Showing papers in "International Studies Quarterly in 1990"

Changing Course: When Governments Choose to Redirect Foreign Policy

Abstract: We are in a period of profound change in international relations and foreign policy. These developments call attention to the state of our knowledge about change processes in governmental decisionmaking. This essay reviews the contributions of several areas of conceptual literature and proposes a scheme for interpreting decisions in which a government decides to change policy direction. Foreign policy changes can be placed on a continuum indicating the magnitude of the shift from minor adjustment changes, through both program and goal changes, to fundamental changes in a country's international orientation. These degrees of change are examined with respect to four change agents: (1) leader driven; (2) bureaucratic advocacy; (3) domestic restructuring; and (4) external shock. The phases of decisionmaking mediate between sources of change and the magnitude of change in policy. The essay concludes with an examination of propositions that suggest conditions under which the phases of decisionmaking can increase the likelihood of major change.

Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies

Abstract: You will have understood that I am speaking the language of exile. This language of the exile muffles a cry, it doesn't ever shout . . . Our present age is one of exile. How can we avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one's own country, language, sex and identity? Writing is impossible without some kind of exile. Exile is already in itself a form of dissidence, since it involves uprooting oneself from a family, a country or a language. More importantly, it is an irreligious act that cuts all ties, for religion is nothing more than membership of a real or symbolic community which may or may not be transcendental, but which always constitutes a link, a homology, an understanding. The exile cuts all links, including those that bind him to the belief that the thing called life has A Meaning guaranteed by the dead father. For if meaning exists in a state of exile, it nevertheless finds no incarnation, and is ceaselessly produced and destroyed in geographical and discursive formations. Exile is a way of surviving in the face of the dead father, of gambling with death, which is the meaning of life, of stubbornly refusing to give in to the law of death . . . This ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse, thought, and existence is . . . the work of a dissident. Such dissidence requires ceaseless analysis, vigilance and will to subversion, and therefore necessarily enters into complicity with other dissident practices in the modern Western world. For true dissidence today is perhaps simply what it has always been: thought.

Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations

Abstract: The voices of dissent proliferating in international studies over the past decade are frequently understood by negation, that is, in terms of their criticisms and refusals of positivist/empiricist commitments and political realist perspectives, so long dominant in the discipline. To understand contemporary discourses of dissent in this way, however, is to impose upon them an undue semblance of unity of perspective and purpose-one that mirrors the illusory unities of positivism and realism. It is to fail to acknowledge the variety of dissident voices that have called to account the given, axiomatic and taken-for-granted "realities" of prevailing disciplinary discourses. Concentrating upon what might be called the "agenda of dissent" in international studies, this paper celebrates that variety, that difference, among critical voices in international studies. In particular, it locates prominent themes in critical international relations thinking within the wider arc of debates in Western social theory-interdisciplinary, intercontinental debates whose questions include the Enlightenment concepts of history, rationality, and truth; the subject/object and agent/structure oppositions; the relationship between language and social meaning; the relationship between knowledge and power; the character and function of the human sciences; and the prospects for emancipatory politics today. These debates point to no necessary conclusion. They mandate no single position. Instead, they suggest the opening up of "thinking space," a space of thought that is exploited by a variety of dissident voices who would speak in reply to the dangers and opportunities of political life in the late twentieth century.

The (s)pace of international relations: Simulation, surveillance, and speed

Abstract: Against the neorealist claim that the “reflectivist” or postmodernist approach is a dead-end unless it merges with the “rationalist” conception of research programs, this essay argues that new technological and representational practices in world politics require not synthesis but theoretical heterogeneity to comprehend the rise of chronopolitics over geopolitics. The theoretical approaches of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Virilio are drawn upon to investigate three global forces in particular: simulation, surveillance, and speed. They have eluded the traditional and re-formed delimitations of the international relations field—the geopolitics of realism, structural political economy of neorealism, and neoliberal institutionalism—because their power is more “real” in time than space, it comes from an exchange of signs rather than goods, and it is transparent and diffuse rather than material and discrete. This essay offers an alternative, poststructuralist map to plot how these and other new forces are transforming the traditional boundaries in international relations between self and other, domestic and international, war and peace.

Reducing the Role of the State in the Economy: A Conceptual Exploration of IMF and World Bank Prescriptions

Abstract: A policy and scholarly consensus is emerging on reducing the role of the state in the economy, but with relatively little consideration of its meaning and potential consequences. Six different forms of state economic intervention are distinguished in this article (influence, regulation, mediation, distribution, production, and planning) and combined to characterize different national economic regimes. IMF and World Bank recommendations for policy reform are then identified, and the consequences of those recommendations are assessed for different forms of economic intervention. On balance, stabilization and structural adjustment programs would appear to facilitate a major continuation of some forms of intervention (influence and mediation), redirect others (regulation, mediation, and distribution), and reduce those associated with state production and planning. These differential effects of the programs have far-reaching political implications, can be internally inconsistent, and are not necessarily conducive to development. In nearly every developing country in the world today, short-term stabilization measures, structural adjustment programs, liberalization efforts, and economic reforms are being considered, attempted, or adopted. Although there is tremendous variation in the details of the programs being initiated, nearly all entail a reduced role for the state in the economy (especially in the area of expenditures and ownership of productive enterprises) and greater reliance on market mechanisms (especially in the areas of exchange rate adjustment, trade liberalization, and the use of subsidies). These tendencies are a far cry from the extensive state interventionism, economic nationalism, and state socialist experimentation found in much of the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s. These policy reforms have been accompanied and strongly encouraged by the official reports, studies, and declarations of the major international financial organizations (most notably the World Bank and the IMF), a number of private transna

State Practices, International Norms, and the Decline of Mercenarism

Abstract: This article describes the evolution of state control over military manpower through an examination of three centuries of mercenarism. It documents the decline of several eighteenth-century forms of mercenarism and presents a critique of the conventional explanations for that decline. I argue that an institutional analysis provides a much richer understanding of how and why state control has varied. I present an empirical analysis of the institutional basis of mercenarism and construct an alternative explanation for its decline. My argument is that mercenarism's decline resulted from the institutionalization of a new international norm of state control over nonstate violence in the international system. The norm reflected a new set of state practices developed by leading states in the context of the French Revolutionary War. In the course of the nineteenth century, these practices were universalized in the state system, setting a new standard for competent statesmanship. State armies of the 1980s are citizen-armies. Nearly 90 percent of the world's armies recruit exclusively within their home states' territories, and the employment of foreigners in regular standing armies is an anomaly. Two hundred years ago this pattern was quite the reverse. 1 A peacetime army with a large contingent of foreigners was the norm and a pure citizen-army was an anomaly. In a state system characterized by enormous differences in size, population, strategic location, wealth, political regime-type, and development, it is striking that only a handful of armies employ foreigners. Among those that do are rich and poor, large and small, socialist and authoritarian and democratic, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern. The theoretical implications of the decline in mercenarism are the subject of this article. Mercenarism, as I use the term, refers to the practices of recruiting for and enlisting in the service of a foreign army.2 In analytic terms, the I Because I am interested in the modern state system as it evolved and developed in Europe, the following analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mercenarism focuses primarily on that region.

Protectionism and the Internationalization of Capital: U.S. Sponsorship of Import Substitution Industrialization in the Philippines, Turkey and Argentina

Abstract: Conventional analyses of the economic policies of Third World states ignore the U.S. role in sponsoring import substitution industrialization (ISI) in these countries after World War Two. This protectionist development policy usually is considered as a project only of Third World nationalists. Ironically, the independent U.S. initiative to promote ISI came from those generally most associated with liberal trade policy: the executive branch of government and internationalist business. Big business benefitted as long as they could invest behind the ISI tariff barriers. They hoped that ISI would be only a temporary program until global economic equilibrium and growth could be restored in the aftermath of the war. However, the U.S. continued to support ISI throughout the 1950s because until recently the resistance of protectionists in the U.S. made it difficult to reduce U.S. tariffs sufficiently to induce developing countries to rely on externally driven growth. Import substitution industrialization (ISI) in the Third World is usually considered a nationalist development strategy. The adoption of this strategy is explained by the situation of Third World states in the international system or by domestic political factors. These traditional treatments ignore the role of the U.S. in sponsoring ISI in the Third World. After World War Two, U.S. technical aid missions were sent to Authors Note: The authors are listed in alphabetical order. Nolt was primarily responsible for the Philippine and Turkish cases, and Maxfield for the Argentine case. Maxfield would like to thank the Institute for the Study of World politics, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies for their financial support during the research and writing of this paper. Timely grants to both authors from the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute funded a trip to the Eisenhower library. The archival staffs at the Eisenhower and Truman libraries and the National Archives, and Jee-Hye Park assisted our research. We are grateful for incisive comments on earlier drafts from Jeff Frieden, Gary Gereffi, Judith Goldstein, Joanne Gowa, Stephan Haggard,

Evolving Foreign Policy Norms: Reciprocity in the Superpower Triad

Abstract: In this study we probe whether a simple model of reciprocity adequately describes superpower foreign policy interactions. We employ structural equation tests to detect the presence of "reciprocity" in conflict and cooperation among the dyadic relations of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. While these tests did not confirm the existence of consistent reciprocity in superpower relations, cointegration tests uniformly suggest that foreign policy behavior among the superpowers is characterized by trend components which move together via an "error correction" mechanism. This, in turn, suggests that equilibria levels of cooperation and conflict exist which explain much of superpower foreign-policy behavior. We hypothesize that over the course of the last four decades reactivity among superpowers has been generally weak, but that stronger periods of short-term reactivity in the 1950s created norms. We argue that reactivity has declined in the period since the creation of these norms. Thus, it would appear that reciprocity in superpower interactions is more complicated than typically portrayed in the international relations literature.

How the West Was One: Representational Politics of NATO

Abstract: Contemporary discussions about the West having “won' the Cold War are framed within a conventional strategic discourse in which one political-military alliance, NATO, demonstrated its staying power and integrity in the face of its rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact. NATO's strategic practices, long the object of criticism on the part of revisionist historians and critical peace researchers, have apparently been vindicated. This paper draws upon a variety of post-realist approaches to global politics to examine NATO as a set of practices by which the West has constituted itself as a political and cultural identity. By turning our attention from the external, foreign, and defense policies of NATO and its member states to the domestic social and cultural dimensions of Western security politics, we can illuminate a side of security policy overlooked in conventional debates. NATO's success resides in having provided a network of intertextual representations for the articulation of global political space. Traditional security concerns, including the nature of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact “threat,” can thereby be seen not as existing externally out there on their own, but as circulating within a broader set of social practices. In the wake of recent developments within the Warsaw Pact and between the two alliance systems, the critical perspective outlined here enables us to analyze contemporary security issues in ways that transcend prevailing strategic discourse. Theoretically, we can see the outlines of a post-realist approach to security. For Europe, such an approach accords dignity to alternative, post-statist, post-modern security arrangements.

Strategic Discourse/Discursive Strategy: The Representation of “Security Policy” in the Video Age

Abstract: Strategic discourse, the linguistic practices through which security policy is represented, is examined from the point of view of the modes of representation through which it is expressed at the national or "official" level. The concept of strategy is elaborated to include, first, the sense in which all discourse is strategic, second, the legitimation issues that arise when security policy is confounded with other policy issues, and third, the special textual strategies required to legitimate official versions of international events when films and videos of the events are shown on television. For purposes of illustration, there is a brief examination of both the Tonkin Gulf incident during the Vietnam War and the recent downing of two Libyan planes to compare the difference in textual strategies of the official discourse in the two cases.

The World Relations of Cities: Closing the Gap Between Social Science Paradigms and Everyday Human Experience

Abstract: People inhabiting the cities of the world are in desperate need of knowledge that would enable them to cope with the worldwide relations of daily life. Although the mainstream of social science tends to ignore the world relations of cities, scattered scholarship in history, anthropology, sociology, and political science offers important insight on the growing involvement of human settlements in the world. The first main theme of this literature draws on scholarship of urban political economy and world systems which illuminates the changing impact of worldwide economic and social forces on the cities of the world and their inhabitants. In light of these changes, there is research urging that cities be freed from state constraints, research on new kinds of political movements, and advocacy of new approaches to research and teaching. The second main theme assesses the response of city government and local citizens movements to the perceived local impact of the foreign policies of states, with respect to issues such as war prevention and disarmament, world poverty, and human rights. There is both overlap and some contradiction between local issues raised by the two themes. This article will explore the implications for democratic theory, and for research and teaching in international studies, of the new world context of cities and the growing efforts of city governments and local people to deal directly with world issues.

Foreign Capital Penetration, State Intervention, and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: Despite the growing debt crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, previous quantitative research on Africa has failed to investigate the association between foreign debt and development. This failure represents a glaring omission in development research because foreign debt and other types of foreign capital penetration may have an impact on various programs that facilitate economic growth and physical quality of life. This paper argues that Africa is influenced by a complex interaction among foreign capital penetration, state processes, and different types of development. The data analysis demonstrates that foreign capital affects African states, which, in turn, influence economic expansion and improvement in physical quality of life. Although substantively interesting, these findings also have broad theoretical implications for scholars conducting research on Africa and other Third World regions. Perhaps most important, the results indicate that contemporary Africa cannot be explained within the context of a single theoretical perspective. Instead, scholars must integrate and modify current theories of international political economy to reflect the uniqueness of modern Africa.

Corralling the Free Rider: Deterrence and the Western Alliance

Abstract: This paper uses the collective-goods approach to alliances to investigate how membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other American alliances affects the interaction between the United States and the other actors. The paper uses two models, differing in their assumptions about the factors involved in the calculations member states make, to derive hypotheses regarding the dynamics of intra-alliance behavior. I conclude that a "bargaining" model, which assumes that allies are concerned more with maintaining long-term mutual commitment than with maximizing short-term utility, better explains how allies act. The implications for the study of group behavior and the contributions to the understanding of alliances are discussed. Public goods theory can be used to analyze the behavior of political actors in several different ways. Analysis can focus on the necessary conditions for the formation of groups, on the behavior of a group once it is formed, or on the actions of the members of an extant group. This paper investigates how membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other American alliances, which aim to supply the public good of deterrence, may affect the interaction between the United States and the other members. The paper will use two models to derive hypotheses regarding intra-alliance behavior. The first is based on the assumption that states respond to marginal utility calculations; the second is derived by viewing the alliance members as involved in a bargaining process, with each state aware of the implications of its actions for the other member states. The paper will conclude that the "bargaining" perspective better captures the pattern of the allied relationship in burden sharing. This conclusion has implications for the study of group behavior and contributes to our understanding of the stability of the Western alliance.

British Hegemony and Major Power War, 1815–1939: An Empirical Test of Gilpin's Model of Hegemonic Governance

Abstract: Robert Gilpin's model of “hegemonic governance” represents one of the few attempts to establish explicit theoretical links between hegemony and international politico-military conflict. Specifically, Gilpin's analysis suggests that the frequency of international conflict is inversely related to the relative power of a hegemon. I empirically test this hypothesis by analyzing the pattern of international conflict during Britain's cycle of hegemony. The analysis yields conflicting evidence. The results indicate that hegemonic power has exerted a consistent negative effect on the outbreak of war since 1815. The findings also reveal a number of anomalies, however, which directly challenge the core assumptions and propositions associated with Gilpin's perspective on the relationship between hegemony and international politico-military outcomes.

A Rational Model of Regional Rivalry

Abstract: A rational choice model of the arms acquisitions and alignments of regional rivals is developed that incorporates the restraining effects of economic opportunity costs as well as the political opportunity costs of alignment concessions and dependence on foreign sources of arms. Emphasis is placed on the consequences of substitutability between arms and alignment in the production of security and on the connections between rivalries at the regional and global levels. This model imposes only general qualitative restrictions rather than specific equations, and it encompasses a wide range of behavior, including self-reliance, diversification, dependence, nonalignment, alignment reversals, and a generalized arms-alignment race. The broad scope of this model poses several challenges for future formal and empirical research in this area.

Military Views of Morality and War: An Empirical Study of the Attitudes of Retired American Officers

Abstract: While philosophers and religious leaders have long discussed the ethical issues involved in war, we know little about the attitudes of the military who must face these issues daily. A factor analysis reveals three organizing principles that appear to be prior to more complex traditional belief systems. The empirical analysis also reveals that a common approach to conflict among the military has largely been overlooked in the literature. We call this framework “better safe than sorry.” Its fundamental characteristics are a defensive posture and risk aversion.

Producing Hegemony: State/Society Relations and the Politics of Productivity in the United States

Abstract: This paper argues for a historical reinterpretation of the social bases of American global hegemony in this century. The first part builds a case for three related propositions: 1) prevailing theoretical traditions in international political economy embody inadequate conceptions of states, state powers, and state/society relations and are, as a consequence, largely unable to interpret the historically concrete processes by which the socio-political basis of American global power was constructed in the twentieth century; 2) recent scholarship in historical political economy suggests potentially fruitful alternatives to prevailing understandings of state powers and the core relations of American global hegemony in this century; and 3) in light of the first two propositions a historical reinterpretation of the socio-political core of American hegemony is warranted. As a step in this direction, the second part of the paper suggests one such alternative interpretation. It is argued that the extraordinary global powers of the United States were made possible by a reconstruction of state/society relations peculiar to the U.S., simultaneously creating the social infrastructure of mass production and consumption while maintaining the formal separation between the spheres of politics and economics, public and private, which is characteristic of liberal capitalist social formations. The distinctive neoliberal quality of American hegemony may be best understood as the historical outcome of the political struggles entailed in this process of socio-political restructuring.

Dollar Bloc Dependency in Latin America: Beyond Bretton Woods

Abstract: The international financial regime is undergoing a significant transition as the Bretton Woods regime weakens and new norms and principles emerge. One change is the emergence of “currency blocs” which serve to stabilize regional financial relations. This paper argues that Latin America and the U.S. are linked in an emerging dollar bloc that has created a new form of Latin American dependency. The centrality of the dollar in the financial structure of Latin America is documented, and an overview of the historical currency blocs, the sterling and franc blocs, is provided. This historical treatment provides the basis for an analysis of the mechanisms and operation of the dollar bloc and for an assessment of the current factors in its evolution. Three specific issues are investigated: the adjustments to the rules and decision-making in the dollar bloc that are currently in progress, the relation of the dollar bloc to the re-democratization of Latin America, and the international financial context provided by the European Monetary System and the growth in the yen's importance.

Rationalizing Core-Periphery Relations: The Analytical Foundations of Structural Inequality in World Politics

Abstract: World system theory characterizes world politics as a three-tiered structure of inequality (core, semiperiphery, periphery) which manifests itself along three dimensions: an unequal distribution of global wealth, asymmetrical economic dependence, and political inequality. While this is a plausible description of the international system, world system theory cannot provide a behaviorally-based causal explanation of this core-periphery structure because the theory is wedded to a structuralist or methodological collectivist explanatory framework. As a result, world system theory treats the international system's core-periphery structure as an unproblematic assumption. In order to address this deficiency, this paper presents a rational choice theory in which wealthy and poor states choose core and peripheral positions respectively. Specifically, I argue that when wealthy states strategically interact with poorly endowed states by rendering economic exchanges contingent upon the acceptance of a subordinate status, then a core-periphery structure emerges as the rational outcome under certain conditions. Like world system theory, my analysis identifies an inegalitarian distribution of wealth as one of the necessary conditions for the existence of a core-periphery structure. But unlike world system theory's canonical model, this paper also identifies, as additional necessary conditions for core-periphery relations, attenuated competition within the core for control over the periphery and normal distributions of state preferences with respect to key economic and political values.

Interdependence and Foreign Policy Management in Sweden and Finland

Abstract: This study examines the implications of interdependence for the national institutions placed between the international and the domestic arenas of policy-making. These foreign affairs communities are hypothesized to be affected in several ways by the pressures of complex interdependence: The expanding scope of issues and the numerous actors engaged at home make for increased management complexity. The decentralization of the handling of foreign relations contributes to increased concern over national coordination of foreign policy. A survey of contemporary evidence from studies of the United States and some West European states seems to support these trends. A detailed empirical analysis over time of Finland and Sweden gives further supporting evidence. However, no dramatic trend toward a loss of central control of foreign relations can be discerned in the two cases examined. The persistently vital role of the traditional elements of foreign policy-making is notable also under conditions of international interdependence and domestic complexity. The mutually supporting relationship between the external and internal dimensions of the active state of the postwar era is emphasized as an explanation for the changes noted in the foreign affairs communities. The importance of building widely accepted theoretical generalizations on an empirical base broader than that of the special circumstances of the United States is illustrated by this comparative study.

Representing Debt: Peruvian Presidents Belaunde's and Garcia's Reading/Writing of Peruvian Debt

Abstract: Conventionally, indebtedness refers to a situation in which one subject is in a position of obligation vis-a-vis another subject. Samuel Weber offers an alternative understanding of debt as the constitution of an interpretative foundation which enables participants to claim legitimate speaking positions. By putting Weber's conception of debt to work in an examination of Peruvian debt servicing strategies, analysis moves away from an assessment of obligations among parties to an exploration of how these parties are constituted and represented in discourse so that they might serve as the grounds for furthering claims of obligation. Specifically, this paper traces two theological metaphors found in the debt servicing discourse of Presidents Fernando Belaunde Terry and Alan Garcia Perez in the 1980s. Each theological metaphor constructs very different identities for “Peruvian man,” “the International Monetary Fund,” “the logic of capital,” and “history.” As a result, Belaunde's and Garcia's narratives make contrasting claims about debt servicing obligations based on the contrasting interpretative foundations their stories construct.

Immodest Modesty: Antinuclear Discourse, Lifestyle Politics, and Intervention Strategies

Abstract: If, as Foucault argued, local and partial interventions now succeed more frequently than do global and ideological approaches, there would be implications even for such general topics as the citizen politics which surrounds foreign policy. One particular localist approach, the commitment to intensely private, personal ("lifestyle") practices in the name of larger issues, partakes in the liberal tradition of extrapolating the self into politics, but also suggests that another basis for such practices might exist. The demise of the social elaborated by Baudrillard and the associated role of language evoked by Foucault detail that alternative base. The shifting, oscillating stance of the serious ironist would be one political stance implied by this position on language and society. In that view, the "lifestyle politics" which seem naive or limited may actually promise a serious intervention into foreign policy politics.