such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Mexico are ex- periencing a divergence of incomes by province within their economies, as labor and capital fail to find better opportunities. Even in recent times, lo- cal elites have fought to maintain oppressive con- ditions in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. Faced with violent intimida- tion, poor people in these countries have suffered from unjust law enforcement similar to what was once experienced by black sharecroppers in the American South.

Modernization and economic development in- evitably threaten the existing distribution of power and income, and powerful elites continue to pro- tect the status quo—even if it means that their soci- ety as a whole falls further behind. It takes more than a constitution, universal suffrage, and regular elections to achieve governmental accountability and the rule of law. It may well be that only the right of exit—emigration—can peacefully bring ac- countability to corrupt and repressive regimes. Unlike the U.S. federal government, multilateral institutions lack the legitimacy to intervene in the internal affairs of most countries. Europe's eco- nomic takeoff in the second half of the nineteenth century was aided by the emigration of 60 million people to North America, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia. This emigration—about 10 percent of the labor force—helped raise European wages while depressing inflated wages in labor-scarce areas such as Australia and the United States. A comparable out-migration of labor from today's poor countries would involve hundreds of millions of people.

Of course, Latin America has seen some suc- cess. Chile has received the most attention for its free market initiatives, but its reforms were imple- mented by a brutally repressive military regime— hardly a model for achieving economic reform through democratic processes. Costa Rica would seem to be a much better model for establishing accountability, but its economic performance has not been as striking as Chile's.

Italy, like the United States in an earlier era, is another good example of "one country, two sys- tems." Italy's per capita income has largely caught up with that of its European neighbors over the past 20 years, even exceeding Britain's and equal- ing France's in 1990, but its Mezzogiorno has failed to keep up. Whereas overall Italian incomes have been converging toward those of the EU Mezzo- giorno incomes have been diverging from those in the north, Southern incomes fell from 65 percent of the northern average in 1975 to 56 percent 20 years later; in Calabria, they fell to 47 percent of the northern average. Southern unemployment rose from 8 percent in 1975 to 19 percent in 1995 almost three times the northern average. In short, 50 years of subsidies from Rome and the EU have failed to stop the Mezzoggiorno from falling further behind. Instead, they have yielded local regimes characterized by greatly increased public-sector employment, patronage, depen- dency, and corruption—not unlike the results of foreign aid for developing countries. And the con- tinuing existence of the Mafia further challenges modernization.

Democracy, then, is not enough to ensure that the governed are allowed to reap the gains of their own efforts. An effective state requires good laws as well as law enforcement that is timely, even- handed, and accessible to the poor. In many coun- tries, achieving objective law enforcement means reducing the extralegal powers of vested interests. When this is not possible, the only recourse usually available is emigration. But if the educated elite manages to emigrate while the masses remain trapped in a society that is short of leaders, the lat- ter will face even more formidable odds as they try to create effective institutions and policies. Al- though Italians still emigrate from south to north, the size of this flow is declining, thanks in part to generous transfer payments that allow them to consume almost as much as northerners. In addi- tion, policymaking for the Mezzogiorno is still con- centrated in Rome.

The immigration barriers in rich countries not only foreclose opportunities in the global village to billions of poor people, they help support repres-

sive, pseudodemocratic governments by denying the citizens of these countries the right to vote against the regime with their feet. In effect, the strict dictates of sovereignty allow wealthy nations to continue to set the rules in their own favor while allowing badly governed poor nations to continue to abuse their own citizens and retard economic development. Hence the remedy for income diver- gence must be political as well as economic.

Getting Institutions Right

According to economic theory, developing nations will create and modernize the institutions needed to underpin their markets so that their markets and firms can gradually match the performance of rich countries. But reality is much more complex than theory. For example, de Soto's analysis makes clear that effectively mobilizing domestic resources offers a much more potent source of capital for most developing nations than foreign inflows do. Yet mainstream economists and their formal mod- els largely ignore these resources. Western eco- nomic advisers in Russia were similarly blindsided by their reliance on an economic model that had no institutional context and no historical perspec- tive. Economists have scrambled in recent years to correct some of these shortcomings, and the Washington consensus now requires the "right" institutions as well as the "right" prices. But little useful theory exists to guide policy when it comes to institutional analysis, and gaps in the institu- tional foundations in most developing countries leave economic models pursuing unrealistic solu- tions or worse.

The adjustment of institutions inevitably fa- vors certain actors and disadvantages others. As a result, modernization causes conflict that must be resolved through politics as well as economics. At a minimum, successful development signifies that the forces for institutional change have won out over the status quo. Achieving a "level playing field" signifies that regulatory and political compe- tition is well governed.

Economists who suggest that all countries must

adopt Western institutions to achieve Western lev- els of income often fail to consider the changes and political risks involved. The experts who recom- mended drat formerly communist countries apply "shock therapy" to markets and democracy disre- garded the political and regulatory issues involved. Each change requires a victory in the "legislative market" and successful persuasion within the state bureaucracy for political approval. Countries with lower incomes and fewer educated people than Russia face even more significant developmen- tal challenges just to achieve economic stability, let alone attract foreign investment or make effec- tive use of it. Institutional deficiencies, not capital shortages, are the major impediment to develop- ment, and as such they must be addressed before foreign investors will be willing to send in capital.

Although price liberalization can be under- taken rapidly, no rapid process (aside from revolu- tion) exists for an economy modernizing its institutions. Boris Yeltsin may be credited with a remarkable turnover, if not a coup d'etat, but his erratic management style and the lack of parlia- mentary support ensured that his government would never be strong. In these circumstances, helping the new Russian regime improve law e- nforcement should have come ahead of mass pri vatization. Launching capitalism in a country where no one other than apparatchiks had access to significant amounts of capital was an open invi tation to gangsterism and a discredited system. Naive economic models made for naive policy recommendations.

How the West Won

The state's crucial role is evident in the West's economic development. European economic su- premacy was forged not by actors who followed a "Washington consensus" model but by strong states. In the fifteenth century, European incomes were not much higher than those in China, India, or Japan. The nation-state was a European innova - tion that replaced feudalism and established the rule of law; in turn, a legal framework was formed

for effective markets. Once these countries were in the lead, they were able to continuously increase their edge through technological advances. In ad- dition, European settlers took their civilization with them to North America and the South Pacific, rapidly raising these areas to rich-country status as well. Thus Europe's early lead became the basis for accumulating further advantages with far-reaching implications.

Europe's rise to economic leadership was not rapid at first. According to the economist Angus Maddison, Europe's economy grew around 0.07 percent a year until 1700; only after 1820 did it reach one percent. But the pace of technological and institutional innovation accelerated thereafter. Meanwhile, discovery of new markets in Africa, Asia, and the Americas created new economic op- portunities. Secular political farces overthrew the hegemony of the Catholic Church. Feudalism was eroded by rising incomes and replaced by a system that financed government through taxes, freeing up land and labor to be traded in markets. Markets permitted a more efficient reallocation of land and labor, allowing further rises in incomes. Effective property rights allowed individuals to keep the fruits of their own labor, thereby encouraging ad- ditional work. And privatization of common land facilitated the clearing of additional acreage.

The nation-state helped forge all these im- provements. It opened up markets by expanding territory; reduced transaction costs; standardized weights, measures, and monetary units; and cut transport costs by improving roads, harbors, and canals. In addition, it was the state that established effective property rights. The European state sys- tem thrived on flexible alliances, which constantly changed to maintain a balance of power. Military and economic rivalries prompted states to pro- mote development in agriculture and commerce as well as technological innovation in areas such as shipping and weaponry. Absent the hegemony of a single church or state, technology was diffused and secularized. Clocks, for instance, transferred time- keeping from the monastery to the village clock tower; the printing press did much the same for the production and distribution of books.

Europe's development contrasts sharply with Asia's. In the early modern era, China saw itself as the center of the world, without real rivals. It had a much larger population than Europe and a far big- ger market as well. But though the Chinese pio- neered the development of clocks, the printing press, gunpowder, and iron, they did not have the external competitive stimulus to promote eco- nomic development. Meanwhile, Japan sealed itself off from external influences for more than 200 years, while India, which had continuous competi- tion within the subcontinent, never developed an effective national state prior to the colonial era.

The Europeans also led in establishing ac- countable government, even though it was achieved neither easily nor peacefully. Most Euro- pean states developed the notion that the sovereign (whether a monarch or a parliament) had a duty to protect subjects and property in return for taxes and service in the army. Rulers in the Qing, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires, in contrast, never recognized a comparable responsibility to their subjects. During the Middle Ages, Italy produced a number of quasi-democratic city-states, and in the seventeenth century Holland created the first mod- ern republic after a century of rebellion and war- fare with Spain. Britain achieved constitutional monarchy in 1689, following two revolutions. After a bloody revolution and then dictatorship, France achieved accountable government in the nineteenth century.

Europe led the way in separating church and state—an essential precursor to free inquiry and adoption of the scientific method—after the Thirty Years' War. The secular state in turn paved the way for capitalism and its "creative destruction." Cre- ative destruction could hardly become the norm until organized religion lost its power to execute as heretics those entrepreneurs who would upset the status quo. After the Reformation, Europeans soon recognized another fundamental tenet of capital- ism: the role of interest as a return for the use of capital. Capitalism required that political leaders allow private hands to hold power as well as wealth; in turn, power flowed from the rural nobil- ity to merchants in cities. European states also per-

mitted banks, insurance firms, and stock markets to develop. The "yeast" in this recipe lay in the no- tion that private as well as state organizations could mobilize and reallocate society's resources— an idea with profound social, political, and eco- nomic implications today.

Most of Europe's leading powers did not rely on private initiative alone but adopted mercantil- ism to promote their development. This strategy used state power to create a trading system that would raise national income, permitting the government to enhance its own power through ad- ditional taxes. Even though corruption was some- times a side effect, the system generally worked well. Venice was the early leader, from about 1000 to 1500; the Dutch followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Britain became dominant in the eighteenth century. In Britain, as in the other cases, mercantilist export promotion was associ- ated with a dramatic rise in state spending and employment (especially in the navy), as well as "crony capitalism." After World War II, export- promotion regimes were adopted by Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan with similar success. Today, of course, such strategies are condemned as violations of global trade rules, even for poor countries.

Finally, geography played a pivotal role in Eu- rope's rise, providing a temperate climate, navi- gable rivers, accessible coastline, and defensible boundaries for future states. In addition, Europe lacked the conditions for the production of labor- intensive commodities such as coffee, cotton, sugar, or tobacco—production that might have in- duced the establishment of slavery. Like in the American North, European agriculture was largely rain-fed, diversified, and small-scale.

Europe's rise, then, was partly due to the cre- ation and diffusion of technological innovations and the gradual accumulation of capital. But the underlying causes were political and social. The creation of the nation-state and institutionalized state rivalry fostered government accountability. Scientific enlightenment and upward social mobil- ity, spurred by healthy competition, also helped Europe achieve such transformations. But many of

today's developing countries still lack these factors crucial for economic transformation.

Playing Catch-up

Globalization offers opportunities for all nations, but most developing countries are very poorly po- sitioned to capitalize on them. Malarial climates, limited access to navigable water, long distances to major markets, and unchecked population growth are only part of the problem. Such countries also have very unequal income structures inherited from colonial regimes, and these patterns of in- come distribution are hard to change unless prompted by a major upheaval such as a war or a revolution. But as serious as these disadvantages are, the greatest disadvantage has been the poor quality of government.

If today's global opportunities are far greater and potentially more accessible than at any other time in world history, developing countries are also further behind than ever before. Realistic po- litical logic suggests that weak governments need to show that they can manage their affairs much better before they pretend to have strategic ambi- tions. So what kind of catch-up models could they adopt?

Substituting domestic goods for imports was the most popular route to economic development prior to the 1980s. But its inward orientation made those who adopted it unable to take advantage of the new global opportunities and ultimately it led to a dead end. Although the United States enjoyed success with such a strategy from 1790 until. 1940, no developing country has a home market large enough to support a modern economy today. The other successful early growth model was European mercantilism, namely export promotion, as pio- neered by Venice, the Dutch republic, Britain, and Germany. Almost all of the East Asian success sto- ries, China included, are modern versions of the export-oriented form of mercantilism.

For its part, free trade remains the right model for rich countries because it provides decentralized initiatives to search for tomorrow's market oppor-

tunities. But it does not necessarily promote devel- opment. Britain did not adopt free trade until the 1840s, long after it had become the world's leading industrial power. The prescription of lower trade barriers may help avoid even worse strategies at the hands of bad governments, but the Washington- consensus model remains best suited for those who are ahead rather than behind.

Today's shareholder capitalism brings addi- tional threats to poor countries, first by elevating compensation for successful executives, and sec- ond by subordinating all activities to those that maximize shareholder value. Since 1970, the esti- mated earnings of an American chief executive have gone from 30 times to 450 times that of the average worker. In the leading developing countries, this ratio is still less than 50. Applying a similar "market-friendly" rise in executive com- pensation within the developing world would therefore only aggravate the income gap, providing new ammunition for populist politicians. In addi- tion, shareholder capitalism calls for narrowing the managerial focus to the interests of shareholders, even if this means dropping activities that offset lo- cal market imperfections. A leading South African bank has shed almost a million small accounts— mostly held by blacks—to raise its earnings per share. Should this bank, like its American counter- parts, have an obligation to serve its community, including its black members, in return for its bank- ing license?

Poor nations must improve the effectiveness of their institutions and bureaucracies in spite of en- trenched opposition and poorly paid civil servants. As the journalist Thomas Friedman has pointed out, it is true that foreign-exchange traders can dump the currencies of poorly managed countries, thereby helping discipline governments to restrain their fiscal deficits and lax monetary policies. But currency pressures will not influence the feudal systems in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the theocra- cies in Afghanistan and Iran, or the kleptocracies in Kenya or southern Mexico, The forces of capital markets will not restrain Brazilian squatters as they take possession of "public lands" or the slums of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, nor will they help dis-

cipline landlords and vigilantes in India's Bihar as they fight for control of their state. Only strong, ac- countable government can do that.

Looking Ahead

Increased trade and investment have indeed brought great improvements in some countries, but the global economy is hardly a win-win situa- tion. Roughly one billion people earn less than $1 per day, and their numbers are growing. Economic resources to ameliorate such problems exist, but the political and administrative will to realize the potential of these resources in poor areas is lack- ing. Developing-nation governments need both the pressure to reform their administrations and institutions, and the access to help in doing so. But sovereignty removes much of the external pres- sure, while immigration barriers reduce key inter- nal motivation. And the Washington consensus on the universality of the rich-country model is both simplistic and self-serving.

The world needs a more pragmatic, country- by-country approach, with room for neomercan- tilist regimes until such countries are firmly on the convergence track. Poor nations should be allowed to do what today's rich countries did to get ahead, not be forced to adopt the laissez-faire approach. Insisting on the merits of comparative advantage in low-wage, low-growth industries is a sure way to stay poor. And continued poverty will lead to ris- ing levels of illegal immigration and low-level vio- lence, such as kidnappings and vigilante justice, as the poor take the only options that remain. Over time, the rich countries will be forced to pay more attention to the fortunes of the poor—if only to enjoy their own prosperity and safety.

Still, the key initiatives must come from the poor countries, not the rich. In the last 50 years, China, India, and Indonesia have led the world in reducing poverty. In China, it took civil war and revolution, with tens of millions of deaths, to cre- ate a strong state and economic stability; a de facto coup d'etatin 1978 brought about a very fortunate change of management. The basic forces behind

Chinese reform were political and domestic, and their success depended as much on better using re- sources as opening up markets. Meanwhile, the former Soviet Union and Africa lie at the other ex- treme. Their economic decline stems from their failure to maintain effective states and ensure the rule of law.

It will not be surprising if some of today's states experience failure and economic decline in the new century. Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia,

and Pakistan will be obvious cases to watch, but other nations could also suffer from internal re- gional failures—for example, the Indian state of Bihar. Income growth depends heavily on the legal, administrative, and political capabilities of public actors in sovereign states. That is why, in the end, external economic advice and aid must go beyond formal models and conform to each country's unique political and social context.

J E S S I C A E I N H O R N

The World Bank's Mission Creep

Less Is More

The World Bank and the global community have learned a lot about development in the past 50 years. The bank is justly proud of its commitment to being a knowledge-based institution and has consistently responded to development setbacks with thoughtful analysis followed by new areas of lending. At the same time, critics have repeatedly faulted the bank for overlooking certain issues and constituencies, from environmental concerns in the 1980s to civil society in the 1990s. Along the way, the bank has added new tasks to its mandate. In recent years, it has been called on for emergency lending in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, for economic management as part of Middle East peacekeeping efforts, for postwar Balkan recon- struction, and for loans to combat the AIDS tragedy in Africa.

By now, its mission has become so complex that it strains credulity to portray the bank as a

From Foreign Affairs 80 no. 5 (September/October 2001): 22-35.

manageable organization. The bank takes on chal- lenges that lie far beyond any institution's op- erational capabilities. The calls for greater focus through reform seem to produce little beyond con- ferences and consternation, since every program has a dedicated constituency resisting change. To counter these problems, the countries that own the bank—its shareholders—need to elaborate a worthwhile and suitably modest agenda. The views of emerging-market countries, which have shared in the bank's successes as well as its failures, should count a great deal; they are the ones who have lived the lessons of the past decades. Policymakers should consider a broad array of options, includ- ing devolving some of the bank's functions to new institutions or redistributing them to existing ones. But whatever the remedy, it is time to redefine the bank's unwieldy mission.

History Lessons

The World Bank, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was established at Bretton

Woods as part of the post-World War II interna- tional financial architecture. This system was meant to avoid future world wars by ensuring an open international trading system and global fi- nancial stability. At the founding conference, the economist John Maynard Keynes called for an institution that would focus first on postwar re- construction and then on development in poor countries. The bank was thus established, begin- ning the great postwar experiment of using public loans for economic development.

Fundamentally committed to open trade, the bank initially emphasized loans to build public in- frastructure—-railways, roads, ports, power plants, and communication facilities. It believed such projects, accompanied by financial stability and private investment, could do the most to trigger development. The bank then learned lessons along the way. Latin America showed the deleterious ef- fects of inflation and macroeconomic instabil- ity. South Asia demonstrated how the state could distort markets through price and regulatory controls, producing scarcity and skewed prices. Af- rica taught the importance of education, training, and human-resource development for economic progress. Thus the bank came to understand the importance of policy. And money became the ve- hicle for policy advice, displacing the old notion that foreign capital alone would spur greater pro- ductive investment and, over time, development.

Economic theory kept pace with experi- ence. Traditionally, economists emphasized GDP growth as the motor of development and focused on the key role of capital. But over time, some be- gan to embrace a broader conception of the inputs necessary for development, such as labor require- ments, social structures, and entrepreneurship. Economists observed a correlation between eco- nomic growth on one hand and literacy and low population growth on the other, and eventually they accepted these and other social goals as essen- tial inputs to development. As for outputs, devel- opment came to encompass not just growth but equitable income distribution and environmental sustainability,

By describing social goals as inputs rather than

results, the bank cleared the path for a cumulative piling on of tasks over the decades, including issues of governance, participation by the poor, and anti- corruption. This approach also let the bank pur- sue an increasingly democratic and humanistic agenda without appearing to be politically intru- sive. Rather than acknowledging the political di- mension of female education in Muslim countries, for example, the bank argued that Pakistan would reap "the highest economic returns" from educat- ing its girls, (Many critics charged that this "nar- row" economic rationale was insensitive. But the bank was probably more effective this way than when it tries to justify policy as a matter of shared values.)

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the bank's re- search continued to expand the development agenda. In a famous speech in Nairobi in 1973, the bank's president at the time, Robert McNamara, called for a new, more challenging, and complex approach to rural development for the globe's poorest people. In a stirring conclusion, he asked all parties to seek to eradicate poverty by the end of the twentieth century, eliminating malnutrition and illiteracy, and raising life expectancy across the developing world. His speech forcefully initiated a tradition of identifying global problems, setting bold objectives, and then attempting to tackle them no matter how complicated the undertaking.

Yet McNamara's vision proved illusory. It is a sad irony that the great post-Nairobi failures came to be identified with the rural sector that figured so prominently in his speech. In Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere's failed rural policies proceeded with bank support as he aimed to resettle peasants in more compact communities. By the early 1980s, the bank itself took note of the exceptionally prob- lematic record of rural development projects, par- ticularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The failures led to further studies and more ambitious conclusions: the need for strong institutions of government, the centrality of human resources, and the necessity of more participation by the poor in designing projects. The bank had learned how an integrated antipoverty program could tax capabilities beyond capacities.

Whereas Africa required an expansion of the bank's mission within the poorest countries, Latin America posed a different challenge in the 1980s. In the turbulent global economy of the 1970s, the oil-price hikes had created huge new requirements for global financing. Banks with major new de- posits based on oil wealth had engaged in large- scale lending to developing countries, particularly in Latin America. As those countries' economic management faltered and debt grew, however, this trend became unsustainable. In 1982, Mexico shocked the world with the news that it could not meet the repayment obligations on its debts. Many parties became tangled in the prolonged resolution of die debt crisis, which spread to other middle- income Latin American countries.

For the bank, this travail set the stage for "struc- tural adjustment" lending, in which loans were proffered in exchange for government commit- ments to economic reform. This set of commit- ments came to be known as the "Washington consensus," and it included trade liberalization, tax reform, realistic exchange rates, liberalization of capital markets, and privatization. Although the term has been caricatured and misrepresented as a symbol for heartless World Bank policies, the real- ity was much more positive. A bank study of 1980s adjustment programs in 42 countries found sub- stantial success—with steadier growth rates, lower inflation, and improvements in current accounts and trade regimes. And although times were hard for many countries, both the bank and the receiv- ing countries increasingly agreed on the need for reform and the realization that money is only as beneficial as the policies it supports. The bank also learned the importance of taking explicit account of the poor in economic reform discussions. The harsh criticisms of the impoverishing effects of early structural adjustment loans brought forth new commitments to mitigate adjustment's social costs through better design of programs, especially for governmental social spending.

A Not-So-Simple Plan

By the early 1990s, the bank was ready to embrace the post-Cold War optimism on development and the global economy. The great strides in Asia and the collapse of communist regimes in the So- viet bloc opened a vista of successful economic de- velopment based on free markets and burgeoning international trade. Although poverty in Africa and South Asia stood as a sober reminder of the limits of financing development, Latin America had made great progress, East Asia was coming to be known as a "miracle" for its high and relatively eq- uitable growth, China was moving steadily toward market-oriented reform, and the former Soviet bloc became free to embrace the Western eco- nomic model. The bank (and the IMF) geared up for the challenge of working with transition econ- omies emerging from communism.

In short, hope was in the air. In its 1990 World Development Report, the bank promoted a two- pronged strategy to combat poverty through better market incentives, social and political institutions, infrastructure, and technology, At the same time, it called on developing-country governments to build human capital through social services such as primary health care and education. The 1991 re- port went further to argue for reevaluating the respective roles of the market and the state in de- velopment. Its prescriptions included more open markets and public-sector privatization accompa- nied by greater government activism in areas such as health, education, infrastructure, and assuring stable macroeconomic growth. Finally, the 1992 report asked how policy could promote sustain- ability, especially in environmental issues affecting the poor, such as safe water, safe air, and usable land. This last issue was especially prominent on the bank's agenda as the global community pre- pared for the Rio de Janeiro world environmental conference in 1992.

By now, the bank's agenda had grown hugely complex. There was a growing appreciation that policy depended on institutions for implementa- tion—but no one had figured out how to build

those institutions successfully in inhospitable po- litical and social climates. Thus much of Africa continued to languish, and poverty in South Asia remained widespread. Moreover, just as the bank's confidence reached its zenith, the howls of critics started to reverberate in the corridors of elected of- ficials. These critics charged that the bank's con- cern for the environment was half-hearted and belated, that its emphasis on markets and stable macroeconomic policies impoverished the poor, that its willingness to deal with almost any govern- ment was wholly insensitive to human rights and other democratic values, and that the closed nature of its deliberations and restricted circulation of its reports were nontransparent and precluded the poor's participation.

Of course, the bank had answers for these charges. But the governments of its largest share- holders increasingly responded to the critics with calls for reform. With the appointment of James Wolfensohn as president in 1995, the bank found a leader committed to changing the human face of the bank by embracing sustainable development and reaching out to civil society and the poor. Debt relief was promised to the poorest countries, and the bank's aspiration was movingly articulated as "a dream of a world free of poverty."

But reality reared its ugly head. The challenges in Russia and eastern Europe turned out to be daunting, and the correct sequencing of reforms was by no means easy to divine. Africa fell into the harshest of times as weak states lost their Cold War patrons and were rocked by war and disease, espe- cially AIDS. The bank was also trying to adapt to the huge private-capital flows into "successful" emerging markets, funds that were overshadowing development assistance and marginalizing the bank's role in all but the poorest countries. Finally, there came the cruel blow of the 1997 Asian finan- cial crisis—a watershed for the bank. The star ac- tors in the development drama had fallen off the stage. Net private capital inflows to developing countries plummeted by more than half in 1996-98. Even more important, commercial bank lending proved the most volatile, moving from a net inflow of $118 billion in 1996 to an outflow of

$45 billion in 1998. But the cold numbers do not begin to describe the earthquake that rocked the foundations of international finance—including central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Billions of public dollars were loaned against the backdrop of crisis, as the development community scrambled to understand what had occurred.

Once again, a global financial crisis led to re- view and revision of the objectives of the Bretton Woods institutions. The IMF, finance ministers, and central bankers tried to use their fresh under- standing of the risks of liberalized capital markets to build a new international financial architecture. Meanwhile, the development community con- cluded that its approach had been too narrowly focused on macroeconomic policy and human resources, It called for an agenda that stressed anti- corruption, effective corporate governance, bank- ing transparency and independence, strong capital markets, and sufficient social safety nets.

Aside from addressing the big crises, the bank has persisted with its other special post-Cold War tasks, including reconstruction in the Balkans, economic management in the Middle East, and environmental challenges such as biodiversity and global warming. And the bank has labored to demonstrate the compatibility of its traditional staunch commitment to open trade and competi- tive markets with the goals of equitable and sus- tainable growth. But as it begins this century with ever-grander visions—abolishing poverty, embrac- ing global civil society, giving voice to the poor, and pursuing sustainable growth—the harsh criti- cism is only increasing. From those who share the bank's core beliefs, there are calls for focus and re- sults. From those who have always opposed the emphasis on trade and markets, there is increased stridency in the streets and at the meetings.

That said, the bank is not the only institution that broadened its scope and raised its ambitions for development. In the 1990s, the United Nations convened a series of conferences on major areas of human development. Each conference produced a manifesto of global ideals for humanity, which the development institutions were then expected to in-

corporate in their programs. The U . N . Millennium Declaration captured these goals in one document last year. Keeping with the times, the bank has also embraced this rhetoric as performance bench- marks. For example, in its 1998 annual report the bank underscored its commitment to U.N. devel- opment targets. These goals included halving by 2015 the proportion of people living in absolute poverty, achieving universal primary education in all countries by the same year, and establishing gender equality in primary and secondary educa- tion by 2005. The report expressed similarly ambi- tious goals for reducing infant and child mortality, ensuring universal access to reproductive health services, and reversing the loss of environmental resources.

The U . N . is supported by the most idealistic members of civil society and thus can claim to voice the aspirations of humanity. But other orga- nizations have abetted the process. In June 2000, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development presented a report that called for progress in achieving the U.N. goals related to poverty reduction. The OECD report was coau- thored with the U.N. , the World Bank, and the IMF—a first for such cooperation—and hailed as a scorecard for progress in achieving the targets of such world conferences.

Meanwhile, the Bretton Woods institutions have been called on to work with developing coun- tries to implement codes of "best practices" in a variety of technical areas such as banking regula- tion and supervision, corporate governance, and accounting. The codes themselves make a lot of sense. Indeed, codifying or even just recording and disseminating best practice is the hallmark of thoughtful progress. But the question remains as to how realistic the expectations for widespread adoption are. The rhetoric of international devel- opment is deeply attached to the notion that any problem can be solved with a detailed blueprint, goodwill, and sufficient effort.

Great Expectations

What explains this extravagant optimism in the face of harsh experience and dire reality? The bank embraces an unachievable vision instead of an op- erational mission because it is under pressure from many different constituencies. More important, this vision drowns out a discussion of realistic ob- jectives and thus undercuts a much-needed drive to enhance internal management. It also weakens the bank's perceived "professional impartiality" as an adviser and partner to developing-country gov- ernments. And because of the politics within the institution—where developing countries are both shareholders and clients—the bank will rarely ad- mit that working within a particular country at a particular time is unlikely to achieve much lasting benefit unless a more reform-minded government takes over. Yet to address all these issues, the bank must acknowledge a series of dilemmas.

First, the bank absorbs and expounds the huge prescriptive literature on development without ac- knowledging that knowing the destination does not produce a road map for getting there. For decades, the bank has underscored the importance of strong institutions to successful development —without admitting that there is no magic wand that can give places such as Pakistan, Russia, or the countries of Africa that institutional infrastructure.

Second, the bank does not acknowledge that much is serendipitous about development. Differ- ent countries have developed at different times through a happy coincidence of myriad factors, in- cluding geography, immigration, political develop- ment, and the outcomes of war and peace. The Asian crisis showed that globalization has raised the bar for locking in development progress. But the idea that good corporate governance and trans- parent and stable financial systems are essential for development contradicts the postwar progress of western Europe. In Germany, banks and insurers have traditionally owned shares in each other and in industry, and unions have been powerful actors in a system of corporate governance that stresses consensus, Government-industry ties are equally

thick in France and Italy, where corruption has also featured prominently. Yet no one would argue that these countries are "unstable" in their claim to be developed. But to say development is serendipi- tous is not to counsel pessimism. The revolution in technology and communication, for example, may over time permit great strides in Africa.

Third, the bank is in danger of overdetermin- ing development to the point where it is a tautol- ogy, not a reasonable prescription. To argue that developing countries need market-friendly poli- cies, stable macro-economic environments, strong investments in human capital, an independent ju- diciary, open and transparent capital markets, and equity-based corporate structures with attention to modern shareholder values is to say that you will be developed when you are developed. It is the old debate of inputs versus outputs, where everything that development brings has become a necessary input to achieving it.

Fourth, the bank's strength paradoxically un- dercuts its effectiveness. The bank is so diverse in its expertise, so professional in its staffing, and so strong in its financial structure that all the inter- ested parties want to control it for their own purposes.

This last point leads to the fifth dilemma; the politics of support can often conflict with the poli- tics of influence. As the bank tries to broaden its support and avoid controversy In developed coun- tries, it refrains from politically charged lending (such as that for large infrastructure projects or sustainable forestry). At the same time, it intrudes into political processes (such as by mandating con- sultation with nongovernmental organizations) as part of the loan process. The checklist for getting credit may now require assessing the loan's impact on poverty, gender disparities, and the environ- ment; it may also call for competitive procurement and enhanced financial management. These re- quirements raise the cost of doing business with the bank to discouraging levels. The need for real- istic management is acute.

The Vision Thing

The bank continually straddles several basic public purposes, which correspond to its separate con- stituencies. It has always been a key institution in the international economic architecture, helping to expand the liberal global economy. The bank has relentlessly pushed developing countries in the di- rection of the "World Trade Organization (WTO) system" of growth. In financial crises such as those in Mexico or Asia, the bank has been part of the at- tempt to prevent widespread financial panic. And it has been a key partner in helping transition countries join the international economy.

The bank is also the leading institution for alleviating poverty. It focuses on individuals, their crushing needs, and their soaring potential. In each country, the bank is expected to help the poorest citizens; it is for them that the bank pursues struc- tural reform, trade liberalization, and the opening to the private sector. Many NGOs, much of the de- velopment community, religious groups, and par- liamentarians associate themselves with the bank through this bridge, which has certainly been the hallmark of Wolfensohn's tenure.

Finally, the bank's role is growing in matters such as biodiversity, ozone depletion, narcotics, crime, and corruption. Postconflict reconstruction (in the Balkans and the West Bank, for example) and conflict prevention are also issues of the mo- ment. The new century demands a new agenda for global cooperation that requires money, and this agenda can be adapted to the bank's operating style of making loans based on policy dialogue. Like Bret- ton Woods objectives, these issues are rooted in a global concern. Unlike such objectives, however, they are often less focused on the global economy and subsumed instead under "development" to fall within the bank's operating charter.

The bank has stressed vision, compassion, and charisma under Wolfensohn's leadership. At the same time, it has tried to pursue reform through greater transparency, broadened participation in project formulation, and increased links to civil so- ciety. The bank has also been open to the emerg-

ing agenda of global common issues. Words like "comprehensive" and "holistic" have come into common use as the bank struggles to encompass all agendas.

Like many institutions, however, the bank goes through phases. It is now clearly due for a "man- agerial" cycle to follow its visionary one. Bank offi- cials must admit there is a problem and move with shareholders toward broad-minded reform. Al- though the bank has changed dramatically with the times, its mandate has expanded continuously toward more complexity, against ever more gran- diose ambitions. Now the bank needs to focus on its internal management not begrudgingly but will- ingly, with candor born of self-knowledge. It must grasp the opportunity to revamp itself in funda- mental ways.

There is no shortage of blueprints for reform among knowledgeable staff, shareholder govern- ments, and special commissions. Different plans might envision breaking up the bank, scaling back its activities, or distributing some of its programs to other existing institutions with overlapping mis- sions. But whatever the plan, it must recognize that the substance of reform is condemned to fail until the bank argues for modernizing and rationalizing today's proliferated development architecture. For example, there is no compelling reason why the bank should consider judicial reform as a develop- ment task under its umbrella rather than passing the job to an organization staffed by lawyers and judges. Of course, law is related to economics, and contracts and a functioning judiciary are funda- mental to markets. But that relationship does not have to dictate organizational sprawl. Similarly, the bank's great vision and (much maligned) adoption of cultural heritage as a development objective would stand to gain if such an objective could be farmed out to an organization with more corre- sponding interests.

There is no single correct approach for reform- ing an international institution after 50 years of great achievement as well as severe disappoint- ment. What the bank's shareholders can do is ex- change ideas on guiding principles to achieve a new consensus. The developing world can con-

tribute much to this dialogue, and those who have succeeded in transforming their countries in the past decades should be given a leading voice in any convocation. The following list of principles should set the process in motion.

First, the task of reforming the bank should be seen as intergovernmental. Civil society is present in every way through the democratic process, but it does not represent governments, which are the shareholders and clients of the bank. Shareholders should stop fleeing from that concept and instead exploit the opportunity to work together as state authorities. The global community needs account- able governments to establish realistic objectives for operating public organizations. A U.N.-style conference is not the venue for such a "manage- ment" agenda.

Second, national finance ministers (advised by development and environmental ministers) should lead delegations in considering reform and reorga- nization of the bank. Putting finance ministers in the lead will strengthen the hand of those policy- makers who see the bank as a valuable central player in expanding the global economy, and they can simplify the bank's role as a partner with the IMF and the WTO in expanding global prosperity.

Third, the bank should raise its profile of core competencies. It has traditionally viewed the world through an economic lens, as it did when it proved that education and health care are essential build- ing blocks for development. The bank should con- tinue to contribute through economic research and position itself as the lead candidate to under- take any major economic tasks. Lending to imple- ment a governmental agenda for economic reform will remain a comparative advantage of the bank.

Fourth, the bank should consider scale and distance, Although it is worthwhile to highlight the benefits of microcredit lending, for example, it does not make sense for an organization headquar- tered in Washington and staffed by international professionals to play an operating role in such local ventures. The bank's location, recruitment, and charter argue in favor of a wholesale, not retail, ap- proach to development. Smaller organizations in the field are more appropriate for hands-on tasks.

Fifth, any discussion of development must ac- knowledge that private capital flows have decisively outpaced public assistance. The bank has tradi- tionally lent to governments to create a "market- friendly" environment that will encourage the flow of private capital and the growth of savings on a constant basis. But it now increasingly finds itself marginalized in its capacity to finance develop- ment, except in the poorest countries. Last year, private net inflows to emerging markets exceeded net official outflows by close to $170 billion, The bank welcomes these private flows and is commit- ted to expanding their scope. It can help by simpli- fying its program to take account of these flows and make sure that its funds complement them. In the poorest countries, not only are private flows unavailable, the bank's terms of lending are inap- propriate. In emerging markets, the bank has the ability to focus its involvement with governments to advance the agenda of reform and attract and enhance the benefits of foreign investment.

Sixth, as the bank narrows its focus, it should shift it as well. It should open the door to the new agenda of global common goods and still com- mand the human and financial resources to make the greatest of strides in this area. This is why the

bank should shed areas where its comparative advantage is no longer compelling. Without the bank, for example, the importance of education to development would have been overlooked. But to- day there is reason to consider moving the best of the bank staff in this area to a more focused enterprise.

In sum, governments should first survey the broad agenda that has become subsumed under the rubric of development and the emerging agenda of global concerns. They should then adopt a "Bretton Woods" frame of mind suitable to the new century and establish organizations that can achieve today's goals and align themselves with to- day's challenges. The World Bank is a great institu- tion staffed by highly educated and motivated public servants, led by a committed president with compassion for helping the poor. But the prolifer- ation of knowledge in the last 60 years has led to a complexity of tasks that defies operational defini- tion—and the new problems that have arisen re- quire mature organizational attention and leadership. As the bank moves into its next stage of leadership in the coming years, its shareholders should be prepared to move both back to basics and into the modern era.

J O S E P H E . S T I C L I T Z

The Way Ahead

G lobalization today is not working for many of the world's poor. It is not work-ing for much of the environment. It is not working for the stability of the global economy.

From Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Nor- ton, 2002), chap 9. Some of the author's footnotes have been edited.

The transition from communism to a market economy has been so badly managed that, with the exception of China, Vietnam, and a few Eastern European countries, poverty has soared as incomes have plummeted.

To some, there is an easy answer: Abandon globalization. That is neither feasible nor desirable. * * * Globalization has also brought huge bene-

fits—East Asia's success was based on globaliza- tion, especially on the opportunities for trade, and increased access to markets and technology. Glob- alization has brought better health, as well as an active global civil society fighting for more democ- racy and greater social justice. The problem is not with globalization, but with how it has been man- aged. Part of the problem lies with the interna- tional economic institutions, with the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, which help set the rules of the game. They have done so in ways that, all too of- ten, have served the interests of the more advanced industrialized countries—and particular interests within those countries—rather than those of the developing world. But it is not just that they have served those interests; too often, they have ap- proached globalization from particular narrow mind-sets, shaped by a particular vision of the economy and society.

The demand for reform is palpable—from congressionally appointed commissions and foundation-supported groups of eminent econo- mists writing reports on changes in the global fi- nancial architecture to the protests that mark almost every international meeting. In response, there has already been some change. The new round of trade negotiations that was agreed to in November 2001 at Doha, Qatar, has been characterized as the "development round," in- tended not just to open up markets further but to rectify some of the imbalances of the past, and the debate at Doha was far more open than in the past. The IMF and the World Bank have changed their rhetoric—there is much more talk about poverty, and at least at the World Bank, there is a sincere at- tempt to live up to its commitment to "put the country in the driver's seat" in its programs in many countries. But many of the critics of the in- ternational institutions are skeptical. They see the changes as simply the institutions facing the politi- cal reality that they must change their rhetoric if they are to survive. These critics doubt that there is real commitment. They were not reassured when, in 2000, the IMF appointed to its number two po- sition someone who had been chief economist at the World Bank during the period when it took on

market fundamentalist ideology. Some critics are so doubtful about these reforms that they continue to call for more drastic actions such as the aboli- tion of the IMF, but I believe this is pointless. Were the Fund to be abolished, it would most likely be recreated in some other form. In times of interna- tional crises, government leaders like to feel there is someone in charge, that an international agency is doing something. Today, the IMF fills that role.

I believe that globalization can be reshaped to realize its potential for good and I believe that the international economic institutions can be reshaped in ways that will help ensure that this is accomplished. But to understand how these in- stitutions should be reshaped, we need to under- stand better why they have failed, and failed so miserably.

Interests and Ideology

In the last chapter we saw how, by looking at the policies of the IMF as if the organization was pur- suing the interests of the financial markets, rather than simply fulfilling its original mission of help- ing countries in crises and furthering global eco- nomic stability, one could make sense of what otherwise seemed to be a set of intellectually inco- herent and inconsistent policies.

If financial interests have dominated thinking at the International Monetary Fund, commercial interests have had an equally dominant role at the World Trade Organization. Just as the IMF gives short shrift to the concerns of the poor—there are billions available to bail out banks, but not the paltry sums to provide food subsidies for those thrown out of work as a result of IMF programs— the WTO puts trade over all else. Environmental- ists seeking to prohibit the importation of goods that are made using techniques that harm the environment—with nets that kill an endangered species, or electricity produced by generators that pollute the air—are told that this is not allowed; these would be unwarranted interventions in the market.

While the institutions seem to pursue commer- cial and financial interests above all else, they do

not see matters that way. They genuinely believe the agenda that they are pursuing is in the general interest. In spite of the evidence to the contrary, many trade and finance ministers, and even some political leaders, believe that everyone will even- tually benefit from trade and capital market lib- eralization. Many believe this so strongly that they support forcing countries to accept these "re- forms," through whatever means they can, even if there is little popular support for such measures.

The greatest challenge is not just in the institu- tions themselves but in mind-sets: Caring about the environment, making sure the poor have a say in decisions that affect them, promoting democ- racy and fair trade are necessary if the potential benefits of globalization are to be achieved. The problem is that the institutions have come to re- flect mind-sets of those to whom they are account- able. The typical central bank governor begins his day worrying about inflation statistics, not poverty statistics: the trade minister worries about export numbers, not pollution indices.

The world is a complicated place. Each group in society focuses on a part of the reality that af- fects it the most. Workers worry about jobs and wages, financiers about interest rates and being re- paid. A high interest rate is good for a creditor— provided he or she gets paid back. But workers see high interest rates as inducing an economic slow- down; for them, this means unemployment. No wonder that they see the danger in high interest rates. For the financier who has lent his money out long term, the real danger is inflation. Inflation may mean that the dollars he gets repaid will be worth less than the dollars he lent.

In public policy debates, few argue openly in terms of their own self-interest. Everything is couched in terms of general interest. Assessing how a particular policy is likely to affect the general in- terest requires a model, a view of how the entire system works. Adam Smith provided one such model, arguing in favor of markets; Karl Marx, aware of the adverse effects that capitalism seemed to be having on workers of his time, provided an alternative model. Despite its many well- documented flaws, Marx's model has had enor-

mous influence, especially in developing countries where for the billions of poor capitalism seemed not to be delivering on its promises. But with the collapse of the Soviet empire, its weaknesses have become all too evident. And with that collapse, and the global economic dominance of the United States, the market model has prevailed.

But there is not just one market model. There are striking differences between the Japanese version of the market system and the German, Swedish, and American versions. There are several countries with per capita income comparable to that of the United States, but where inequality is lower, poverty is less, and health and other aspects of living standards higher (at least in the judgment of those living there). While the market is at the center of both the Swedish and American versions of capitalism, government takes on quite differ- ent roles. In Sweden, the government takes on far greater responsibilities promoting social welfare; it continues to provide far better public health, far better unemployment insurance, and far better re- tirement benefits than does the United States. Yet it has been every bit as successful, even in terms of the innovations associated with the "New Econ- omy." For many Americans, but not all, the Amer- ican model has worked well; for most Swedes, the American model is viewed as unacceptable—they believe their model has served them well. For Asians, a variety of Asian models has worked well, and this is true for Malaysia and Korea as well as China and Taiwan, even taking into account the global financial crisis.

Over the past fifty years, economic science has explained why, and the conditions under which, markets work well and when they do not. It has shown why markets may lead to the underproduc- tion of some things—like basic research—and the overproduction of others—like pollution. The most dramatic market failures are the periodic slumps, the recessions and depressions, that have marred capitalism over the past two hundred years, that leave large numbers of workers unem- ployed and a large fraction of the capital stock un- derutilized. But while these are the most obvious examples of market failures, there are a myriad

of more subtle failures, instances where markets failed to produce efficient outcomes.

Government can, and has, played an essential role not only in mitigating these market failures but also in ensuring social justice. Market processes may, by themselves, leave many people with too few resources to survive. In countries that have been most successful, in the United States and in East Asia, government has performed these roles and performed them, for the most part, reasonably well. Governments provided a high-quality educa- tion to all and furnished much of the infrastruc- ture—including the institutional infrastructure, such as the legal system, which is required for mar- kets to work effectively. They regulated the finan- cial sector, ensuring that capital markets worked more in the way that they were supposed to. They provided a safety net for the poor. And they pro- moted technology, from telecommunications to agriculture to jet engines and radar. While there is a vigorous debate in the United States and else- where about what the precise role of government should be, there is broad agreement that govern- ment has a role in making any society, any econ- omy, function efficiently—and humanely.

There are important disagreements about eco- nomic and social policy in our democracies. Some of these disagreements are about values—how concerned should we be about our environment (how much environmental degradation should we tolerate, if it allows us to have a higher GDP); how concerned should we be about the poor (how much sacrifice in our total income should we be willing to make, it if allows some of the poor to move out of poverty, or to be slightly better off); or how concerned should we be about democracy (are we willing to compromise on basic rights, such as the rights to association, if we believe that as a result, the economy will grow faster). Some of these disagreements are about how the econ- omy functions. The analytic propositions are clear: whenever there is imperfect information or mar- kets (that is always), there are, in principle, inter- ventions by the government—even a government that suffers from the same imperfections of infor- mation—which can increase the markets' effi-

ciency. * * * The assumptions underlying market fundamentalism do not hold in developed economies, let alone in developing countries. But the advocates of market fundamentalism still argue that the inefficiencies of markets are relatively small and the inefficiencies of government are rela- tively large. They see government more as part of the problem than the solution; unemployment is blamed on government setting too-high wages, or allowing unions too much power.

Adam Smith was far more aware of the limita- tions of the market, including the threats posed by imperfections of competition, than those who claim to be his latterday followers. Smith too was more aware of the social and political context in which all economies must function. Social cohe- sion is important if an economy is to function: ur- ban violence in Latin America and civil strife in Africa create environments that are hostile to in- vestment and growth. But while social cohesion can affect economic performance, the converse is also true: excessively austere policies—whether they be contractionary monetary or fiscal policies in Argentina, or cutting off food subsidies to the poor in Indonesia—predictably give rise to tur- moil. This is especially the case when it is believed that there are massive inequities—such as billions going to corporate and financial bailouts in In- donesia, leaving nothing left for those forced into unemployment.

In my own work—both in my writings and in my role as the president's economic adviser and chief economist of the World Bank—I have advo- cated a balanced view of the role of government, one which recognizes both the limitations and fail- ures of markets and government, but which sees the two as working together, in partnership, with the precise nature of that partnership differing among countries, depending on their stages of both political and economic development.

But at whatever stage of political and economic development a country is, government makes a difference. Weak governments and too-intrusive governments have both hurt stability and growth. The Asia financial crisis was brought on by a lack of adequate regulation of the financial sector,

Mafia capitalism in Russia by a failure to enforce the basics of law and order, Privatization without the necessary institutional infrastructure in the transition countries led to asset stripping rather than wealth creation. In other countries, privatized monopolies, without regulation, were more capa- ble of exploiting consumers than the state monop- olies. By contrast, privatization accompanied by regulation, corporate restructuring, and strong corporate governance1 has led to higher growth.

My point here, however, is not to resolve these controversies, or to push for my particular concep- tion of the role of government and markets, but to emphasize that there are real disagreements about these issues among even well-trained economists. Some critics of economics and economists jump to the conclusion that economists always disagree, and therefore try to dismiss whatever economists say. That is wrong. On some issues—like the ne- cessity of countries living within their means, and the dangers of hyperinflation—there is widespread agreement.

The problem is that the IMF (and sometimes the other international economic organizations) presents as received doctrine propositions and pol- icy recommendations for which there is not wide- spread agreement; indeed, in the case of capital market liberalization, there was scant evidence in support and a massive amount of evidence against. While there is agreement that no economy can succeed under hyperinflation, there is no consen- sus about the gains from lowering inflation to lower and lower levels; there is little evidence that pushing inflation to lower and lower levels yields gains commensurate with the costs, and some economists even think that there are negative bene- fits from pushing inflation too low.2

The discontent with globalization arises not just from economics seeming to be pushed over everything else, but because a particular view of economics—market fundamentalism—is pushed over all other views. Opposition to globalization in many parts of the world is not to globalization per se—to the new sources of funds for growth or to the new export markets—but to the particular set of doctrines, the Washington Consensus policies

that the international financial institutions have imposed. And it is not just opposition to the poli- cies themselves, but to the notion that there is a single set of policies that is right. This notion flies in the face both of economics, which emphasizes the importance of trade-offs, and of ordinary com- mon sense, In our own democracies we have active debates on every aspect of economic policy; not just on macroeconomics, but on matters like the appropriate structure of bankruptcy laws or the privatization of Social Security, Much of the rest of the world feels as if it is being deprived of making its own choices, and even forced to make choices that countries like the United States have rejected.

But while the commitment to a particular ide- ology deprived countries of the choices that should have been theirs, it also contributed strongly to their failures. The economic structures in each of the regions of the world differ markedly; for in- stance, East Asian firms had high levels of debt, those in Latin America relatively little. Unions are strong in Latin America, relatively weak in much of Asia. Economic structures also change over time— a point emphasized by the New Economy discus- sions of recent years. The advances in economics of the past thirty years have focused on the role of fi- nancial institutions, on information, on changing patterns of global competition. I have noted how these changes altered views concerning the effi- ciency of the market economy. They also altered views concerning the appropriate responses to crises.

At the World Bank and the IMF, these new in- sights—and more important, their implications for economic policy—were often resisted, just as these institutions had resisted looking at the experiences of East Asia, which had not followed the Washing- ton Consensus policies and had grown faster than any other region of the world. This failure to take on board the lessons of modern economic science left these institutions ill-prepared to deal with the East Asia crisis when it occurred, and less able to promote growth around the world.

The IMF felt it had little need to take these lessons on board because it knew the answers; if economic science did not provide them, ideology

—the simple belief in free markets—did. Ideology provides a lens through which one sees the world, a set of beliefs that are held so firmly that one hardly needs empirical confirmation. Evidence that contradicts those beliefs is summarily dis- missed. For the believers in free and unfettered markets, capital market liberalization was obviously desirable; one didn't need evidence that it pro- moted growth. Evidence that it caused instability would be dismissed as merely one of the adjust- ment costs, part of the pain that had to be accepted in the transition to a market economy.

The Need for International Public Institutions

We cannot go back on globalization; it is here to stay. The issue is how can we make it work. And if it is to work, there have to be global public institu- tions to help set the rules.

These international institutions should, of course, focus on issues where global collective ac- tion is desirable, or even necessary. Over the past three decades there has been an increased under- standing of the circumstances under which collec- tive action, at whatever level, is required. Earlier, I discussed how collective action is required when markets by themselves do not result in efficient outcomes. When there are externalities—when the actions of individuals have effects on others for which they neither pay nor are compensated—the market will typically result in the overproduction of some goods and the underproduction of others. Markets cannot be relied upon to produce goods that are essentially public in nature, like defense.3

In some areas, markets fail to exist;4 governments have provided student loans, for instance, because the market, on its own, failed to provide funding for investments in human capital. And for a variety of reasons, markets are often not self-regulating— there are booms and busts—so the government has an important role in promoting economic stability.

Over the past decade, there has been an in- creased understanding of the appropriate level— local, national, or global—at which collective ac-

tion is desirable. Actions, the benefits of which accrue largely locally (such as actions related to lo- cal pollution), should be conducted at the local level; while those that benefit the citizens of an en- tire country should be undertaken at the national level. Globalization has meant that there is increas- ing recognition of arenas where impacts are global. It is in these arenas where global collective action is required—and systems of global governance are essential. The recognition of these areas has been paralleled by the creation of global institutions to address such concerns. The United Nations can be thought of as focusing upon issues of global politi- cal security, while the international financial insti- tutions, and in particular the IMF, are supposed to focus on global economic stability. Both can be thought of as dealing with externalities that can take on global dimensions. Local wars, unless con- tained and defused, can draw in others, until they become global conflagrations. An economic down- turn in one country can lead to slowdowns else- where. In 1998 the great concern was that a crisis in emerging markets might lead to a global eco- nomic meltdown.

But these are not the only arenas in which global collective action is essential. There are global environmental issues, especially those that concern the oceans and atmosphere. Global warming caused by the industrial countries' use of fossil fuels, leading to concentrations of greenhouse gasses (CO 2), affects those living in preindustrial economies, whether in a South Sea island or in the heart of Africa. The hole in the ozone layer caused by the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) similarly affects everyone—not just those who made use of these chemicals. As the importance of these inter- national environmental issues has grown, interna- tional conventions have been signed. Some have worked remarkably well, such as the one directed at the ozone problem (the Montreal Protocol of 1987); while others, such as those that address global warming, have yet to make a significant dent in the problem.

There are also global health issues like the spread of highly contagious diseases such as AIDS, which respect no boundaries. The World Health

Organization has succeeded in eradicating a few diseases, notably river blindness and smallpox, but in many areas of global public health the chal- lenges ahead are enormous. Knowledge itself is an important global public good: the fruits of research can be of benefit to anyone, anywhere, at essen- tially no additional cost.

International humanitarian assistance is a form of collective action that springs from a shared compassion for others. As efficient as markets may be, they do not ensure that individuals have enough food, clothes to wear, or shelter. The World Bank's main mission is to eradicate poverty, not so much by providing humanitarian assistance at the time of crisis as by enabling countries to grow, to stand on their own.

Although specialized institutions in most of these areas have evolved in response to specific needs, the problems they face are often interre- lated. Poverty can lead to environmental degra- dation, and environmental degradation can contribute to poverty. People in poor countries like Nepal with little in the way of heat and energy resources are reduced to deforestation, stripping the land of trees and brush to obtain fuel for heat- ing and cooking, which leads to soil erosion, and thus to further impoverishment.

Globalization, by increasing the interdepen- dence among the people of the world, has enhanced the need for global collective action and the impor- tance of global public goods. That the global insti- tutions which have been created in response have not worked perfectly is not a surprise: the problems are complex and collective action at any level is dif- ficult. But in previous chapters we have docu- mented complaints that go well beyond the charge that they have not worked perfectly. In some cases their failures have been grave; in other cases they have pursued an agenda that is unbalanced—with some benefiting from globalization much more than others, and some actually being hurt.

Governance

So far, we have traced the failures of globalization to the fact that in setting the rules of the game,

commercial and financial interests and mind-sets have seemingly prevailed within the international economic institutions. A particular view of the role of government and markets has come to prevail— a view which is not universally accepted within the developed countries, but which is being forced upon the developing countries and the economies in transition.

The question is, why has this come about? And the answer is not hard to find: It is the finance ministers and central bank governors who sit around the table at the IMF making decisions, the trade ministers at the WTO. Even when they stretch to push policies that are in their countries' broader national interests (or occasionally, stretch- ing further, to push policies that are in a broader global interest), they see the world through partic- ular, inevitably more parochial, perspectives.

I have argued that there needs to be a change in mind-set. But the mind-set of an institution is in- evitably linked to whom it is directly accountable. Voting rights matter, and who has a seat at the table—even with limited voting rights—matters. It determines whose voices get heard. The IMF is not just concerned with technical arrangements among bankers, such as how to make bank check-clearing systems more efficient. The IMF's actions affect the lives and livelihoods of billions throughout the de- veloping world; yet they have little say in its ac- tions. The workers who are thrown out of jobs as a result of the IMF programs have no seat at the table; while the bankers, who insist on getting re- paid, arc well represented through the finance ministers and central bank governors. The conse- quences for policy have been predictable: bailout packages which pay more attention to getting cred- itors repaid than to maintaining the economy at full employment. The consequences for the choice of the institution's management have equally been predictable: there has been more of a concern with finding a leader whose views are congruent with the dominant "shareholders" than with finding one that has expertise in the problems of the devel- oping countries, the mainstay of the Fund's busi- ness today.

Governance at the WTO is more complicated.

Just as at the IMF it is the finance ministers that are heard, at the WTO it is the trade ministers. No wonder, then, that little attention is often paid to concerns about the environment. Yet while the voting arrangements at the IMF ensure that the rich countries predominate, at the W T O each country has a single vote, and decisions are largely by consensus. But in practice, the United States, Europe, and Japan have dominated in the past. This may now be changing. At the last meeting at Doha, the developing countries insisted that if an- other round of trade negotiations was to be initi- ated, their concerns had to be heard—and they achieved some notable concessions. With China's joining the WTO, the developing countries have a powerful voice on their side—though the interests of China and those of many of the other develop- ing countries do not fully coincide.

The most fundamental change that is required to make globalization work in the way that it should is a change in governance. This entails, at the IMF and the World Bank, a change in voting rights, and in all of the international economic institutions changes to ensure that it is not just the voices of trade ministers that are heard in the W T O or the voices of the finance ministries and treasuries that are heard at the IMF and World Bank.

Such changes are not going to be easy. The United States is unlikely to give up its effective veto at the IMF. The advanced industrial countries are not likely to give up their votes so that the develop- ing countries can have more votes. They will even put up specious arguments: voting rights, as in any corporation, are assigned on the basis of capi- tal contributions. China would long ago have been willing to increase its capital contribution, if that was required to give it more voting rights. U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has tried to give the impression that it is the American taxpay- ers, its plumbers and carpenters, who pay for the multi-billion-dollar bailouts—and because they pay the costs, they ought to have the vote. But that is wrong. The money comes ultimately from the workers and other taxpayers in the developing countries, for the IMF almost always gets repaid.

But although change is not easy, it is possible.

The changes that the developing countries wrenched from the developed countries in No- vember 2001 as the price for beginning another round of trade negotiations show that, at least in the WTO, there has been a change in bargaining power.

Still, I am not sanguine that fundamental re- forms in the formal governance of the IMF and World Bank will come soon. Yet in the short run, there are changes in practices and procedures that can have significant effects. At the World Bank and the IMF there are twenty-four seats at the table. Each seat speaks for several countries. In the pres- ent configuration, Africa has veiy few seats simply because it has so few votes, and it has so few votes because, as we noted, votes are allocated on the ba- sis of economic power. Even without changing the voting arrangements, one could have more African seats; their voice would be heard even if their votes were not counted.

Effective participation requires that the repre- sentatives of the developing countries be well informed. Because the countries are poor, they simply cannot afford the kinds of staff that the United States, for instance, can muster to support its positions at all the international economic insti- tutions. If the developed countries were serious about paying more attention to the voices of the developing countries, they could help fund a think tank—independent from the international eco- nomic organizations—that would help them for- mulate strategies and positions.

Transparency

Short of a fundamental change in their gover- nance, the most important way to ensure that the international economic institutions are more re- sponsive to the poor, to the environment, to the broader political and social concerns that I have emphasized is to increase openness and trans- parency. We have come to take for granted the im- portant role that an informed anci free press has in reining in even our democratically elected govern- ments: any mischief, any minor indiscretion, any favoritism, is subject to scrutiny, and public pres-

sure works powerfully, Transparency is even more important in public institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, because their leaders are not elected directly. Though they are public, there is no direct accountability to the public. But while this should imply that these institutions be even more open, in fact, they are even less trans- parent.

The problem of lack of transparency affects each of the international institutions, though in slightly different ways. At the WTO, the negotia- tions that lead up to agreements are all done behind closed doors, making it difficult—until it is too late—to see the influence of corporate and other special interests. The deliberations of the WTO panels that rule on whether there has been a violation of the WTO agreements occur in secret. It is perhaps not surprising that the trade lawyers and ex-trade officials who often comprise such panels pay, for instance, little attention to the envi- ronment; but by bringing the deliberations more out into the open, public scrutiny would either make the panels more sensitive to public concerns or force a reform in the adjudication process.

The IMF comes by its penchant for secrecy nat- urally: central banks, though public institutions, have traditionally been secretive. Within the finan- cial community, secrecy is viewed as natural—in contrast to academia, where openness is the ac- cepted norm. Before September 11, 2001, the sec- retary of treasury even defended the secrecy of the offshore banking centers. The billions of dollars in the Cayman Islands and other such centers are not there because those islands provide better banking services than Wall Street, London, or Frankfurt; they are there because the secrecy allows them to engage in tax evasion, money laundering, and other nefarious activities. Only after September 11 was it recognized that among those other nefarious activities was the financing of terrorism.

But the IMF is not a private bank; it is a public institution.

The absence of open discourse means that models and policies are not subjected to timely criticism. Had, the actions and policies of the IMF during the 1997 crisis been subject to conventional

democratic processes, and there had been a full and open debate in the crisis countries about the proffered IMF policies, it is possible that they would never have been adopted, and that far saner policies would have emerged. That discourse might not only have exposed the faulty economic assumptions on which the policy prescriptions were based but also revealed that the interests of the creditors were being placed ahead of those of workers and small businesses. There were alterna- tive courses of actions, where less of the risk was borne by these less powerful parties, and these al- ternative courses of actions might have been given the serious consideration that they deserved.

Earlier, in my days at the Council of Economic Advisers, I had seen and come to understand the strong forces that drove secrecy. Secrecy allows government officials the kind of discretion that they would not have if their actions were subject to public scrutiny. Secrecy not only makes their life easy but allows special interests full sway. Secrecy also serves to hide the mistakes, whether innocent or not, whether the result of a failure to think mat- ters through or not. As it is sometimes put, "Sun- shine is the strongest antiseptic,"

Even when policies are not driven by special interests, secrecy engenders suspicions—-whose in- terests are really being served?—and such suspi- cions, even when groundless, undermine the political sustainability of the policies. It is this se- crecy, and the suspicions it gives rise to, that has helped sustain the protest movement. One of the demands of the protestors has been for greater openness and transparency.

These demands had a special resonance be- cause the IMF itself emphasized the importance of transparency during the East Asia crisis. One of the clearly unintended consequences of the IMF's rhetorical emphasis on transparency was that eventually, when the transparency spotlight was turned around to shine on the IMF itself, it was found wanting.5

Secrecy also undermines democracy. There can be democratic accountability only if those to whom these public institutions are supposed to be accountable are well informed about what they are

doing—including what choices they confronted and how those decisions were made. * * * Modern democracies ha[ve] come to recognize the citizens' basic right to know, implemented through laws such as America's Freedom of Information Act. * * * However, . . . while nominally espousing trans- parency and openness, the IMF and the World Bank have not yet embraced these ideas. They must.

Reforming the IMF and the Global Financial System

There are some common themes facing reform in all of the international economic institutions, but each institution has a set of problems of its own. I begin with the IMF, partly because it brings out more clearly some problems that are present to a lesser extent in other institutions.

* * * How could an organization with such tal- ented (and high paid) government bureaucrats make so many mistakes? I suggested that part of its problems arose from the dissonance between its supposed objective, the objective for which it was originally created, promoting global economic sta- bility, and the newer objectives—such as capital market liberalization—which did more to serve the interests of the financial community than of global stability. This dissonance led to intellectual inco- herency and inconsistencies that were more than just matters of academic interest. No wonder, then, that it was hard to derive coherent policies. Eco- nomic science was too often replaced by ideology, an ideology that gave clear directions, if not always guidance that worked, and an ideology that was broadly consonant with the interests of the finan- cial community, even if, when it failed to work, those interests themselves were not well served.

One of the important distinctions between ideology and science is that science recognizes the limitations on what one knows. There is always uncertainty. By contrast, the IMF never likes to discuss the uncertainties associated with the poli- cies that it recommends, but rather, likes to project an image of being infallible. This posture and

mind-set makes it difficult for it to learn from past mistakes—how can it learn from those mistakes if it can't admit them? While many organizations would like outsiders to believe that they are indeed infallible, the problem with the IMF is that it often acts as if it almost believes in its infallibility.

The IMF has admitted to mistakes in the East Asia crisis, acknowledging that the contractionary fiscal policies exacerbated the downturn, and that the strategy for restructuring the financial system in Indonesia led to a bank run, which only made matters worse. But, not surprisingly, the Fund— and the U.S. Treasury, which was responsible for pushing many of the policies—has tried to limit the criticisms and their discussion. Both were furi- ous when a World Bank report touched on these and other mistakes and got front-page coverage in the New York Times. Orders to muzzle the critics were issued. More tellingly, the IMF never pursued the issues further. It never asked why fire mistakes had occurred, what was wrong with the models, or what could be done to prevent a recurrence in the next crisis—and there surely will be another crisis in the future. (The crisis facing Argentina in 2002 showed that once again, the IMF bailout policies failed to work; the contractionary fiscal policies that it insisted upon pushed the economy into an ever deeper recession.) The IMF never asked why its models systematically underestimated the depth of recessions—or why its policies are systematically underestimated the depth of recessions—or why its policies are systematically excessively contrac- tionary.

The Fund tries to defend its stance of institu- tional infallibility, saying that if it showed it was wavering in its conviction that its policies were correct, it would lose credibility-—and the success of its policies requires that markets give it credibil- ity. Here again, there is real irony. Does the IMF, always praising the "perfection and rationality" of the market, really believe that it enhances its credi- bility by making overly confident forecasts? Predic- tions that repeatedly don't pan out make the Fund look rather less than infallible, especially if the markets are as rational as it claims. Today, the IMF has lost much of its credibility, not only in devel-

oping countries but also with its cherished con- stituency, the financial community. Had the IMF been more honest, more forthright, more modest, it would arguably be in a better standing today.

Sometimes, IMF officials give another reason for their failure to discuss alternative policies and the risks associated with each. They say that it would simply confuse the developing countries—a patronizing attitude that reflects a deep skepticism about democratic processes.

It would be nice if the IMF, having had these problems pointed out, would change its mind-set and its modes of behavior. But this is not likely to be the case. Indeed, the Fund has been remarkably slow in learning from its mistakes—partly, as we have seen, because of the strong role of ideology and its belief in institutional infallibility, partly be- cause its hierarchical organizational structure is used to ensure its prevailing worldviews dominate throughout the institution. The IMF is not, in the jargon of modern business schools, a "learning or- ganization," and like other organizations that find it difficult to learn and adapt, it finds itself in diffi- culties when the environment around it changes.

Earlier in this chapter, I argued that a funda- mental change in mind-set is likely to occur only with a change in governance, but that such changes are unlikely in the near term. Increased trans- parency would help; but even there, meaningful reforms were being resisted.

A broad consensus—outside the IMF—has de- veloped that the IMF should limit itself to its core area, managing crises; that it should no longer be involved (outside crises) in development or the economies of transition. I strongly concur—partly because the other reforms that would enable it to promote democratic, equitable, and sustainable development and transition are simply not forth- coming,

There are other dimensions to narrowing the focus. The IMF currently is responsible for the col- lection of valuable economic statistics, and though by and large it does a good job, the data it reports are compromised by its operating responsibilities; to make its programs seem to work, to make the numbers "add up," economic forecasts have to be

adjusted. Many users of these numbers do not real- ize that they are not like ordinary forecasts; in these instances, GDP forecasts are not based on a sophisticated statistical model, or even on the best estimates of those who know the economy well, but are merely the numbers that have been negoti- ated as part of an IMF program. Such conflicts of interest invariably arise when the operating agency is also responsible for statistics, and many govern- ments have responded by creating an independent statistical agency.

Another activity of the Fund is surveillance, re- viewing a country's economic performance, under the Article 4 consultations * * * This is the mecha- nism through which the IMF pushes its particular perspectives on developing countries that are not dependent on its aid. Because an economic slow- down in one country can have adverse effects on others, it does make sense for countries to put pressure on each other to maintain their economic strength; there is a global public good. The prob- lem is the report card itself. The IMF emphasizes inflation; but unemployment and growth are equally important. And its policy recommenda- tions too reflect its particular perspectives on the balance of government and markets. My direct ex- perience with these Article 4 consultations in the United States convinces me that this too is a task that should be taken over by others, Because the most direct impact of one country's slowdown is on its neighbors, and the neighbors are much more attuned to the circumstances in the country, re- gional surveillance is a viable alternative.

Forcing the IMP to return to its original mis- sion—narrowing its focus—enables greater ac- countability. We can attempt to ascertain whether it has prevented crises from happening, creating a more stable global environment, and whether it has resolved them well, But clearly, narrowing fo- cus does not solve the institution's problem; part of the complaint is that it has pushed policies, such as capital market liberalization, which have in- creased global instability, and that its big bailout policies, whether in East Asia, or Russia, or Latin America, have failed,

Reform Efforts

In the aftermath of the East Asian crisis, and the failures of the IMF policies, there was a general consensus that something was wrong with the in- ternational economic system, something needed to be done to make the global economy more stable. However, many of those at the U.S. Treasury and IMF felt that only minor changes were needed. To compensate for the lack of grandness in the changes, they conceived a grandiose title for the re- form initiative, reform of the global financial archi- tecture. The term was intended to suggest a major change in the rules of the game that would prevent another crisis.

Underneath the rhetoric, there were some real issues. But just as those in charge at the IMF did everything to shift the blame away from their mis- takes and away from the systemic problems, they did everything they could to curtail the reforms, ex- cept to the extent that they result in more power and money to the IMF and more obligations (such as compliance with new standards set by the advanced industrial countries) on the emerging markets.

These doubts are reinforced by the way discus- sions of reform have proceeded. The "official" reform debate has been centered in the same insti- tutions and dominated by the same governments that have effectively "run" globalization for over fifty years. Around the world today, there is a great deal of cynicism about the reform debate. Faced with the same people at the table who had been re- sponsible for the system all along, the developing countries wondered if it was likely that real change would occur. As far as these "client countries" were concerned, it was a charade in which the politi- cians pretended to do something to redress the problems while financial interests worked to pre- serve as much of the status quo as they could. The cynics were partly right, but only partly so. The cri- sis brought to the fore the sense that something was wrong with the process of globalization, and this perception mobilized critics across a wide landscape of issues, from transparency to poverty to the environment to labor rights.

Inside the organizations themselves, among

many influential members there is a sense of com- placency. The institutions have altered their rhetoric. They talk about "transparency," about "poverty," about "participation." Even if there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality, the rhetoric has an effect on the institutions' behavior, on transparency, on the concern for poverty. They have better Web sites and there is more openness. The participatory poverty assessments have gener- ated more involvement and a greater awareness of the poverty impacts of programs. But these changes, as profound as they seem to those inside the institutions, appear superficial to outsiders. The IMF and World Bank still have disclosure standards far weaker than those of governments in democracies like the United States, or Sweden, or Canada. They attempt to hide critical reports; it is only their inability to prevent leaks that often forces the eventual disclosure. There is mounting unhappiness in developing countries with the new programs involving participatory poverty assess- ments, as those participating are told that im- portant matters, such as the macroeconomic framework, are off limits.6

There are other instances where there has been more change in what is said than in what is done. Today, the dangers of short-term capital flows and premature capital and financial market liberaliza- tion are occasionally acknowledged even by senior officials at the IMF. This constitutes a major change in the official stance of the Fund—though it is still too soon to see whether, or how, the change in rhetoric will be reflected in policies im- plemented within countries.7 So far, the evidence does not look promising, as one simple episode il- lustrates. Shortly after the new managing director Horst Kohler took office, he undertook a tour of some member countries. In a visit to Thailand at the end of May 2000, he noted what had by then become conventional wisdom outside the IMF, and was beginning to seep into the IMF itself: the dangers of capital market liberalization. Neigh- boring Indonesia quickly picked up on the open- ing, and by the time he visited there in June, its government had announced plans to explore inter- ventions into the capital market. But quickly, the

Indonesians—and Kdhler—were set straight by the IMF staff. The bureaucracy won again: capital market liberalization might, in theory, be prob- lematic; but capital market interventions (con- trols) evidently were not to be on the table for those seeking IMF assistance.

There were other gestures to reform, half- hearted or half-baked.8 As criticism of the large bailouts in the 1990s mounted, there was a succes- sion of failed reforms. First came the precautionary lending package—lending before a crisis actually had occurred—to Brazil, which forestalled that country's crisis but for a few months, and at great cost. Then there was the contingent credit line, an- other measure designed to have money ready when a crisis erupted.^ That too didn't work, mainly be- cause no one seemed interested in it on the pro- posed terms.10 It was recognized that the bailouts may have contributed to moral hazard, to weak lending practices, and so a bail-in strategy whereby creditors would have to bear part of the costs was put into place, though not for major countries like Russia, but rather for the weak and powerless, like Ecuador, Ukraine, Romania, and Pakistan. * * * By and large the bail-in strategies were a failure. In some cases, such as Romania, they were aban- doned, though not until after considerable damage to that country's economy; in other cases, like Ecuador, they were enforced, with even more dev- astating effects. The new U.S. Treasury secretary and the IMF's new managing director both ex- pressed reservations about the overall effectiveness of the large bailout strategy, but then went ahead with more of the same—$11 billion and $21.6 bil- lion lent to Turkey and Argentina in 2000 and 2001, respectively. The eventual failure of the Ar- gentine bailout seems to have finally forced the be- ginning of a rethinking of strategy.

Even when there was widespread, but not uni- versal, consensus on reforms, resistance arose from those in financial centers, sometimes supported by the U.S. Treasury. In the East Asia crisis, as atten- tion was focused on transparency, it became clear that to know what was going on in emerging mar kets, one had to know what hedge funds and off- shore banking centers were doing. Indeed, there

was a worry that more transparency elsewhere would lead to more transactions going through these channels, and there would overall be less in- formation about what was going on. Secretary Summers took the side of the hedge funds and the offshore banking centers, resisting calls for in- creased transparency, arguing that excessive trans- parency might reduce incentives for gathering information, the "price discovery" function in the technical jargon. Reforms in the offshore banking centers, established as tax and regulatory avoid- ance havens, only took on momentum after Sep- tember 11. This should not come as a surprise; these facilities exist as a result of deliberate policies in the advanced industrial countries, pushed by fi- nancial markets and the wealthy,

Other, even seemingly minor reforms faced strong resistance, sometimes from the developing as well as developed countries. As it became clear that short-term indebtedness played a key role in the crisis, attention focused on bond provisions that allowed what seemed to be a long-term bond to be converted into a short-term indebtedness overnight.11 And as demands for bail-in of credi- tors grew, so too did demands for provisions in bonds that would facilitate their "forced" partici- pation in workouts, so-called collective action clauses. The bond markets have, so far successfully, resisted both reforms—even as these reforms have seemingly received some support from the IMF. The critics of these reforms argued that such provi- sions might make credit more costly to the bor- rowing country; but they the central point. Today, there are huge costs to borrowing, espe- cially when things go badly, but only a fraction of those costs are borne by the borrower.

What Is Needed

The recognition of the problems has come a long way. But the reforms of the international financial system have only just begun. In my mind, among the key reforms required are the following:

1. Acceptance of the dangers of capital market liberalization, and that short-term capital

flows ("hot money") impose huge externali- ties, costs borne by those not directly party to the transaction (the lenders and bor- rowers). Whenever there are such large ex- ternalities, interventions—including those done through the banking and tax sys- tems12—are desirable. Rather than resisting these interventions, the international finan- cial institutions should be directing their ef- forts to making them work better.

2. Bankruptcy reforms and standstills. The ap- propriate way of addressing problems when private borrowers cannot repay creditors, whether domestic or foreign, is through bankruptcy, not through an IMF-financed bailout of creditors. What is required is bankruptcy reform that recognizes the spe- cial nature of bankruptcies that arise out of macroeconomic disturbances; what is needed is a super-Chapter 11, a bankruptcy provision that expedites restructuring and gives greater presumption for the continua- tion of existing management. Such a reform will have the further advantage of inducing more due diligence on the part of creditors, rather than encouraging the kind of reck- less lending that has been so common in the past.13 Trying to impose more creditor- friendly bankruptcy reforms, taking no note of the special features of macro-induced bankruptcies, is not the answer. Not only does this fail to address the problems of countries in crises; it is a medicine which likely will not take hold—as we have seen so graphically in East Asia, one cannot simply graft the laws of one country onto the cus- toms and norms of another. The problems of defaults on public indebtedness (as in Ar- gentina) are more complicated, but again there needs to be more reliance on bank- ruptcies and standstills, a point that the IMF too seems belatedly to have accepted. But the IMF cannot play the central role. The IMF is a major creditor, and it is dominated by the creditor countries. A bankruptcy sys- tem in which the creditor or his representa-

tive is also the bankruptcy judge will never be accepted as fair,

3. Less reliance on bailouts. With increased use of bankruptcies and standstills, there will be less need for the big bailouts, which failed so frequently, with the money either going to ensure that Western creditors got paid back more than they otherwise would, or that exchange rates were maintained at overvalued levels longer than they otherwise would have been (allowing the rich inside the country to get more of their money out at more favorable terms, but leaving the country more indebted). As we have seen, the bailouts have not just failed to work; they have contributed to the problem, by re- ducing incentives for care in lending, and for covering of exchange risks.

4. Improved banking regulation—both design and implementation—in the developed and the less developed countries alike. Weak bank regulation in developed countries can lead to bad lending practices, an export of instability. While there may be some debate whether the design of the risk-based capital adequacy standards adds to the stability of the financial systems in the developed countries, there is little doubt that it has contributed to global instability, by encour- aging short-term lending. Financial sector deregulation and the excessive reliance on capital adequacy standards has been mis- guided and destabilizing; what is required is a broader, less ideological approach to regu- lation, adapted to the capacities and cir- cumstances of each country. Thailand was right to have restricted speculative real es- tate lending in the 1980s. It was wrong to encourage the Thais to eliminate these re- strictions. There are a number of other re- strictions such as speed limits (restrictions on the rate of increase of banks' assets), which are likely to enhance stability. Yet the reforms cannot, at the same time, lose sight of the broader goals: a safe and sound bank- ing system is important, but it must also be

one that supplies capital to finance enter- prise and job creation.1 4

5. Improved risk management. Today, coun- tries around the world face enormous risk from the volatility of exchange rates. While the problem is clear, the solution is not. Ex- perts—including those at the IMF—have vacillated in the kinds of exchange-rate sys- tems that they have advocated. They en- couraged Argentina to peg its currency to the dollar. After the East Asia crisis, they ar- gued that countries should either have a freely floating exchange rate or a fixed peg. With the disaster in Argentina, this advice is likely to change again. No matter what re- forms occur to the exchange rate mecha- nism, countries will still face enormous risks. Small countries, like Thailand, buying and selling goods to many countries face a difficult problem, as the exchange rates among the major currencies vary by 50 per- cent or more. Fixing their exchange rate to one currency will not resolve the problems; it can actually exacerbate fluctuations with respect to other currencies. But there are other dimensions to risk. The Latin Ameri- can debt crisis in the 1980s15 was brought about by the huge increase in interest rates, a result of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's tight money policy in the United States. Developing countries have to learn to manage these risks, probably by buying in- surance against these fluctuations in the in- ternational capital markets. Unfortunately, today the countries can only buy insurance for short-run fluctuations, Surely the devel- oped countries are much better able to handle these risks than the less developed countries, and they should help develop these insurance markets. It would therefore make sense for the developed countries and the international financial institutions to provide loans to the developing countries in forms that mitigate the risks, e.g., by having the creditors absorb the risks of large real interest fluctuations.

6. Improved safety nets. Part of the task of risk management is enhancing the capabilities of the vulnerable within the country to absorb risks. Most developing countries have weak safety nets, including a lack of unemploy- ment insurance programs. Even in more de- veloped countries, safety nets are weak and inadequate in the two sectors that predomi- nate in developing countries, agriculture and small businesses, so international assis- tance will be essential if the developing countries are to make substantial strides in improving their safety nets.

7. Improved response to crises. We have seen the failure of the crisis responses in the 1997-98 crisis. The assistance given was badly designed and poorly implemented. The programs did not take sufficiently into account the lack of safety nets, that main- taining credit flows was of vital importance, and that collapse in trade between countries would spread the crisis. The policies were based not only on bad forecasts but on a failure to recognize that it is easier to de- stroy firms than to recreate them, that the damage caused by high interest rates will not be reversed when they are lowered. There needs to be a restoration of balance: the concerns of workers and small busi- nesses have to be balanced with the con- cerns of creditors; the impacts of policies on domestic capital flight have to balance the seemingly excessive attention currently paid to outside investors. Responses to future fi- nancial crises will have to be placed within a social and political context. Apart from the devastation of the riots that happen when crises are mismanaged, capital will not be attracted to countries facing social and po- litical turmoil, and no government, except the most repressive, can control such tur- moil, especially when policies are perceived to have been imposed from the outside.

Most important, there needs to be a re- turn to basic economic principles; rather than focusing on ephemeral investor psy-

chology, on the unpredictability of con- fidence, the IMF needs to return to its original mandate of providing funds to re- store aggregate demand in countries facing an economic recession. Countries in the de- veloping world repeatedly ask why, when the United States faces a downturn, does it argue for expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, and yet when they face a downturn, just the opposite is insisted upon. As the United States went into a recession in 2001, the debate was not whether there should be a stimulus package, but its design. By now, the lessons of Argentina and East Asia should be clear: confidence will never be re- stored to economies that remain mired in deep recessions. The conditions that the IMF imposes on countries in return for money need not only to be far more nar- rowly circumscribed but also to reflect this perspective.

There are other changes that would be desir- able: forcing the IMF to disclose the expected "poverty" and unemployment impact of its programs would direct its attention to these di- mensions. Countries should know the likely conse- quences of what it recommends. If the Fund systematically errs in its analyses—if, for instance, the increases in poverty are greater than it pre- dicted—it should be held accountable. Questions can be asked: Is there something systematically wrong with its models? Or is it trying to deliber- ately mislead policy making?

Reforming the Wor ld Bank and Development Assistance

Part of the reason that I remain hopeful about the possibility of reforming the international eco- nomic institutions is that I have seen change occur at the World Bank. It has not been easy, nor has it gone as far as I would have liked. But the changes have been significant.

By the time I arrived, the new president, James

Wolfensohn, was well on his way to trying to make the Bank more responsive to the concerns of devel- oping countries. Though the new direction was not always clear, the intellectual foundations not al- ways firm, and support within the Bank far from universal, the Bank had begun seriously to address the fundamental criticisms levied at it. Reforms in- volved changes in philosophy in three areas: devel- opment; aid in general and the Bank's aid in particular; and relationships between the Bank and the developing countries.

In reassessing its course, the Bank examined how successful development has occurred.16 Some of the lessons that emerged from this reassessment were ones that the World Bank had long recog- nized: the importance of living within one's budget constraints, the importance of education, includ- ing female education, and of macroeconomic sta- bility. However, some new themes also emerged. Success came not just from promoting primary ed- ucation but also from establishing a strong techno- logical basis, which included support for advanced training. It is possible to promote equality and rapid growth at the same time, in fact, more egali- tarian policies appear to help growth. Support for trade and openness is important,17 but it was the jobs created by export expansion, not the job losses from increased imports, that gave rise to growth. When governments took actions to promote ex- ports and new enterprises, liberalization worked; otherwise, it often failed. In East Asia, government played a pivotal role in successful development by helping create institutions that promote savings and the efficient allocation of investment, Success- ful countries also emphasized competition and enterprise creation over privatization and the re- structuring of existing enterprises.

Overall, the successful countries have pursued a comprehensive approach to development. Thirty years ago, economists of the left and the right often seemed to agree that the improvement in the effi- ciency of resource allocation and the increase in the supply of capital were at the heart of develop- ment. They differed only as to whether those changes should be obtained through government led planning or unfettered markets. In the end,

neither worked. Development encompasses not just resources and capital but a transformation of society.18 Clearly, the international financial insti- tutions cannot be held responsible for this trans- formation, but they can play an important role. And at the very least, they should not become im- pediments to a successful transformation.

Assistance

But the way assistance is often given may do ex- actly that—create impediments to effective transi- tions. * * * Conditionality—the imposition of a myriad of conditions, some often political in na- ture—as a precondition for assistance did not work; it did not lead to better policies, to faster growth, to better outcomes. Countries that think reforms have been imposed on them do not really feel invested in and committed to such reforms. Yet their participation is essential if real societal change is to happen. Even worse, the conditional- ity has undermined democratic processes. At last, there is a glimmering of recognition, even by the IMF, that conditionality has gone too far, that the dozens of conditions make it difficult for develop- ing countries to focus on priorities. But while there has, accordingly, been an attempt to refine condi- tionality, within the World Bank the discussion of reform has been taken further. Some argue that conditionality should be replaced by selectivity, giving aid to countries with a proven track record, allowing them to choose for themselves their own development strategies, ending the micro- management that has been such a feature of the past. The evidence is that aid given selectively can have significant impacts both in promoting growth and in reducing poverty.

Debt Forgiveness

The developing countries require not only that aid be given in a way that helps their development but also that there be more aid. Relatively small amounts of money could make enormous differ- ences in promoting health and literacy. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, the amounts of devel-

opment assistance have actually been declining, and even more so either as a percentage of devel- oped country income or on a per capita basis for those in the developing countries. There needs to be a basis for funding this assistance (and other global public goods) on a more sustained level, free from the vagaries of domestic politics in the United States or elsewhere. Several proposals have been put forward. When the IMF was established, it was given the right to create Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), a kind of international money. With countries today wisely putting aside billions of dollars into reserves every year to protect them- selves against the vicissitudes of international mar- kets, some income is not being translated into aggregate demand. The global economic slowdown of 2001-02 brought these concerns to the fore. Is- suing SDRs to finance global public goods—in- cluding financing development assistance—could help maintain the strength of the global economy at the same time that it helped some of the poorest countries in the world. A second proposal entails using the revenues from global economic re- sources—the minerals in the seabed and fishing rights in the oceans—to help finance development assistance.

Recently, attention has focused on debt for- giveness, and for good reason. Without the for- giveness of debt, many of the developing countries simply cannot grow. Huge proportions of their current exports go to repaying loans to the devel- oped countries.19 The Jubilee 2000 movement mo- bilized enormous international support for debt forgiveness. The movement gained the backing of churches throughout the developed world. To them, it seemed a moral imperative, a reflection of basic principles of economic justice.

The issue of the moral responsibility of the creditors was particularly apparent in the case of cold war loans.2 0 When the IMF and World Bank lent money to the Democratic Republic of Congo's notorious ruler Mobutu, they knew (or should have known) that most of the money would not go to help that country's poor people, but rather would be used to enrich Mobutu. It was money paid to ensure that this corrupt leader would keep

his country aligned with the West. To many, it doesn't seem fair for ordinary taxpayers in coun- tries with corrupt governments to have to repay loans that were made to leaders who did not repre- sent them.

The Jubilee movement was successful in get- ting much larger commitments to debt forgiveness. Whereas before 2000 there had been a debt relief program for the highly indebted countries, few met the criteria that the IMF had erected. By the end of 2000, as a result of international pressure, twenty-four countries had passed the threshold.

But debt relief needs to go further: as it stands now, the agreements touch only the poorest of the countries. Countries like Indonesia, devastated by the East Asian crisis and the failures of the IMF policies there, are still too well off to be brought in under the umbrella.

Reforming the W T O and Balancing the Trade Agenda

The global protests over globalization began at the W T O meetings in Seattle, Washington, because it was the most obvious symbol of the global inequities and the hypocrisy of the advanced in- dustrial countries. While these countries had preached—and forced—the opening of the mar- kets in the developing countries to their industrial products, they had continued to keep their mar- kets closed to the products of the developing coun- tries, such as textiles and agriculture. While they preached that developing countries should not subsidize their industries, they continued to pro- vide billions in subsidies to their own farmers, making it impossible for the developing countries to compete. While they preached the virtues of competitive markets, the United States was quick to push for global cartels in steel and aluminum when its domestic industries seemed threatened by imports. The United States pushed for liberaliza- tion of financial services, but resisted liberalization of the service sectors in which the developing coun- tries have strength, construction and maritime services. As we have noted, so unfair has the trade

agenda been that not only have the poorer coun- tries not received a fair share of the benefits; the poorest region in the world, Sub-Saharan Africa, was actually made worse off as a result of the last round of trade negotiations.

These inequities have increasingly been recog- nized, and that, combined with the resolve of some of the developing countries, resulted in the Doha "development" round of trade negotiations (No- vember 2001), which put on its agenda the redress- ing of some of these past imbalances. But there is a long way to go; the United States and the other advanced industrial countries only agreed to dis- cussions; just to discuss redressing some of these imbalances was viewed as a concession!

One of the areas that was of particular concern at Doha was intellectual property rights. These are important, if innovators are to have incentives to innovate—though much of the most crucial research, such as that in basic science and mathe- matics, is not patentable. No one denies the impor- tance of intellectual property rights. But these rights need to balance out the rights and interests of producers with those of users—not only users in developing countries but researchers in developed countries. In the final stages of the Uruguay nego- tiations, both the Office of Science and Technology and the Council of Economic Advisers worried that we had not got the balance right—the agree- ment put producers interests over users. We wor- ried that in doing so, the rate of progress and innovation might actually be impeded; after all, knowledge is the most important input into re- search, and stronger intellectual property rights can increase the price of this input. We were also concerned about the consequences of the denial of life-saving medicines to the poor. This issue subse- quently gained international attention in the con- text of the provision of AIDS medicines in South Africa. The international outrage forced the drug companies to back down—and it appears that, go- ing forward, the most adverse consequences will be circumscribed. But it is worth noting that initially even the Democratic U.S. administration sup- ported the pharmaceutical companies. What we were not fully aware of was another danger, what

has come to be termed bio-piracy, international companies patenting traditional medicines or foods; it is not only that they seek to make money from "resources" and knowledge that rightfully be- longs to the developing countries, but in so doing, they squelch domestic firms that have long pro- vided the products. While it is not clear whether these patents would hold up in court if they were effectively challenged, it is clear that the less devel- oped countries may not have the legal and finan- cial resources required to challenge the patent. This issue has become a source of enormous emo- tional, and potentially economic, concern all around the developing world. I was recently in an Andean village in Ecuador, where the indigenous mayor railed against how globalization had led to bio-piracy.

Reforming the WTO will require thinking fur- ther about a more balanced trade agenda—more balanced in treating the interests of the developing countries, more balanced in treating concerns, like environment, that go beyond trade.

But redressing the current imbalances does not require that the world wait until the end of a new round of trade negotiations. International eco- nomic justice requires that the developed countries take actions to open themselves up to fair trade and equitable relationships with developing coun- tries without recourse to the bargaining table or attempts to extract concessions in exchange for do- ing so. The European Union has already taken steps in this direction, with its "everything but Arms" initiative to allow the free importing of all goods, other than arms, from the poorest countries into Europe. It does not solve all the complaints of the developing countries; they still will not be able to compete against highly subsidized European agriculture. But it is a big step in the right direc- tion. The challenge now is to get the United States and Japan to participate. Such a move would be of enormous benefit to the developing world and would even benefit the developed countries, whose consumers would be able to obtain goods at lower prices.

Toward a Globalization with a More Human Face

The reforms I have oudined would help make globalization fairer, and more effective in raising living standards, especially of the poor. It is not just a question of changing institutional structures. The mind-set around globalization itself must change. Finance and trade ministers view global- ization as largely an economic phenomenon; but to many in the developing world, it is far more than that.

One of the reasons globalization is being at- tacked is that it seems to undermine traditional values. The conflicts are real, and to some extent unavoidable. Economic growth—including that induced by globalization—will result in urbaniza- tion, undermining traditional rural societies. Un- fortunately, so far, those responsible for managing globalization, while praising these positive benefits, all too often have shown an insufficient appre- ciation of this adverse side, the threat to cultural identity and values.21 This is surprising, given the awareness of the issues within the developed coun- tries themselves: Europe defends its agricultural policies not just in terms of those special interests, but to preserve rural traditions. People in small towns everywhere complain that large national re- tailers and shopping malls have killed their small businesses and their communities.

The pace of global integration matters: a more gradual process means that traditional institutions and norms, rather than being overwhelmed, can adapt and respond to the new challenges.

Of equal concern is what globalization does to democracy. Globalization, as it has been advo- cated, often seems to replace the old dictatorships of national elites with new dictatorships of interna- tional finance. Countries are effectively told that if they don't follow certain conditions, the capital markets or the IMF will refuse to lend them money, They are basically forced to give up part of their sovereignty, to let capricious capital markets, including the speculators whose only concerns are short-term rather than the long-term growth of the

country and the improvement of living standards, "discipline" them, telling them what they should and should not do.

But countries do have choices, and among those choices is the extent to which they wish to subject themselves to international capital markets. Those, such as in East Asia, that have avoided the strictures of the IMF have grown faster, with greater equality and poverty reduction, than those who have obeyed its commandments. Because al- ternative policies affect different groups differ- ently, it is the role of the political process—not international bureaucrats—to sort out the choices. Even if growth were adversely affected, it is a cost many developing countries may be willing to pay to achieve a more democratic and equitable soci- ety, just as many societies today are saying it is worth sacrificing some growth for a better envi- ronment. So long as globalization is presented in the way that it has been, it represents a disenfran- chisement. No wonder then that it will be resisted, especially by those who are being disenfranchised.

Today, globalization is being challenged around the world. There is discontent with globalization, and rightfully so. Globalization can be a force for good: the globalization of ideas about democracy and of civil society have changed the way people think, while global political movements have led to debt relief and the treaty on land mines. Globaliza- tion has helped hundreds of millions of people attain higher standards of living, beyond what they, or most economists, thought imaginable but a short while ago, The globalization of the econ- omy has benefited countries that took advantage of it by seeking new markets for their exports and by welcoming foreign investment. Even so, the coun- tries that have benefited the most have been those that took charge of their own destiny and rec- ognized the role government can play in de- velopment rather than relying on the notion of a self-regulated market that would fix its own problems.

But for millions of people globalization has not worked. Many have actually been made worse off, as they have seen their jobs destroyed and their

lives become more insecure. They have felt increas- ingly powerless against forces beyond their control, They have seen their democracies undermined, their cultures eroded,

If globalization continues to be conducted in the way that it has been in the past, if we continue to fail to learn from our mistakes, globalization will not only not succeed in promoting develop- ment but will continue to create poverty and insta- bility. Without reform, the backlash that has already started will mount and discontent with globalization will grow.

This will be a tragedy for all of us, and espe- cially for the billions who might otherwise have benefited. While those in the developing world stand to lose the most economically, there will be broader political ramifications that will affect the developed world too.

If the reforms outlined in this last chapter are taken seriously, then there is hope that a more hu- mane process of globalization can be a powerful force for the good, with the vast majority of those living in the developing countries benefiting from it and welcoming it. If this is done, the discontent with globalization would have served us all well.

The current situation reminds me of the world some seventy years ago. As the world plummeted into the Great Depression, advocates of the free market said, "Not to worry; markets are self- regulating, and given time, economic prosperity will resume." Never mind the misery of those whose lives are destroyed waiting for this so-called eventuality. Keynes argued that markets were not self-correcting, or not at least in a relevant time frame. (As he famously put it, "In the long run, we are all dead.")* Unemployment could persist for years, and government intervention was required. Keynes was pilloried—attacked as a Socialist, a critic of the market. Yet in a sense, Keynes was in- tensely conservative. He had a fundamental belief in the markets: if only government could correct this one failure, the economy would be able to function reasonably efficiently. He did not want a

* M. Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1924),

wholesale replacement of the market system; but he knew that unless these fundamental problems were addressed, there would be enormous popular pressures. And Keynes's medicine worked: since World War II, countries like the United States, fol- lowing Keynesian prescriptions, have had fewer and shorter-lived downturns, and longer expan- sions than previously.

Today, the system of capitalism is at a cross- roads just as it was during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, capitalism was saved by Keynes, who thought of policies to create jobs and rescue those suffering from the collapse of the global economy. Now, millions of people around the world are waiting to see whether globalization can be re- formed so that its benefits can be more widely shared.

Thankfully, there is a growing recognition of these problems and increasing political will to do something. Almost everyone involved in develop- ment, even those in the Washington establishment, now agrees that rapid capital market liberalization without accompanying regulation can be danger- ous. They agree too that the excessive tightness in fiscal policy in the Asian crisis of 1997 was a mis- take. As Bolivia moved into a recession in 2001, caused in part by the global economic slowdown, there were some intimations that that country would not be forced to follow the traditional path of austerity and have to cut governmental spend- ing. Instead, as of January 2002, it looks like Bo- livia will be allowed to stimulate its economy, helping it to overcome the recession, using rev- enues that it is about to receive from its newly dis- covered natural gas reserves to tide it over until the economy starts to grow again. In the aftermath of the Argentina debacle, the IMF has recognized the failings of the big-bailout strategy and is beginning to discuss the use of standstills and restructuring through bankruptcy, the kinds of alternatives that I and others have been advocating for years. Debt forgiveness brought about by the work of the Ju- bilee movement and the concessions made to initi- ate a new development round of trade negotiations at Doha represent two more victories.

Despite these gains, there is still more to be

done to bridge the gap between rhetoric and real- ity. At Doha, the developed countries only agreed to begin discussing a fairer trade agenda; the im- balances of the past have yet to be redressed. Bank- ruptcy and standstills are now on the agenda; but there is no assurance that there will be an appro- priate balance of creditor and debtor interests. There is a lot more participation by those in devel- oping countries in discussions concerning eco- nomic strategy, but there is little evidence yet of changes in policies that reflect greater participa- tion. There need to be changes in institutions and in mind-sets. The free market ideology should be replaced with analyses based on economic science, with a more balanced view of the role of govern- ment drawn from an understanding of both mar- ket and government failures. There should be more sensitivity about the role of outside advisers, so they support democratic decision making by clarifying the consequences of different policies, including impacts on different groups, especially the poor, rather than undermining it by pushing particular policies on reluctant countries.

It is clear that there must be a multipronged strategy of reform. One should be concerned with reform of the international economic arrange- ments. But such reforms will be a long time com- ing. Thus, the second prong should be directed at encouraging reforms that each country can take upon itself. The developed countries have a special responsibility, for instance, to eliminate their trade barriers, to practice what they preach. But while the developed countries' responsibility may be great, their incentives are weak: after all, offshore banking centers and hedge funds serve interests in the developed countries, and the developed coun- tries can withstand well the instability that a failure to reform might bring to the developing world. In- deed, the United States arguably benefited in sev- eral ways from the East Asia crisis,

Hence, the developing countries must assume responsibility for their well-being themselves. They can manage their budgets so that they live within their means, meager though that might be, and eliminate the protectionist barriers which, while they may generate large profits for a few, force

consumers to pay higher prices. They can put in place strong regulations to protect themselves from speculators from the outside or corporate misbehavior from the inside. Most important, de- veloping countries need effective governments, with strong and independent judiciaries, democra- tic accountability, openness and transparency and freedom from the corruption that has stifled the effectiveness of the public sector and the growth of the private.

What they should ask of the international com- munity is only this: the acceptance of their need, and right, to make their own choices, in ways which reflect their own political judgments about who, for instance, should bear what risks. They should be encouraged to adopt bankruptcy laws and regulatory structures adapted to their own sit- uation, not to accept templates designed by and for the more developed countries.22

What is needed are policies for sustainable, eq- uitable, and democratic growth. This is the reason for development. Development is not about help- ing a few people get rich or creating a handfvd of poindess protected industries that only benefit the country's elite; it is not about bringing in Prada and Benetton, Ralph Lauren or Louis Vuitton, for the urban rich and leaving the rural poor in their misery. Being able to buy Gucci handbags in Mos- cow department stores did not mean that country had become a market economy. Development is about transforming societies, improving the lives of the poor, enabling everyone to have a chance at success and access to health care and education.

This sort of development won't happen if only a few people dictate the policies a country must follow. Making sure that democratic decisions are made means ensuring that a broad range of econo- mists, officials, and experts from developing coun- tries are actively involved in the debate. It also means that there must be broad participation that goes well beyond the experts and politicians. De- veloping countries must take charge of their own futures. But we in the West cannot escape our re- sponsibilities.

It's not easy to change how things are done. Bureaucracies, like people, fall into bad habits, and

adapting to change can be painful. But the interna- tional institutions must undertake the perhaps pain- ful changes that will enable them to play the role they should be playing to make globalization work, and work not just for the well off and the industrial countries, but for the poor and the developing na- tions.

The developed world needs to do its part to re- form the international institutions that govern globalization. We set up these institutions and we need to work to fix them. If we are to address the legitimate concerns of those who have expressed a discontent with globalization, if we are to make globalization work for the billions of people for whom it has not, if we are to make globalization with a human face succeed, then our voices must be raised. We cannot, we should not, stand idly by.

NOTES 1. The term corporate governance refers to the

laws that determine the rights of shareholders, including minority shareholders. With weak corporate governance, management may ef- fectively steal from shareholders, and majority shareholders from minority shareholders.

2. World Bank studies, including those coau- thored by my predecessor as chief economist at the World Bank, Michael Bruno, formerly head of Israel's Central Bank, helped provide the empirical validation of this perspective. See Michael Bruno and W. Easterly, "Inflation Crises and Long-run Growth," Journal of Mone- tary Economics 41 (February 1998), pp. 3-26.

3. Economists have analyzed what are the attrib- utes of such goods; they are goods for which the marginal costs of supplying the goods to an additional individual are small or zero, and for which the costs of excluding them from the benefits are large.

4. Economists have analyzed deeply why such markets may not exist, e.g., as a result of prob- lems of information imperfections (informa- tion asymmetries), called adverse selection and moral hazard.

5. It was ironic that the calls for transparency were coming from the IMF, long criticized for its own lack of openness, and the U.S. Trea- sury, the most secretive agency of the U.S. gov- ernment (where I saw that even the White House often had trouble extracting informa- tion about what they were up to).

6. The perception in some quarters is that those inside the country can decide on such issues as when the school year will begin and end.

7. The IMF's position of institutional infallibility makes these changes in position particularly difficult. In this case, senior people could seemingly claim, trying to keep a straight face, that they had been warning of the risks associ- ated with capital market liberalization for a long time. The assertion is at best disingenu- ous (and itself undermines the credibility of the institution).

8. The multiple objectives—and the reluctance to discuss openly the tacit change in the mandate to reflect the interests of the financial commu- nity—led to many instances of intellectual in- coherence; this in turn made coming up with coherent reforms more difficult.

9. As its name indicates, a contingent credit line provides credit automatically in certain con- tingencies, those associated with a crisis.

10. There were more profound problems. While a contingent credit line could make sure that some new funds were made available in the presence of a crisis, it could not prevent other short-term loans from not being rolled over; and the amount of exposure that the banks would be willing to take would presumbly take into account the new loans that would be made under the contingent credit line facility. Thus there was a concern that the net supply of funds available in the event of a crisis might not be affected that much.

11. These provisions allow a creditor to demand payment under certain circumstances—gener- ally precisely the circumstances in which other creditors are pulling back their money,

12. In Europe, a great deal of attention has focused on one particular tax proposal, the so-called

Tobin Tax—on cross-border financial transac- tions. See, for instance, H. Williamson, "Koh- ler Says IMF Wi l l Look Again at Tobin Tax," Financial Times, September 10, 2001.

13. Though in the aftermath of the East Asia crisis, these proposals received considerable atten- tion, with the Argentine crisis, which involved public indebtedness, attention was switched to sovereign debt restructuring mechanisms—in spite of the fact that many of the recent crises have involved private not sovereign debt.

14. As we saw, opening up a country to for- eign banks may not lead to more lending, es- pecially to small and medium-sized domestic enterprises. Countries need to impose require- ments, similar to those in America's Commu- nity Reinvestment Act, to ensure that as they open their markets up, their small businesses are not starved of capital.

15. The debt crisis hit Argentina in 1981, Chile and Mexico in 1982, and Brazil in 1983, Out- put growth remained very slow throughout the remainder of the decade.

16. The reassessment (as we have noted) actually began earlier, under pressure from the Japa- nese, and was reflected in the Bank's publica- tion in 1993 of the landmark study, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy.

17. Not surprisingly, the Bank still has not taken as seriously as it should the theoretical and empirical critiques of trade liberalization, such as that provided by F. Rodriguez and D. Rodrik, "Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic's Guide to the Cross- National Evidence," Ben Bernanke and Ken- neth S. Rogoff, eds., in Macroeconomics Annual 2000 (Cambridge, M A : MIT Press for NBER, 2001). Whatever the intellectual merits of that position, it runs counter to the "offi- cial" position of the United States and other G-7 governments that trade is good.

18. There are many dimensions to this transfor- mation—including the acceptance of change (recognizing that things do not have be done in the way they have been done for genera-

tions), of the basic tenets of science and the scientific way of thinking, of the willingness to accept the risks that are necessary for entrepre- neurships.

19. In several of the countries, debt service is more than a quarter of exports; in a couple, it is al- most half.

20. Such debts are sometimes referred to as "odi- ous debts."

21. An important exception is Jim Wolfensohn, who has pushed cultural initiatives at the World Bank.

22. Recently, developing countries have been in- creasingly pushed to comply with standards (e.g., of banking) that they have played little part in setting. Indeed, this is often heralded as one of the few "achievements" of the efforts to reform the global economic architecture. Whatever good they may do to improve global economic stability, the way they have been brought about has engendered enormous re- sentment in the developing world.

10 GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBALIZING ISSUES

Globalization is an overarching process discussed at several junctures in Essentials of International Relations, Of the recent changes in international relations, none has been as complex as this multifaceted phenomenon involving economic, politi- cal, social, and cultural ramifications. David Held and his collaborators in Great Britain, drawing on their book Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (1999), investigate the analytic dimensions of globalization for a piece in the new scholarly journal Global Governance, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in an excerpted piece from his national bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), examines the backlash against globalization.

Arising out of the interconnectedness of globalization, new issues have become part of the global agenda—issues of population, disease, the environment, and hu- man rights. Together these issues represent the new security issues for the twenty- first century. In many of these globalizing issues, the rights of the individual are pitted against the rights of the global community. Does a couple have the right of unlimited procreation? What are the rights of the community to protect itself against the scourge of AIDS? Do the rights of the individual take precedence over the right of the community in the use of land and natural resources? In trying to resolve these dilemmas, some people have argued in favor of enforcement of a uni- versal definition of human rights. These are human rights applicable across all peoples and cultures. Others think that the notion of a universality of human rights is but an illusion. Cambridge University's Amartya Sen, in the last selection of this chapter, suggests that there is a great diversity of human rights experience among both Western and non-Western cultures. The application of Western hu- man rights standards across cultures may be problematic. These questions of the entitlements of the individual versus the entitlements of the community address core issues of culture, legality, and morality.

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D A V I D H E L D A N D A N T H O N Y M C G R E W , W I T H D A V I D G O L D B L A T T A N D

J O N A T H A N P E R R A T O N

Globalization

Globalization: n. a process (or set of processes) that embodies a transformation in the spatial organiza- tion of social relations and transactions, generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and power.

Although everybody talks about globalization, few people have a clear understanding of it, The "big idea" of the late twentieth century is in danger of turning into the cliche' of our times. Can we give it precise meaning and content, or should globaliza- tion be consigned to the dustbin of history?

The reason there is so much talk about global- ization is that everyone knows that something ex- traordinary is happening to our world. We can send e-mail across the planet in seconds; we hear that our jobs depend on economic decisions in far- off places; we enjoy films, food, and fashion from all over the world; we worry about an influx of drugs and how we can save the ozone layer, These growing global connections affect all aspects of our lives—but it is still not clear what globalization re- ally means.

There has been a heated debate about whether globalization is occurring at all. The debate rages between those who claim that globalization marks the end of the nation-state and the death of politics and those who dismiss the globalization hype and say that we have seen it all before. This debate has continued for a decade, leading to ever more con- fusion. It is not that these positions are wholly mistaken. In fact, both capture elements of a com- plex reality. But it is the wrong debate to have

From Global Governance 5, no. 4 (October/December 1999): 483-96.

when there is no common ground about what globalization is. Until we know what globalization actually means, we will not be able to understand how it affects our lives, our identities, and our politics.

In this essay, we try to go beyond the rhetoric of entrenched positions and produce a richer ac- count of what globalization is, how the world is changing, and what we can do about it. So what does globalization mean? We show that globaliza- tion is made up of the accumulation of links across the world's major regions and across many do- mains of activity. It is not a single process but in- volves four distinct types of change:

• It stretches social, political, and economic activities across political frontiers, regions, and continents.

• It intensifies our dependence on each other, as flows of trade, investment, finance, migra- tion, and culture increase.

• It speeds up the world. New systems of trans- port and communication mean that ideas, goods, information, capital, and people move more quickly.

• It means that distant events have a deeper impact on our lives. Even the most local de- velopments may come to have enormous global consequences. The boundaries be- tween domestic matters and global affairs can become increasingly blurred.

In short, globalization is about the connections be- tween different regions of the world—from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the envi- ronmental—and the ways in which they change and increase over time.

We show that globalization, in this sense, has been going on for centuries. But we also show that globalization today is genuinely different both in scale and in nature. It does not signal the end of the nation-state or the death of politics. But it does mean that politics is no longer, and can no longer be, based simply on nation-states. We cannot pre- dict the future or know what the final outcome of globalization will be. But we can now define the central challenge of the global age—rethinking our values, institutions, and identities so that politics can remain an effective vehicle for human aspira- tions and needs.

First, we need to understand what is distinctive about globalization today. We can do this only by studying the forms it has taken throughout history in all areas of activity—the environment, the econ- omy, politics, and culture. The thread that ties these things together is people, and so it is with the movements of people that we must start.

People on the Move

Globalization began with people traveling. For millennia, human beings have migrated—settling new lands, building empires, or searching for work. Most migrations in history have not been global. But from the sixteenth century onward, Eu- ropeans traveled the world, conquering the Ameri- cas and Oceania before making colonial incursions into Africa and Asia. The first great wave of mod- ern migration was the transatlantic slave trade. Nine to twelve million people were shipped as slaves from Africa to the Americas by the mid- nineteenth century. But this was dwarfed by the extraordinary outpouring of Europe's poor to the New World from the mid-nineteenth century on- ward. More than thirty million people moved in this way between 1880 and World War I.

Levels of global migration have fluctuated dra- matically with political and economic conditions. During World War I, international migration plummeted. European migration stopped, beyond a few forced migrations like that of Armenians and Greeks from Turkey. North America closed its borders and created the first systematic immigra-

tion legislation in the modern era. But the bitter struggles and ethnic violence of World War II led to unprecedented levels of forced migrations, refugees, and asylum movements. Ethnic Germans fled the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Jews headed for Israel. Pakistan and India exchanged millions of people. And Koreans flooded south,

In the 1950s and 1960s, millions of people poured into Europe, attracted by the rebirth of Western European economies. After the oil shocks of the 1970s, politicians closed many of these mi- gration programs. But they couldn't stop the for- eign population and ethnic mix continuing to grow, A combination of family reunions, unpolice- able borders, and sheer demand for labor have continued to drive migration from the European peripheries of Turkey and North Africa and from the distant outposts of old European empires in Asia and Africa. There has also been a takeoff in le- gal and illegal migration to the United States and Australasia, enormous flows to the oil-rich and labor-scarce Middle East, and new patterns of re- gional migration throughout the world.

Today, we are living with the consequences of centuries of migration and conquest. There is more ethnic diversity than ever before in states of the Organization for Economic and Community Development (OECD), especially in Europe. The process can never be reversed, particularly when in countries like Sweden more than 10 percent of the population are foreign born. Moreover, the United States is experiencing levels of migration that are comparable to the great transatlantic push of the late nineteenth century. In the mid-1990s, this in- volved more than a million immigrants per year, mainly from Asia, Latin America, and Central America. And it is not just economic migration. There has also been an astronomical rise in asylum seeking, displaced persons, and refugees from wars as states are created and collapse in the developing world. More than half a million applicants for asy- lum were received per annum by OECD countries in the 1990s.

International attempts to regulate the flow of people have not succeeded, Some states are highly dependent on migrant labor; others find it difficult

to win support for tracking illegal migrants. All states have to reassess what national citizenship is and what it means as an era of diversity transforms identities and cultures. The long history of migra- tion is coming home to roost.

The Fate of National Cultures

When people move, they take their cultures with them. So, the globalization of culture has a long history. The great world religions showed how ideas and beliefs can cross the continents and transform societies. No less important were the great premodern empires that, in the absence of direct military and political control, held their do- mains together through a common culture of the ruling classes. For long periods of human history, there have been only these global cultures and a vast array of fragmented local cultures. Little stood between the court and the village until the inven- tion of nation-states in the eighteenth century cre- ated a powerful new cultural identity that lay between these two extremes.

This rise of nation-states and nationalist proj- ects truncated the process of cultural globalization. Nation-states sought to control education, lan- guage, and systems of communication, like the post and the telephone. But as European empires became entrenched in the nineteenth century, new forms of cultural globalization emerged with inno- vations in transport and communications, notable regularized mechanical transport, and the tele- graph. These technological advances helped the West to expand and enabled the new ideas that emerged—especially science, liberalism, and socialism—to travel and transform the ruling cul- tures of almost every society on the planet.

Contemporary popular cultures have certainly not yet had a social impact to match this, but the sheer scale, intensity, speed, and volume of global cultural communications today is unsurpassed. The accelerating diffusion of radio, television, the Inter- net, and satellite and digital technologies has made instant communication possible. Many national controls over information have become ineffective. Through radio, film, television, and the Internet,

people everywhere are exposed to the values of other cultures as never before. Nothing, not even the fact that we all speak different languages, can stop the flow of ideas and cultures. The English lan- guage is becoming so dominant that it provides a linguistic infrastructure as powerful as any techno- logical system for transmitting ideas and cultures.

Beyond its scale, what is striking about today's cultural globalization is that it is driven by compa- nies, not countries. Corporations have replaced states and theocracies as the central producers and distributors of cultural globalization. Private inter- national institutions are not new, but their mass impact is. News agencies and publishing houses in previous eras had a much more limited impact on local and national cultures than the consumer goods and cultural products of global corporations today.

Although the vast majority of these cultural products come from the United States, this is not a simple case of "cultural imperialism," One of the surprising features of our global age is how robust national and local cultures have proved to be. Na- tional institutions remain central to public life, and national audiences constantly reinterpret foreign products in novel ways.

These new communication technologies threaten states that pursue rigid closed-door poli- cies on information and culture. For example, China sought to restrict access to the Internet but found this extremely difficult to achieve. In addi- tion, it is likely that the conduct of economic life everywhere will be transformed by the new tech- nologies. The central question is the future impact of cultural flows on our sense of personal identity and national identity. Two competing forces are in evidence: the growth of multicultural politics al- most everywhere and, in part as a reaction to this, the assertion of fundamentalist identities (reli- gious, nationalist, and ethnic). Although the bal- ance between these two forces remains highly uncertain, it is clear that only a more open, cos- mopolitan outlook can ultimately accommodate itself to a more global era.

The Territorial State and Global Politics

One thousand years ago, a modern political map of the world would have been incomprehensible. It is not just that much of the world was still to be "dis- covered." People simply did not think of political power as something divided by clear-cut bound- aries and unambiguous color patches. But our contemporary maps do not just misrepresent the past. By suggesting that territorial areas contain in- divisible, illimitable, and exclusive sovereign states, they may also prove a poor metaphor for the shape of the politics of the future.

Modern politics emerged with and was shaped by the development of political communities tied to a piece of land, the nation-state. This saw the centralization of political power within Europe, the creation of state structures, and the emergence of a sense of order between states. Forms of democracy were developed within certain states, while at the same time the creation of empires saw this ac- countability denied to others.

Today, we are living through another political transformation, which could be as important as the creation of the nation-state; the exclusive link between geography and political power has now been broken.

Our new era has seen layers of governance spread within and across political boundaries. New institutions have both linked sovereign states to- gether and pooled sovereignty beyond the nation- state. We have developed a body of regional and international law that underpins an emerging sys- tem of global governance, both formal and infor- mal, with many layers.

Our policymakers experience a seemingly end- less merry-go-round of international summits. Two or three congresses a year convened 150 years ago. Today more than four thousand convene each year. They include summits of the U N , the Group of Seven, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the European Union (EU), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation bloc, the regional forum of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Mercado Comun del Sur (Mer-

cosur). These summits and many other official and unofficial meetings lock governments into global, regional, and multilayered systems of governance that they can barely monitor, let alone control.

Attention has tended to focus on the failure of global institutions to live up to the vast hopes that their birth created. But they have significant achievements to their credit. Although the UN remains a creature of the interstate system with well-documented shortcomings, it does deliver sig- nificant international public goods, These range from air traffic control and the management of telecommunications to the control of contagious diseases, humanitarian relief for refugees, and measures to protect our oceans and atmosphere.

However, it is regional institutions that have done the most to transform the global political landscape. The EU has transformed Europe from postwar disarray to a situation where member states can pool sovereignty to tackle common problems. Despite the fact that many people still debate its very right to exist, the view from 1945 would be of astonishment at how far the EU has come so quickly. Although regionalism elsewhere is very different from the European model, its ac- celeration in the Americas, in the Asian Pacific, and (somewhat less) in Africa has had significant consequences for political power. Despite fears of Fortress Europe and protectionist blocs, regional- ism has been a midwife to political globalization rather than a barrier to it. In fact, many global standards have resulted from negotiations involv- ing regional groupings.

Another feature of the new era is the strength- ening and broadening of international law. States no longer have the right to treat their citizens as they think fit. An emerging framework of "cos- mopolitan law"—governing war, crimes against humanity, environmental issues, and human rights—has made major inroads into state sover- eignty. Even the many states that violate these stan- dards in practice accept general duties to protect their citizens, to provide a basic standard of living, and to respect human rights.

These international standards are monitored and vociferously lobbied for by a growing num-

ber of international agencies. In 1996, there were nearly 260 intergovernmental organizations and nearly 5,500 international nongovernmental orga- nizations. In 1909, the former numbered just 37 and the latter a mere 176. There has also been a vast increase in the number of international treaties and regimes, such as the nuclear nonprolif- eration regime.

The momentum for international cooperation shows no sign of slowing, despite the many vocif- erous complaints often heard about it. The stuff of global politics already goes far beyond traditional geopolitical concerns and will increase whenever effective action requires international cooperation. Drug smugglers, capital flows, acid rain, and the activities of pedophiles, terrorists, and illegal im- migrants do not recognize borders; neither can the policies for their effective resolution.

This transformation of international politics does not mean that the nation-state is dead. The multilateral revolution, rather than replacing the familiar world of nation-states, overlays and com- plicates it. Many familiar political distinctions and assumptions have been called into question. The context of national politics has been transformed by the diffusion of political authority and the growth of multilayered governance (which we dis- cuss further in the section on governing globaliza- tion). But it is not entirely clear which factors will determine how far old institutions can adapt and whether new institutions can be invested with le- gitimacy.

The Globalization of Organized Violence

Ironically, war and imperial conquest have been great globalizing forces in history. Countries and peoples have met often on the battlefield. Although we live in an era distinguished by the absence of empires, great-power conflict, and interstate war, military globalization is not a thing of the past. It works very differentiy now but in many ways is more significant than ever. New threats to our se- curity and our responses to these threats have made countries much more interdependent

One major change comes from weapons them- selves. Military competition has always been about developing more powerful weapons. But the last half-century has not just created the most power- ful weapons the world has ever seen—including weapons of mass destruction that can travel across entire continents. It has also seen some of these tools of war fall into the hands of an unprece- dented number of countries and regimes. This has "shrunk" the world and made it more dangerous. Although the end of the Cold War has undermined the political logic of the global arms dynamic, the Cold War itself accelerated the diffusion of military-technological innovation across the world. Whereas it took two centuries for the gun- powder revolution to reach Europe from China in the Middle Ages, it took less than five decades for India to acquire its existing nuclear capability.

Meanwhile, the same infrastructures that have facilitated global flows of goods, people, and capital have generated new societal security threats. Cyberwar, international and ecological ter- rorism, and transnational organized crime cannot be satisfactorily dealt with either by traditional military means or solely within a national framework.

These changes have transformed power rela- tionships in the world military order, creating new global and regional risks that demand multilateral action. Global and regional security institutions have become more important. Most states today have chosen to sign up to a host of multilateral arrangements and institutions in order to enhance their security. Few states now see unilateralism or neutrality as a credible defense strategy.

But it is not just the institutions of defense that have become multinational. The way that we make military hardware has also changed. The age of "national champions" has been superseded by a sharp increase in licensing, coproduction agree- ments, joint ventures, corporate alliances, and subcontracting. This means that few countries to- day—not even the United States—can claim to have an autonomous military production capacity. This is especially so because key civil technologies such as electronics, which are vital to advanced

weapons systems, are themselves the products of highly globalized industries.

Arms producers have also become increasingly reliant on export markets. This is why, despite the end of the Cold War, global arms sales (in real terms) have remained above the level of the 1960s. In fact, since the mid-1990s, their volume has in- creased. The number of countries manufacturing arms (forty) or purchasing arms (a hundred) is greater than at any time since the crisis-ridden 1930s.

The paradox and novelty of the globalization of violence today is that national security has become a multilateral affair. For the first time in history, die one thing that did most to give nation-states a focus and a purpose, the thing that has always been at the very heart of what sovereignty is, can now be protected only if nation-states come together and pool resources, technology, intelligence, and sover- eignty.

The Global Economy

When people are not fighting, they have always made things and sold them to each other. And in- deed when most people think about globalization, they think of economics. So what is happening to trade, production, and finance? How do they relate to each other—and how are they changing our world?

TRADE

The world has never been more open to trade than it is today. The dismantling of trade barriers has al- lowed global markets to emerge for many goods and services. The major trading blocs created in Europe, North America, and the Asian Pacific are not regional fortresses but remain open to compe- tition from the rest of the world. Developing and transition economies have also opened up and seen their shares of world trade rise as a result. The consequence of these trading networks is not just that trade today is greater than ever before. Trade has changed in a way that links national economies together at a deeper level than in the past.

Competitive pressures have blurred the divi- sion between trade and domestic economic ac- tivity. Countries not only increasingly consume goods from abroad but depend on components from overseas for their own production processes. The massive growth of intraindustry trade, which now forms the majority of trade in manufactures among developed economies, further intensifies competition across national boundaries. The pro- duction process can now easily be sliced up and lo- cated in different countries—creating a new global division of labor and new patterns of wealth and inequality.

No economic activity can easily be insulated from global competition. A greater proportion of domestic output is traded than in the past. This does not mean that countries' fortunes are simply determined by their national "competitiveness." The basic rules of economics still apply. Countries still specialize according to comparative advantage; they cannot be competitive in everything or noth- ing. National economies can still gain, overall, from increased trade.

What has changed is the distribution of these gains from trade. These are highly uneven—and in new ways. There are clear winners and losers, both between and within countries. More trade with de- veloping countries hurts low-skilled workers while simultaneously increasing the incomes of more highly skilled workers. National governments may protect and compensate those who lose out from structural change, but employers in tradable in- dustries vulnerable to global competition will in- creasingly resist the costs of welfare provision. The welfare state is under pressure from both within and without.

Despite the creation of global markets, regula- tion remains largely national. The banana dispute waged between the EU and the United States illus- trates the international friction that trade can gen- erate. The weakness of international regulation also means that we cannot easily correct for market failures and externalities in global markets. The World Trade Organization, a powerful advocate of deregulation and trade liberalization, is in its in- fancy in harmonizing national regulatory regimes.

It confronts a legitimation deficit—as the banana dispute shows—that can be effectively removed only by greater transparency and by wider partici- pation (of those significantly affected by disputes) in its rule making.

P R O D U C T I O N

Global exports may be more important than ever, but transnational production is now worth even more. To sell to another country, increasingly you have to move there; this is the main way to sell goods and services abroad. The multinational cor- poration has taken economic interdependence to new levels. Today, 53,000 multinational corpora- tions and 450,000 foreign subsidiaries sell $9.5 tril- lion of goods and services across the globe every year. Multinational corporations account for at least 20 percent of world production and 70 per- cent of world trade. A quarter to a third of world trade is intrafirm trade between branches of multi- nationals.

Such impressive figures nevertheless under- estimate the importance of multinational corpora- tions to global economic prosperity: multinationals also form relationships that link smaller national firms into transnational production chains, Al- though multinationals typically account for a minority of national production, they are concen- trated in the most technologically advanced eco- nomic sectors and in export industries. They also often control the global distribution networks on which independent exporters depend, especially in developing countries, and are of fundamental im- portance in the generation and international trans- fer of technology.

Multinationals are concentrated in developed countries and a small number of developing ones, but their impact is felt across the world. Almost all countries have some inward foreign direct invest- ment and compete intensely for more. Investment is spreading out, with an increasing share to devel- oping countries and rapid increases in Central and Eastern Europe and in China.

How powerful are multinational corporations today? They have developed transnational net-

works that allow them to take advantage of differ- ences in national cost conditions and regulations. Domestic economies are also suffering because multinational companies are becoming genuinely more multinational as they find it increasingly dif- ficult to win competitive advantage from their home base alone. In the past, even large multina- tional corporations like Sony retained many na- tional characteristics. Technological advantages were largely realized in their country of origin and were shared among various national stakeholders. This is less and less possible due to the significant growth of transnational corporate alliances, merg- ers, and acquisitions (such as Chrysler-Daimler) and the tendency of multinationals to invest in for- eign innovation clusters.

Nevertheless, multinationals are not "foot- loose." Production has to take place somewhere, and the costs of shifting can be high—especially where an area of industrial specialization gives strong reasons to stay. But their exit power, as re- cent events in Sweden and Germany show, has in- creased over time. And governments increasingly see multinationals as determining the balance of economic power in the world economy, with the power to play different governments off against each other to win extra subsidies for inward invest- ment or changes to regulatory requirements,

In the short term, governments will continue to respond to this pressure by trimming their na- tional regimes to balance domestic priorities and conditions with the demands of global capital. But we can expect increasing pressure for the transna- tional harmonization of corporate practices, taxes, and business regimes as an escape route from this Dutch auction.

F I N A N C E

Alongside multinationals the power of global fi- nance has been most central to economic global- ization. World financial flows are so large that the numbers are overwhelming. Every day, $1.5 tril- lion is traded on the foreign exchange markets as a few thousand traders seem to determine the eco- nomic fate of nations. Most countries today are

incorporated into global financial markets, but the nature of their access to these markets is highly un- even. When foreign exchange markets turn over sixty times the value of world trade, this is not just a staggering increase; it is a different type of activ- ity altogether. The instantaneous transactions of the twenty-four-hour global markets are largely speculative, where once most market activity fi- nanced trade and long-term investment.

The fact that these global markets determine countries' long-term interest rates and exchange rates does not mean that the financial markets sim- ply determine national economic policy. But they do radically alter both the costs of particular policy options and, crucially, policymakers' perceptions of costs and risk. Speculative activity on this scale brings both unprecedented uncertainty and volatil- ity—and can rapidly undermine financial institu- tions, currencies, and national economic strategies. It is not surprising that policymakers take a dis- tinctly risk-averse approach and therefore adopt a more conservative macroeconomic strategy as a re- sult. Even if there is often more room for maneu- ver with hindsight, future policy will change only marginally when the risks of getting it wrong ap- pear to be, and are, potentially so catastrophic.

The 1997 East Asian crisis forcibly demon- strated the impact of global financial markets and the shifting balance between public and private power. The global financial disruption triggered by the collapse of the Thai baht demonstrated new levels of economic interconnectedness. The "Asian tiger" economies had benefited from the rapid in- crease of financial flows to developing countries in the 1990s and were held up as examples to the rest of the world. But these heavy flows of short-term capital, often channeled into speculative activity, could be quickly reversed, causing currencies to fall very heavily and far in excess of any real eco- nomic imbalances. The inability of the existing in- ternational financial regime to prevent global economic turmoil has created a wide-ranging de- bate on its future institutional architecture—and the opportunity to promote issues of legitimacy, accountability, and effectiveness.

Another important change on the policymak-

ing menu arises from the exchange rate crises of the 1990s. Fixed exchange rates are ceasing to be a viable policy option in the face of global capital flows of this scale and intensity. The choice that countries face is increasingly between floating rates and monetary union—shown by the launch of the euro and discussion of dollarization in Latin America.

Globalization and the Environment

Environmental change has always been with us. What is new today is that some of the greatest threats are global—and any effective response will have to be global too. For most of human history, the main way in which environmental impacts cir- culated around the earth was through the uninten- tional transport of flora, fauna, and microbes. The great plagues showed how devastating the effects could be. The European colonization of the New World within a generation wiped out a substantial proportion of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean, Mexico, and parts of Latin America. Over the following centuries, these societies saw their ecosystems, landscapes, and agricultural sys- tems transformed. Early colonialism also damaged the environment in new ways. The Sumatran and Indian forests were destroyed to meet consumer demand in Europe and America. Seals were over- hunted to dangerously low levels. And some species of whale were hunted to extinction.

But most forms of environmental degradation were largely local until the middle of this century. Since then, the globalization of environmental degradation has accelerated. Fifty years of resource-intensive and high-pollution growth in the OECD countries and the even dirtier industri- alization of Russia, Eastern Europe, and the ex- Soviet states have taken their toll on the environment. The South is now industrializing at breakneck speed, driven by exponential growth of global population. We also know much more about the dangers and the damage that we have caused.

Humankind is increasingly aware that it faces an unprecedented array of truly global and re-

gional environmental problems, which no national community or single generation can tackle alone. We have reacted to global warming; to ozone de- pletion; to destruction of global rainforests and loss of biodiversity; to toxic waste; to the pollution of oceans and rivers; and to nuclear risks with a flurry of global and regional initiatives, institu- tions, regimes, networks, and treaties. Transna- tional environmental movements are also more politically visible than ever. But there has simply not been the political power, domestic support, or international authority so far on a scale that can do any more than limit the very worst excesses of these global environmental threats.

Governing Globalization

Contemporary globalization represents the begin- ning of a new epoch in human affairs. In trans- forming societies and world order, it is having as profound an impact as the Industrial Revolution and the global empires of the nineteenth century, We have seen that globalization is transforming our world, but in complex, multifaceted, and un- even ways. Although globalization has a long his- tory, it is today genuinely different both in scale and in form from what has gone before. Every new epoch creates new winners and losers. This one will be no different. Globalization to date has al- ready both widened the gap between the richest and poorest countries and further increased divi- sions within and across societies. It has inevitably become increasingly contested and polidcized,

National governments—sandwiched between global forces and local demands—must now re- consider their roles and functions. But to say sim- ply that states have lost power distorts what is happening, as does any suggestion that nothing much has changed. The real picture is much more complex. States today are at least as powerful, if not more so, than their predecessors on many fun- damental measures of power—from the capacity to raise taxes to the ability to hurl force at enemies. But the demands on states have grown very rapidly as well. They must often work together to pursue the public good—to prevent recession or to pro-

tect the environment. And transnational agree- ments, for example dealing with acid rain, will of- ten force national governments to adopt major changes in domestic policy.

So state power and political authority are shift- ing. States now deploy their sovereignty and au- tonomy as bargaining chips in multilateral and transnational negotiations, as they collaborate and coordinate actions in shifting regional and global networks. The right of most states to rule within circumscribed territories—their sovereignty—is not on the edge of collapse, although the practical nature of this entitlement—the actual capacity of states to rule—is changing its shape. The emerging shape of governance means that we need to stop thinking of state power as something that is indi- visible and territorially exclusive. It makes more sense to speak about the transformation of state power than the end of the state; the range of gov- ernment strategies stimulated by globalization are, in many fundamental respects, producing the po- tential for a more activist state.

But tire exercise of political and economic power now frequently escapes effective mecha- nisms of democratic control. And it will continue to do so while democracy remains rooted in a fixed and bounded territorial conception of political community. Globalization has disrupted the neat correspondence between national territory, sover- eignty, political space, and the democratic political community. It allows power to flow across, around, and over territorial boundaries. And so the challenge of globalization today is ultimately political. Just as the Industrial Revolution created new types of class politics, globalization demands that we re-form our existing territorially defined democratic institutions and practices so that poli- tics can continue to address human aspirations and needs,

This means rethinking politics. We need to take our established ideas about political equality, social justice, and liberty and refashion these into a coherent political project robust enough for a world where power is exercised on a transnational scale and where risks are shared by peoples across the world. And we need to think about what

institutions will allow us to tackle these global problems while responding to the aspirations of the people they are meant to serve.

This is not a time for pessimism. We are caught between nostalgia for causes defeated and ideas

lost, and excitement at the new possibilities that we face. We need to think in new ways. Globalization is not bringing about the death of politics. It is reil- luminating and reinvigorating the contemporary political terrain.

T H O M A S F R I E D M A N

The Backlash

Analysts have been wondering for a while now whether the turtles who are left behind by globalization, or most brutalized or of- fended by it, will develop an alternative ideology to liberal, free-market capitalism. * * * [I]n the first era of globalization, when the world first experi- enced the creative destruction of global capitalism, the backlash eventually produced a whole new set of ideologies—communism, socialism, fascism— that promised to take the sting out of capitalism, particularly for the average working person. Now that these ideologies have been discredited, I doubt we will see a new coherent, universal ideological re- action to globalization—because I don't believe there is an ideology or program that can remove all of the brutality and destructiveness of capitalism and still produce steadily rising standards of living,

Another reason the backlash against globaliza- tion is unlikely to develop a coherent alternative ideology is because the backlash itself involves so many disparate groups—as evidenced by the coali- tion of protectionist labor unions, environmental- ists, anti-sweatshop protestors, save-the-turtles activists, save-the-dolphins activists, anti-geneti- cally altered food activists and even a group called

From Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York; Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999; reprint, New York Anchor Books, 2000), chap. 15 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

"Alien Hand Signals," who came together in De- cember 1999 to protest globalization at the Seattle WTO summit. These disparate groups are bound by a common sense that a world so dominated by global corporations, and their concerns, can't help but be a profoundly unfair world, and one that is as hostile to the real interests of human beings as it is to turtles. But when it comes to actually identify- ing what the real interests of human beings are and how they should be protected, these groups are as different as their costumes. The auto work- ers, steelworkers and longshoremen, who were in Seattle to demand more protectionism, doubtlessly couldn't care much whether America allows im- ports of tuna caught in nets that also snare turtles. Indeed, I wouldn't want to be the turtle that gets in the way of one of those longshoremen offloading a boat in Seattle harbor. This makes the power of the backlash hard to predict, because while all the groups can agree that globalization is hurtful to them, they have no shared agenda, ideology or strategy for making it less so for all.

That's why 1 suspect that the human turtles, and many of those who simply hate the changes that globalization visits on cultures, environment or communities, are not going to bother with an alternative ideology. Their backlash will take a va- riety of different spasmodic forms. The steelwork- ers will lobby Washington to put up walls against foreign steel. Others, such as the radical environ- mentalists who want to save the rain forest, will

simply lash out at globalization and all its manifes- tations, without offering a sustainable economic alternative. Their only message will be: STOP.

As for the poorest human turdes in the devel- oping world, those really left behind by globaliza- tion, they will express their backlash by simply eating the rain forest—each in their own way— without trying to explain it or justify it or wrap it in an ideological bow. In Indonesia, they will eat the Chinese merchants by ransacking their stores. In Russia, they will sell weapons to Iran or turn to crime. In Brazil, they will log the rest of the rain forest or join the peasant movement in the Brazil- ian countryside called "Sem Teto" (Without Roofs), who simply steal what they need. There are an estimated 3.5 million of them in Brazil— agricultural people without land, living in some 250 encampments around the country. Sometimes they live by the roads and just close the roads until they are paid or evicted, sometimes they invade su- permarkets, rob banks or steal trucks. They have no flag, no manifesto. They have only their own unmet needs and aspirations. That's why what we have been seeing in many countries, instead of popular mass opposition to globalization, is wave after wave of crime—people just grabbing what they need, weaving their own social safety nets and not worrying about the theory or ideology.

But while this backlash may be a bit incoherent and only loosely connected, it is very real. It comes from the depth of people's souls and pocketbooks and therefore, if it achieves a critical mass, can in- fluence politics in any country. Societies ignore it at their own peril.

In almost every country that has put on the Golden Straitjacket you have at least one populist party or major candidate who is campaigning all the time now against globalization. They offer var- ious protectionist, populist solutions that they claim will produce the same standards of living, without having to either run so fast, trade so far or open the borders so wide. They all claim that by just putting up a few new walls here and there everything will be fine. They appeal to all the peo- ple who prefer their pasts to their future. In Rus-

sia, for instance, the communist members of the Duma continue to lead a backlash against global- ization by telling the working classes and pension- ers that in the days of the Soviet Union they may have had lousy jobs and been forced to wait in breadlines, but they always knew there would be a job and always knew there would be some bread they could afford at the head of the line. The strength of these populist, antiglobalization candi- dates depends to a large degree on the weakness of the economy in the country that they are in. Usu- ally, the weaker the economy, the wider the follow- ing these simplistic solutions will attract.

But these antiglobalization populists don't only thrive in bad times. In 1998, a majority of the U.S. Congress refused to give the President authority to expand NAFTA to Chile—little Chile—on the ar- gument that this would lead to a loss of American jobs. This wrongheaded view carried the day at a time when the American stock market was at a record high, American unemployment was at a record low and virtually every study showed that NAFTA had been a win-win-win arrangement for the United States, Canada and Mexico. Think of how stupid this was: The U.S. Congress appropri- ated $18 billion to replenish the International Monetary Fund, so that it could do more bail- outs of countries struggling with globalization, but the Congress would not accept expansion of the NAFTA free trade zone to Chile. What is the logic of that? It could only be: "We support aid, not trade."

It makes no sense, but the reason these argu- ments can resonate in good times as well as bad is that moments of rapid change like this breed enor- mous insecurity as well as enormous prosperity. They can breed in people a powerful sense that their lives are now controlled by forces they cannot see or touch. The globalization system is still too new for too many people, and involves too much change for too many people, for them to have con- fidence that even the good job they have will al- ways be there. And this creates a lot of room for backlash demagogues with simplistic solutions. It also creates a powerful feeling in some people that

we need to slow this world down, put back some walls or some sand in the gears—not so 1 can get off, but so I can stay on.

And don't kid yourself, the backlash is not just an outburst from the most downtrodden. Like all rev- olutions, globalization involves a shift in power from one group to another. In most countries it involves a power shift from the state and its bu- reaucrats to the private sector and entrepreneurs. As this happens, all those who derived their status from positions in the bureaucracy, or from their ties to it, or from their place in a highly regulated and protected economic system, can become los- ers—if they can't make the transition to the Fast World, This includes industrialists and cronies who were anointed with import or export monop- olies by their government, business owners who were protected by the government through high import tariffs on the products they made, big labor unions who got used to each year whining fewer work hours with more pay in constantly protected markets, workers in state-owned factories who got paid whether the factory made a profit or not, the unemployed in welfare states who enjoyed rela- tively generous benefits and health care no matter what, and all those who depended on the largesse of the state to protect them from the global market and free them from its most demanding aspects.

This explains why, in some countries, the strongest backlash against globalization comes not just from the poorest segments of the population and the turtles, but rather from the "used-to-bes" in the middle and lower-middle classes, who found a great deal of security in the protected commu- nist, socialist and welfare systems. As they have seen the walls of protection around them coming down, as they have seen the rigged games in which they flourished folded up and the safety nets under them shrink, many have become mighty unhappy. And unlike the turdes, these downwardly mobile groups have the political clout to organize against globalization. The AFL-CIO labor union federa- tion has become probably the most powerful polit- ical force against globalization in the United States.

Labor unions covertly funded a lot of the advertis- ing on behalf of the demonstrations in Seattle to encourage grass-roots opposition to free trade.

One of my first tastes of this middle-class back- lash against globalization came by accident when I was in Beijing talking to Wang Jisi, who heads the North America desk at the Chinese Academy of So- cial Sciences. We drifted from talking about Amer- ica to talking about his own life in a China that was rapidly moving toward the free market, which many Chinese both welcome and fear. "The market mechanism is coming to China, but the question is how to impose it," said Wang. "I depend on my work unit for my housing. If all the housing goes to a free-market system, I might lose my housing. I am not a conservative, but when it comes to practi- cal issues like this, people can become conservatives if they are just thrown onto the market after being accustomed to being taken care of. * * * "

You don't have to have been a communist worker bee to feel this way. Peter Schwartz, chair- man of the Global Business Network, a consulting firm, once told me about a conversation he had be- fore being interviewed in London for an econom- ics program on the BBC: "The British reporter for the show, while escorting me to the interview, was asking me about some of my core ideas. I alluded to the idea that Britain was a good example of the takeoff of the entrepreneurial economy—particu- larly compared to the rest of Europe—and that the best indicator of the difference was the difference in unemployment in the U.K. and continental Eu- rope. At that point he said to me: 'Isn't that terri- ble? Unemployment benefits are now so low in Britain it isn't worth staying on the dole anymore and people have to go to work.' "

Schwartz then added: "There are people who see this transformation [to globalization] as a big loss, not a gain. They are losing not just a benefit but something they perceived as a right—the no- tion that modem industrial societies are so wealthy that it is the right of people to receive generous un- employment insurance,"

If you want to see this war between the pro- tected and the globalizers at its sharpest today, go

to the Arab world. In 1996, Egypt was scheduled to host the Middle East Economic Summit, which was to bring together Western, Asian, Arab and Is- raeli business executives. The Egyptian bureau- cracy fought bitterly against holding the summit. In part, this was politically inspired by those in Egypt who did not feel Israel had done enough vis- a-vis the Palestinians to really merit normalization. But in part it was because the Egyptian bureau- crats, who had dominated the Egyptian economy ever since Nasser nationalized all the big commer- cial institutions in the 1960s, intuitively under- stood that this summit could be the first step in their losing power to the private sector, which was already being given the chance to purchase various state-owned enterprises and could eventually get its hands on the state-controlled media. The Is- lamic opposition newspaper al-Shaab denounced the economic summit as "the Conference of Shame." For the first time, though, the Egyptian private sector got itself organized into power lobbies—the American-Egypt Chamber of Com- merce, the President's Council of Egyptian business leaders and the Egypt Businessmen's Association—and tugged President Mubarak the other way, saying that hosting a summit with hun- dreds of investors from around the world was es- sential to produce jobs for an Egyptian workforce growing by 400,000 new entrants each year. Presi- dent Mubarak went back and forth, finally siding with the private sector and agreeing to host the summit, and bluntly declaring in his opening speech: "This year Egypt joined the global econ- omy, It will live by its rules." But the Egyptian bu- reaucracy, which does not want to cede any power to the private sector, is still fighting that move, and every time there is a downturn in the global econ- omy, such as the Asian collapse in 1998, the Egyp- tian bureaucrats go to Mubarak and say, "See, we told you so. We need to slow down, put up some new walls, otherwise what happened to Brazil will happen to us."

For a long time, I thought that this Egyptian re- luctance to really plug into the globalization system was rooted simply in the ignorance of bureaucrats, and a total lack of vision from the top. But then I

had an eye-opening experience. I did an author's tour of Egypt in early 2000, meeting with students at Cairo University, journalists at Egyptian newspa- pers and business leaders in Cairo and Alexandria to talk about the Arabic edition of this book.

Two images stood out from this trip. The first was riding the train from Cairo to Alexandria in a car full of middle- and upper-class Egyptians. So many of them had cell phones that kept ringing with different piercing melodies during the two- hour trip that at one point I felt like getting up, taking out a baton and conducting a cell-phone symphony. I was so rattled from ringing phones, I couldn't wait to get off the train. Yet, while all these phones were chirping inside the train, out- side we were passing along the Nile, where bare- foot Egyptian villagers were tilling their fields with the same tools and water buffalo that their ances- tors used in Pharaoh's day. I couldn't imagine a wider technology gap within one country. Inside the train it was A.D. 2000, outside it was 2000 B.C.

The other image was visiting Yousef Boutrous- Ghali, Egypt's M.I.T.-trained minister of economy, When I arrived at his building the elevator opera- tor, an Egyptian peasant, was waiting for me at the elevator, which he operated with a key. Before he turned it on, though, to take me up to the minis- ter's office, he whispered the Koranic verse "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." To a Westerner, it is unnerving to hear your eleva- tor operator utter a prayer before he closes the door, but for him this was a cultural habit, rooted deep in his tradition. Again, the contrast: Mr, Boutrous-Ghali is the most creative, high-tech driver of globalization in Egypt, but his elevator man says a prayer before taking you up to his office.

These scenes captured for me the real tension at the heart of Egypt: while its small, cell-phone- armed, globalizing elites were definitely pushing to get online and onto the global economic train, most others feared they would be left behind or lose their identity trying to catch it. Indeed I was struck, after a week of discussing both the costs and benefits of globalization, how most Egyp- tians, including many intellectuals, could see only the costs. The more I explained globalization, the

more they expressed unease about it. It eventually struck me that I was encountering what an- thropologists call "systematic misunderstanding." Systematic misunderstanding arises when your framework and the other person's framework are so fundamentally different that it cannot be cor- rected by providing more information.

The Egyptians' unease about globalization is rooted partly in a justifiable fear that they still lack the technological base to compete. But it's also rooted in something cultural—and not just the professor at Cairo University asked me: "Does globalization mean we all have to become Ameri- cans?" The unease goes deeper, and you won't understand the backlash against globalization in traditional societies unless you understand it. Many Americans can easily identify with modern- ization, technology and the Internet because one of the most important things these do is increase in- dividual choices. At their best, they empower and emancipate the individual. But for traditional soci- eties, such as Egypt's, the collective, the group, is much more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with divid- ing the society. So "globalizing" for them not only means being forced to eat more Big Macs, it means changing the relationship of the individual to his state and community in a way that they feel is so- cially disintegrating.

"Does globalization mean we just leave the poor to fend for themselves?" one educated Egyp- tian woman asked me. "How do we privatize when we have no safety nets?" asked a professor. When the government here says it is "privatizing" an in- dustry, the instinctive reaction of Egyptians is that something is being "stolen" from the state, said a senior Egyptian official.

After enough such conversations I realized that most Egyptians—understandably—were approach- ing globalization out of a combination of despair and necessity, not out of any sense of opportunity. Globalization meant adapting to a threat coming from the outside, not increasing their own free- doms. I also realized that their previous ideolo- gies—Arab nationalism, socialism, fascism or communism—while they may have made no eco-

nomic sense, had a certain inspirational power. But globalism totally lacks this. When you tell a tradi- tional society it has to streamline, downsize and get with the Internet, it is a challenge that is devoid of any redemptive or inspirational force. And that is why, for all of globalization's obvious power to ele- vate living standards, it is going to be a tough, tough sell to all those millions who still say a prayer before they ride the elevator.

This tug-of-war is now going on all over the Arab world today, from Morocco to Kuwait. As one senior Arab finance official described this globalization struggle in his country: "Sometimes I feel like I am part of the Freemasons or some secret society, because I am looking at the world so dif- ferently from many of the people around me. There is a huge chasm between the language and vocabulary I have and them. It is not that I have failed to convince them. I often can't even commu- nicate with them, they are so far away from this global outlook. So for me, when I am pushing a policy issue related to globalization, the question always becomes how many people can I rally to this new concept and can I create a critical mass to effect a transition? If you can get enough of your people in the right places, you can push the system along. But it's hard. On so many days I feel like I have people coming to me and saying, 'We really need to repaint the room.' And I'm saying, 'No, we really need to rebuild the whole building on a new foundation.' So their whole dialogue with you is about what color paint to use, and all you can see in your head is the whole new architecture that needs to be done and the new foundations that need to be laid. We can worry about the color of paint later! Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, they now have that critical mass of people and officials who can see this world. But most developing countries are not there yet, which is why their transition is still so uncertain."

In Morocco, the government is privatizing simply by selling many state-owned enterprises to the same small economic clique tied to the royal palace that once dominated the state monopolies. This is why 3 percent of Morocco's population controls 85 percent of the country's wealth. M o -

rocco's universities, which uniquely combine the worst of the socialist and French education sys- tems, each year turn out so many graduates who cannot find jobs, and have no entrepreneurial or technical skills suited for today's information economy, that Morocco now has a "Union of Un- employed University Graduates."

As more countries have plugged into the globaliza- tion system and the Fast World, still another new backlash group has started to form—the wounded gazelles. This group comprises people who feel they have tried globalization, who have gotten hammered by the system, and who, instead of get- ting up, dusting themselves off and doing whatever it takes to get back into the Fast World are now trying artificially to shut it out or get the rules of the whole system changed. The poster boy for this group is Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir. Hell hath no wrath like a globalizer burned. On October 25, 1997, in the midst of the Asian eco- nomic meltdown, Mahathir told the Edinburgh Commonwealth Summit that the global econ- omy—which had poured billions of dollars of in- vestments into Malaysia, without which its spectacular growth would never have been possi- ble—had become "anarchic."

"This is an unfair world," Mahathir fumed. "Many of us have struggled hard and even shed blood in order to be independent. When borders are down and the world becomes a single entity, independence can become meaningless."

Not surprisingly, in 1998 Mahathir was the first Asian globalizer to impose capital controls in an effort to halt the wild speculative swings in his own currency and stock market. When Singapore's Minister for Information, George Yeo, described Mahathir's move at the time, he said, "Malaysia has retreated to a lagoon and is trying to anchor its boats, but the strategy is not without risk."

Indeed it is not. If you think you can retreat permanently into an artificially constructed third space, and enjoy all the rising living standards of the Fast World without any of the pressures, you

are really fooling yourself and your people. Never- theless, Mahathir's retreat, which proved to be only temporary, was received with a certain amount of sympathy in the developing world— although it was not copied by anyone. As we enter this second decade of globalization, there is an in- creasing awareness among those countries that have resisted the Golden Straitjacket and the Fast World that they cannot go on resisting. And they know that a strategy of retreat will not produce growth over the long run. For several years I would meet Emad El-Din Adeeb, editor of the Egyptian journal Al Alam Al Youm, at different World Bank meetings and other settings, and for several years he would express to me strong reservations about Egypt joining this globalization system. When I saw him in 1999, at the Davos Forum, he said to me, "O.K., I understand we need to get prepared for this globalization and that is partly our respon- sibility. There is a train that is leaving and we should have known this and done our homework. But now you should slow the train down a bit and give us a chance to jump on."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that 1 had just come from a press lunch with Bill Gates. Al l the re- porters there kept asking him, "Mr. Gates, these Internet stocks, they're a bubble, right? Surely, they're a bubble. They must be a bubble?" Finally, an exasperated Gates said to the reporters: Look, of course they're a bubble, but you're all missing the point. This bubble is going to attract so much new capital to this Internet industry that it is going to drive innovation "faster and faster." So there I was: in the morning listening to Bill Gates telling me that the Fast World was about to get even faster and in the afternoon listening to Adeeb tell me he wanted to hop on but could someone just slow it down a bit,

I wish we could slow this globalization train down, I told Adeeb, but there's no one at the con- trols.

* * *

Universal Truths: Human Rights and the

Westernizing Illusion

y students seem to be very concerned and also very divided on how to ap- proach the difficult subject of human

rights in non-Western societies. Is it right, the question is often asked, that non-Western societies should be encouraged and pressed to conform to "Western values of liberty and freedom"? Is this not cultural imperialism? The notion of human rights builds on the idea of a shared humanity. These rights are not derived from citizenship of any country, or membership of any nation, but taken as entitlements of every human being. The concept of universal human rights is, in this sense, a uniting idea. Yet the subject of human rights has ended up being a veritable battleground of political debates and ethical disputes, particu- larly in their application to non-Western societies. Why so?

A Clash of Cultures?

The explanation for this is sometimes sought in the cultural differences that allegedly divide the world, a theory referred to as the "clash of civilizations" or a "battle between cultures." It is often asserted that Western countries recognize many human rights, related for example to political liberty, that have no great appeal in Asian countries. Many people see a big divide here. The temptation to think in these

From Harvard International Review 20, no. 3 (summer 1998): 40-43. This article is a revised version of the Commencement Address given at Bard College on May 24,1997. Related arguments were presented in Pro- fessor Sen's Morgenthau Memorial Lecture ("Human Rights and Asian Values") at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs on May 1, 1997, and published by the Carnegie Council.

regional and cultural terms is extremely strong in the contemporary world.

Are there really such firm differences on this subject in terms of traditions and cultures across the world? It is certainly true that governmental spokesmen in several Asian countries have not only disputed the relevance and cogency of univer- sal human rights, they have frequently done this disputing in the name of "Asian values," as a con- trast with Western values. The claim is that in the system of so-called Asian values, for example in the Confucian system, there is greater emphasis on or- der and discipline, and less on rights and freedoms.

Many Asian spokesmen have gone on to argue that the call for universal acceptance of human rights reflects the imposition of Western values on other cultures. For example, the censorship of the press may be more acceptable, it is argued, in Asian society because of its greater emphasis on disci- pline and order. This position was powerfully ar- ticulated by a number of governmental spokesmen from Asia at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993. Some positive things happened at that conference, including the general acceptance of the importance of eliminating economic depri- vation and some recognition of social responsibil- ity in this area. But on the subject of political and civil rights the conference split through the middle, largely on regional lines, with several Asian gov- ernments rejecting the recognition of basic politi- cal and civil rights. In this argument, the rhetoric of "Asian values" and their differences from West- ern priorities played an important part.

If one influence in separating out human rights as specifically "Western" comes from the pleading of governmental spokesmen from Asia, another in- fluence relates to the way this issue is perceived in

the West itself. There is a tendency in Europe and the United States to assume, if only implicidy, that it is in the West—and only in the West—that human rights have been valued from ancient times. This allegedly unique feature of Western civilization has been, it is assumed, an alien con- cept elsewhere. By stressing regional and cultural specificities, these Western theories of the origin of human rights tend to reinforce, rather in- advertendy, the disputation of universal human rights in non-Western societies. By arguing that the valuing of toleration, of personal liberty, and of civil rights is a particular contribution of West- ern civilization, Western advocates of these rights often give ammunition to the non-Western critics of human rights. The advocacy of an allegedly "alien" idea in non-Western societies can indeed look like cultural imperialism sponsored by the West.

Modernity as Tradition

How much truth is there in this grand cultural dichotomy between Western and non-Western civilizations on the subject of liberty and rights? I believe there is rather little sense in such a grand dichotomy. Neither the claims in favor of the specialness of "Asian values" by govern- mental spokesmen from Asia, nor the particular claims for the uniqueness of "Western values" by spokesmen from Europe and America can survive much historical examination and critical scrutiny.

In seeing Western civilization as the natural habitat of individual freedom and political democ- racy, there is a tendency to extrapolate backwards from the present. Values that the European En- lightenment and other recent developments since the eighteenth century have made common and widespread are often seen, quite arbitrarily, as part of the long-run Western heritage, experienced in the West over millennia. The concept of universal human rights in the broad general sense of entitle- ments of every human being is really a relatively new idea, not to be much found either in the an- cient West or in ancient civilizations elsewhere.

There are, however, other ideas, such as the value of toleration, or the importance of individual freedom, which have been advocated and defended for a long time, often for the selected few. For ex- ample, Aristotle's writings on freedom and human flourishing provide good background material for the contemporary ideas of human rights. But there are other Western philosophers (Plato and St. Au- gustine, for example) whose preference for order and discipline over freedom was no less pro- nounced than Confucius' priorities. Also, even those in the West who did emphasize the value of freedom did not, typically, see this as a fight of all human beings. Aristotle's exclusion of women and slaves is a good illustration of this non- universality. The defenses of individual freedom in Western tradition did exist but took a limited and contingent form.

Confucius and Co.

Do we find similar pronouncements in favor of in- dividual freedom in non-Western traditions, par- ticularly in Asia? The answer is emphatically yes. Confucius is not the only philosopher in Asia, not even in China. There is much variety in Asian in- tellectual traditions, and many writers did empha- size the importance of freedom and tolerance, and some even saw this as the entitlement of every human being. The language of freedom is very im- portant, for example, in Buddhism, which origi- nated and first flourished in South Asia and then spread to Southeast Asia and East Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. In this context it is important to recognize that Buddhist philoso- phy not only emphasized freedom as a form of life but also gave it a political content. To give just one example, the Indian emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE presented many political inscriptions in favor of tolerance and individual freedom, both as a part of state policy and in the relation of differ- ent people to each other. The domain of toleration, Ashoka argued, must include everybody without exception.

Even the portrayal of Confucius as an unmiti- gated authoritarian is far from convincing.

Confucius did believe in order, but he did not rec- ommend blind allegiance to the state. When Zilu asks him how to serve a prince, Confucius replies, "Tell him the truth even if it offends him"—a pol- icy recommendation that may encounter some dif- ficulty in contemporary Singapore or Beijing. Of course, Confucius was a practical man, and he did not recommend that we foolhardily oppose estab- lished power, He did emphasize practical caution and tact, but also insisted on the importance of op- position. "When the [good] Way prevails in the state, speak boldly and act boldly. When the state has lost the Way, act boldly and speak softly," he said.

The main point to note is that both Western and non-Western traditions have much variety within themselves. Both in Asia and in the West, some have emphasized order and discipline, even as others have focused on freedom and tolerance. The idea of human rights as an entitlement of every human being, with an unqualified universal scope and highly articulated structure, is really a recent development; in this demanding form it is not an ancient idea either in the West or elsewhere. But there are limited and qualified defenses of free- dom and tolerance, and general arguments against censorship, that can be found both in ancient tra- ditions in the West and in cultures of non-Western societies.

Islam and Tolerance

Special questions are often raised about the Islamic tradition. Because of the experience of contempo- rary political battles, especially in the Middle East, the Islamic civilization is often portrayed as being fundamentally intolerant and hostile to individual freedom. But the presence of diversity and variety within a tradition applies very much to Islam as well. The Turkish emperors were often more tol- erant than their European contemporaries. The Mughal emperors in India, with one exception, were not only extremely tolerant, but some even theorized about the need for tolerating diversity, The pronouncements of Akbar, the great Mughal emperor in sixteenth century India, on tolerance

can count among the classics of political pro- nouncements, and would have received more attention in the West had Western political histori- ans taken as much interest in Eastern thought as they do in their own intellectual background. For comparison, I should mention that the Inquisi- tions were still in full bloom in Europe as Akbar was making it a state policy to tolerate and protect all religious groups.

A Jewish scholar like Maimonides in the twelfth century had to run away from an intolerant Europe and from its persecution of Jews for the security offered by a tolerant Cairo and the pa- tronage of Sultan Saladin. Alberuni, the Iranian mathematician, who wrote the first general book on India in the early eleventh century, aside from translating Indian mathematical treatises into Ara- bic, was among the earliest of anthropological the- orists in the world. He noted and protested against the fact that "depreciation of foreigners . . . is common to all nations towards each other." He devoted much of his life to fostering mutual un- derstanding and tolerance in his eleventh-century world.

Authority and Dissidence

The recognition of diversity within different cul- tures is extremely important in the contemporary world, since we are constantly bombarded by over- simplified generalizations about "Western civiliza- tion, . . . Asian values," "African cultures," and so on. These unfounded readings of history and civi- lization are not only intellectually shallow, they also add to the divisiveness of the world in which we live. Boorishness begets violence.

The fact is that in any culture people like to ar- gue with each other, and often do. I recollect being amused in my childhood by a well-known poem in Bengali from nineteenth century Calcutta, The poet is describing the horror of death, the sting of mortality. "Just think," the poem runs, "how terri- ble it would be on the day you die / Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to respond." The worst sting of death would appear to be, in this view, the inability to argue, and this illustrates

how seriously we take our differences and our de- bates.

Dissidents exist in every society, often at great risk to their own security. Western discussion of non-Western societies is often too respectful of authority—the governor, the Minister, the military leader, the religious leader. This "authoritarian bias" receives support from the fact that Western countries themselves are often represented, in in- ternational gatherings, by governmental officials and spokesmen, and they in turn seek the views of their "opposite numbers" from other countries.

The view that Asian values are quintessentially authoritarian has tended to come almost exclu- sively from spokesmen of those in power and their advocates. But foreign ministers, or government officials, or religious leaders do not have a monop- oly in interpreting local culture and values. It is important to listen to the voices of dissent in each society.

National and Cultural Diversity

To conclude, the so-called "Western values of free- dom and liberty," sometimes seen as an ancient Western inheritance, are not particularly ancient,

nor exclusively Western in their antecedence. Many of these values have taken their full form only over the last few centuries, While we do find some anticipatory components in parts of the an- cient Western traditions, there are other such an- ticipatory components in parts of non-Western ancient traditions as well. On the particular subject of toleration, Plato and Confucius may be on a somewhat similar side, just as Aristotle and Ashoka may be on another side.

The need to acknowledge diversity applies not only between nations and cultures, but also within each nation and culture. In the anxiety to take ade- quate note of international diversity and cultural divergences, and the so-called differences between "Western civilization," "Asian values," "African culture," and so on, there is often a dramatic ne- glect of heterogeneity within each country and cul- ture. "Nations" and "cultures" are not particularly good units to understand and analyze intellectual and political differences. Lines of division in commitments and skepticism do not run along na- tional boundaries—they criss-cross at many dif- ferent levels. The rhetoric of cultures, with each "culture" seen in largely homogenized terms, can confound us politically as well as intellectually.