Scholars and policymakers alike have recently begun to tout the ability of international organizations (IOs) to encourage and secure democracy throughout the world. Despite this stance, little theoretical attention or empirical investigation has attempted to ascertain why or whether this relationship truly exists. One challenge to answering this puzzle is that extant theories of international institutions do not generally delineate clear hypotheses about how IOs influence domestic politics. In this article, I address this paucity of both theory and empirical evidence. I delineate three causal mechanisms that link IOs to domestic actors' calculations about political liberalization and test the argument. I find that membership in regional IOs is correlated with transitions to democracy during the period from 1950 to 1992.

Democracy from the Outside-In? International Organizations and Democratization

Informal agreements are the most common form of international cooperation and the least studied. Ranging from simple oral deals to detailed executive agreements, they permit states to conclude profitable bargains without the formality of treaties. They differ from treaties in more than just a procedural sense. Treaties are designed, by long-standing convention, to raise the credibility of promises by staking national reputation on their adherence. Informal agreements have a more ambiguous status and are useful for precisely that reason. They are chosen to avoid formal and visible national pledges, to avoid the political obstacles of ratification, to reach agreements quickly and quietly, and to provide flexibility for subsequent modification or even renunciation. They differ from formal agreements not because their substance is less important (the Cuban missile crisis was solved by informal agreement) but because the underlying promises are less visible and more equivocal. The prevalence of such informal devices thus reveals not only the possibilities of international cooperation but also the practical obstacles and the institutional limits to endogenous enforcement.

Why are some international agreements informal

This course explores the history of early-modern and modern China, from the seventeenth century to the present. We will examine the rise and fall of China’s last empire, the emergence of a modern nation-state, the sources and development of revolution, and the implications of complex social, political, cultural, and economic transformations in the People’s Republic of China. Course materials include scholarly monographs, a memoir, primary sources, and visual and material artifacts that offer diverse perspectives. We will meet twice a week for a combination of lectures, discussion, and viewing of visual texts.

The search for modern China

The relationship between foreign trade and political conflict has been a persistent source of controversy among scholars of international relations. Existing empirical studies of this topic have focused on the effects of trade flows on conflict, but they have largely ignored the institutional context in which trade is conducted. In this article we present some initial quantitative results pertaining to the influence on military disputes of preferential trading arrangements (PTAs), a broad class of commercial institutions that includes free trade areas, common markets, and customs unions. We argue that parties to the same PTA are less prone to disputes than other states and that hostilities between PTA members are less likely to occur as trade flows rise between them. Moreover, we maintain that heightened commerce is more likely to inhibit conflict between states that belong to the same preferential grouping than between states that do not. Our results accord with this argument. Based on an analysis of the period since World War II, we find that trade flows have relatively little effect on the likelihood of disputes between states that do not participate in the same PTA. Within PTAs, however, there is a strong, inverse relationship between commerce and conflict. Parties to such an arrangement are less likely to engage in hostilities than other states, and the likelihood of a military dispute dips markedly as trade increases between them.

/pdf/trade-blocs-trade-flows-and-international-conflict-5gbyespf3c.pdf

Trade Blocs, Trade Flows, and International Conflict

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of regionalism in world politics. Old regionalist organizations have been revived, new organizations formed, and regionalism and the call for strengthened regionalist arrangements have been central to many of the debates about the nature of the post-Cold War international order. The number, scope and diversity of regionalist schemes have grown significantly since the last major ‘regionalist wave’ in the 1960s. Writing towards the end of this earlier regionalist wave, Joseph Nye could point to two major classes of regionalist activity: on the one hand, micro-economic organizations involving formal economic integration and characterized by formal institutional structures; and on the other, macro-regional political organizations concerned with controlling conflict. Today, in the political field, regional dinosaurs such as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have re-emerged. They have been joined both by a large number of aspiring micro-regional bodies (such as the Visegrad Pact and the Pentagonale in central Europe; the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the Middle East; ECOWAS and possibly a revived Southern African Development Community (SADC, formerly SADCC) led by post-apartheid South Africa in Africa), and by loosely institutionalized meso-regional security groupings such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) and more recently the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). In the economic field, micro-regional schemes for economic cooperation or integration (such as the Southern Cone Common Market, Mercosur, the Andean Pact, the Central American Common Market (CACM) and CARICOM in the Americas; the attempts to expand economic integration within ASEAN; and the proliferation of free trade areas throughout the developing world) stand together with arguments for macro-economic or ‘bloc regionalism’ built around the triad of an expanded European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and some further development of Asia-Pacific regionalism. The relationship between these regional schemes and between regional and broader global initiatives is central to the politics of contemporary regionalism.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0260210500117954

Explaining the resurgence of regionalism in world politics

Rethinking Pan Americanism: An Introduction by David Sheinin Pan Americanism and Slavery in the Era of Latin American Independence by Peter Blanchard The First Conference of American States (1889-1890) and the Early Pan American Policy of the United States by Joseph Smith Leo Stanton Rowe and the Meaning of Pan Americanism by David Barton Castle A Greater America? Pan Americanism and the Professional Study of Latin America, 1890-1990 by Mark T. Berger Ruben Dario and Literary Anti-Americanism/Anti-imperialism by Alberto Prieto-Calixto Hispanismo Versus Pan Americanism: Spanish Efforts to Counter US Influence in Latin America Before 1930 by Richard V. Salisbury In Four Languages, But with One Voice: Division and Solidarity Within Pan American Feminism, 1923-1933 by K. Lynn Stoner The New Pan Americanism in United States-Central American Relations, 1933-1954 by Thomas M. Leonard "Its Most Destructive Agents": Pan American Environmentalism in the Early Twentieth Century by David Sheinin Pan American Shift: Oswaldo Aranha and the Demise of the Brazilian-American Alliance by Michael Weis The Theory and Practice of Inter-American Literature: An Historical Overview by Earl E. Fitz The Myth of Pan Americanism: United States Policy Toward Latin America During the Cold War, 1954-1963 by Stephen M. Streeter Ecuador and the Organization of American States: A Less Than Perfect Union by Jeanne A.K. Hey The Inter-American Human Rights System: A Force for Positive Change in the Americas by Jo M. Pasqualucci Eclectic Ideal: Bringing a Positivist Order to the Literature of Pan Americanism by David Sheinin Index

Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs

Of the four countries most active in independent Central America - Britain, the United States, France, and Germany - historians know the least about the full extent of the involvement of the Germans. Germany, however, played a crucial role in Central American history. Germany in Central America reveals the stories of the institutions that supported and organized German migration, the immigrants' continuing ties with the homeland, and the preservation of their culture on foreign soil. This unique book traces the political and economic changes in Germany (and to some extent also in Central America) to serve as background for narrating or analyzing the relationship between Germany and Central American countries. Schoonover utilizes extensive private and public manuscript material from Central America, Europe, and the United States, including private collections and German federal and state government archives, to reveal this relationship within the framework of the rivalry of European powers and the United States.

Germany in Central America: Competitive Imperialism, 1821-1929

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Abbreviations Used in Notes Chapter 3 Introduction Chapter 4 Early French Interests in Central America, 1820-1848 Chapter 5 Napoleon III's New Empire: Colonies, Trade, and Military Bases, 1848-1871 Chapter 6 Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Panama Canal, 1871-1889 Chapter 7 The Aftermath fo the Universal Interoceanic Canal Company, 1889-1903 Chapter 8 Cooperation with the United States, 1903-1914 Chapter 9 The Great War in Central America, 1914-1920 Chapter 10 A Modest Revival: Trade and Investment in the 1920s Chapter 11 Conclusion and Epilogue Chapter 12 Appendix: French Economic Ties with Central America, 1827-1943 Chapter 13 Bibliography Chapter 14 Index

Thomas Schoonover

Papers

Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs

Germany in Central America: Competitive Imperialism, 1821-1929

The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce, 1820-1930

Dollars over dominion

The United States in Central America, 1860-1911