The increasing density of international regimes has contributed to the proliferation of overlap across agreements, conflicts among international obligations, and confusion regarding what international and bilateral obligations cover an issue. This symposium examines the consequences of this “international regime complexity” for subsequent politics. What analytical insights can be gained by thinking about any single agreement as being embedded in a larger web of international rules and regimes? Karen Alter and Sophie Meunier's introductory essay defines international regime complexity and identifies the mechanisms through which it may influence the politics of international cooperation. Short contributions analyze how international regime complexity affects politics in specific issue areas: trade (Christina Davis), linkages between human rights and trade (Emilie Hafner-Burton), intellectual property (Laurence Helfer), security politics (Stephanie Hofmann), refugee politics (Alexander Betts), and election monitoring (Judith Kelley). Daniel Drezner concludes by arguing that international regime complexity may well benefit the powerful more than others.

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The Politics of International Regime Complexity

The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such a policy without fear of serious opposition. The most consequential effect of the Bush strategy will be a fundamental transformation in how major states perceive the United States and how they react to future uses of U.S. power. Major powers are already engaging in the early stages of balancing behavior against the United States, by adopting “soft-balancing” measures that do not directly challenge U.S. military preponderance but use international institutions, economic statecraft, and diplomatic arrangements to delay, frustrate, and undermine U.S. policies. If th...

Soft Balancing against the United States

of China (PRC) is more integrated into, and more cooperative within, regional and global political and economic systems than ever in its history. Yet there is growing uneasiness in the United States and the Asia-Paciac region about the implications of China’s increasing economic and military power. Characterizations of Chinese diplomacy in the policy and scholarly worlds are, if anything, less optimistic of late about China’s adherence to regional and international norms. In the 1980s there was little discussion in the United States and elsewhere about whether China was or was not part of something called “the international community.” Since the early 1990s, however, scholars and practitioners alike have argued increasingly that China has not demonstrated sufaciently that it will play by so-called international rules and that somehow it must be brought into this community. The subtext is a fairly sharp othering of China that includes a civilizing discourse (China is not yet a civilized state) or perhaps a sports discourse (China is a cheater). Many of the most vigorous policy debates in the United States in recent years have been over whether it is even possible to socialize a dictatorial, nationalistic, and dissatisaed China within this putative international community. Engagers argue that China is becoming socialized, though mainly in the sphere of economic norms (e.g., free trade and domestic marketization). Skeptics either conclude that this is not the case, due to the nature of the regime (for some, China is still Red China; for more sophisticated skeptics, China is oirting with fascism), or that it could not possibly happen because China as a rising power, by deanition, is dissatisaed with the U.S.-dominated global order (a power-transition realpolitik argument). A logical conclusion is that both groups view the problem of China’s rising power as the primary Is China a Status Quo Power?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4137603.pdf

Is China a Status Quo Power

1. Power and global governance Michael N. Barnett and Raymond Duvall 2. Power, institutions, and the production of inequality Andrew Hurrell 3. Policing and global governance Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes 4. Power, fairness and the global economy Ethan Kapstein 5. Power politics and the institutionalization of international relations Lloyd Gruber 6. Power, nested governance, and the WTO: a comparative institutional approach Greg Shaffer 7. The power of liberal international organizations Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore 8. The power of interpretive communities Ian Johnstone 9. Class powers and the politics of global governance Mark Rupert 10. Global civil society and global governmentality: or, the search for the political and the state amidst capillaries of power Ronnie Lipschutz 11. Governing the innocent? The 'civilian' in international law Helen Kinsella 12. Colonial and postcolonial global governance Himadeep Muppidi 13. Knowledge in power: the epistemic construction of global governance Emanuel Adler and Steven Bernstein.

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Power in global governance

What makes international threats credible? Recent theories point to domestic audience costs—the domestic price a leader would pay for making foreign threats and then backing down+ This article provides the first direct evidence of audi- ence costs+ The analysis, based on experiments embedded in public opinion surveys, shows that audience costs exist across a wide range of conditions and increase with the level of escalation+ The costs are evident throughout the population, and espe- cially among politically active citizens who have the greatest potential to shape government policy+ Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that audience costs arise because citizens care about the international reputation of the country or leader+ These findings help identify how, and under what conditions, domestic audiences make commitments credible+ At the same time, they demonstrate the promise of using ex- periments to answer previously intractable questions in the field of international relations+

Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations: An Experimental Approach

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, sadly shattered these idyllic illusions, and John Mearsheimer's masterful new book explains why these harmonious visions remain utopian. To Mearsheimer, great power politics are tragic because the anarchy of the international system requires states to seek dominance at one another's expense, dooming even peaceful nations to a relentless power struggle. Mearsheimer illuminates his theory of offensive realism through a sweeping survey of modern great power struggles and reflects on the bleak prospects for peace in Europe and northeast Asia, arguing that the United States's security competition with a rising China will intensify regardless of \"engagement\" policies.

P. F. Coogan

Papers

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics