The Negotiation Process and International Economic Organizations

By John S. Odell (School of International Relations University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-0043 odell@usc.edu)

 

Prepared for delivery at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta Marriott Marquis and Atlanta Hilton and Towers, September 2-5, 1999.  Copyright by the American Political Science Association.

 

Abstract

We will understand the formation and dynamics of international organizations better if we invest in more and better research aimed at generalizing about the process of negotiation in those settings. The study of international institutions and the empirical study of negotiation have often been isolated from each other.  This has been changing, but many promising opportunities remain unexploited. This paper illustrates with reference to economic organizations. Research opportunities lie in questions such as what strategies regime negotiators use, what shapes their strategy choices, what effects these strategies have, what coalition-building tactics they use and which work best under what conditions, and how the process is conditioned by its contexts–domestic political institutions, cultures, the security environment, and the international organization context. One major reason for digging further into these possibilities is to benefit bargaining practice as well as the ivory towers.

 

Introduction

            We will understand the formation and dynamics of international organizations better if we invest in more and better research aimed at generalizing about the process of negotiation in those settings. The study of international institutions and the empirical study of negotiation have often been isolated from each other.  This has been changing, and we do have solid empirical knowledge about some regime negotiations, but many promising opportunities remain unexploited. This paper concentrates on economic organizations and illustrates possibilities for research, rather than reporting results of a completed project.[1]  One major reason for digging further into these possibilities is to benefit bargaining practice as well as the ivory towers.

            The negotiation process may be distinguished from the structures in which it takes place. Negotiation (or bargaining) is a sequence of actions in which two or more parties address demands and proposals to each other for the ostensible purposes of reaching an agreement and changing the behavior of at least one actor. Concretely, on international economic issues the process refers to what governments’ finance and trade ministers, for example, do with one another. The process includes which strategies negotiators choose, how markets and negotiators influence each other, whether negotiators add tactics to smoke out joint gains, how much they use tactics to guard against their own biases, and how they go about forming and splitting coalitions. The process includes how the negotiators’ moves interact with domestic politics.

            The outcome is a ratified government agreement or implicit settlement (or lack of agreement), rather than effects these official settlements may have later in politics or markets. The context consists of surrounding conditions that economic negotiators inherit and normally cannot influence much in the short term–cultures, international security conditions, domestic political institutions, and international organizations.

            Many fine studies of international institutions are dominated by theoretical interests other than the negotiation process.  Many revealing negotiation case studies have yet to be integrated under any common analytical framework. An increasing number of studies on institutional bargaining do give us promising foundations to build on.[2]  But rather than systematically reviewing the published literature here, I would prefer to cut to the chase and spell out some (I hope) provocative ideas for fresh studies, for discussion.

The English School and Diplomacy: Scholarly Promise Unfulfilled

By Iver B. Neumann.

 

Paper presented to the Fourth ECPR IR Standing Group Conference, Canterbury, 14-16 September 2001. Comments welcome to ibn@nupi.no.

 

There are, perhaps, three major reasons for the renewed interest in the English School after the Cold War. First, this event made for such an obvious challenge to the structure of  world politics that even the structuralists of our discipline were, at least initially, willing to consider that something was changing. Acknowledged change pushes the scholar in the direction of privileging process over structure. Inasmuch as the English School is one of IR research programmes which are most attuned to historical contingency and change, an upsurge in attention was to be expected. Secondly, a particularly noteworthy aspect of that change which had been afoot since decolonialisation, but which had been marinalised by the centrality of bipolarity in the states system, was the enhanced importance of multiculturalism to world politics. The end of the Cold War brought on a ‘return of culture’ to IR in various quarters of the discipline. As seen from the English School, those returning came late to the ball. The question of how the rise of what was generally referred to as the ‘third world’ would impact on world politics at large had been a core interest of the English School since its inception (e.g. Bull 1984a). It is, therefore, hardly surprising that a renewed interest in the one should be condusive to a renewed interest in the other. Whereas the first reason for the renewed interest is lodged in developments at large and the second reason concerns a factor which makes itself felt in a number of different places in world politics, a third reason is to do with the link between the development of the states system and the development of IR as a discipline. Inasmuch as it was predicated on the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War removed the causal factor behind the institutionalisation of a ‘Western’ military alliance. This meant that one reason for papering over the fissure between what had become the two principal parties to that alliance – United States and the EU – was gone. Whereas a way was found, at least initially, to shore up ‘Western’ unity in such an area as defence, in most other areas the fissure between the United States and Europe grew wider as Europeans reasserted themselves. Read in the light of this development, it is hardly coincidental that the upsurge of interest in the English School also happens to be an upsurge in interest in the only fully fledged non-American research programme that the ‘American’ discipline of IR (Hoffmann 197x) has ever known.[1]

For reasons similar to the ones listed above, the renewed interest in the English School has also coincided with a renewed interest in the specific practices which together constitute world politics. Instead of assuming a set of functions and a state structure and then deducing a set of truth claim from these assumptions, a growing number of scholars have begun to scrutinise how world politics are actually performed. As pointed out by the English School, if one views world politics as an historically emerging and social phenomenon, then diplomacy plays a key role in it. The renewed interests in the English School and in social practices like diplomacy should, therefore, be mutually reinforcing. To the extent that Tim Dunne (1998: 181) is right in maintaining that ‘few academics who identify with the English School today are interested in the processes of diplomacy’, this is definitely a situation which should be remedied.[2] Part of the groundwork for such a revival must be to scrutinise and critique what the English School has had to say about diplomacy. That is the job to be undertaken in this paper. Part one introduces English School thought on diplomacy as it evolved through an original series of book. Part two looks at the work of  the next generation(s). Part three draws attention to the limits of the present English School  conceptualisation by arguing that it is not sufficiently tied in with an overall discussion of social change. The conclusion reached is that the English School has indeed made an impressive contribution, but one which we can only followed up by wedding it to more wide-reaching projects of social theory.

Hierarchy and Stratification in International Society: a Comparison of the Old and New Diplomacies

By Edward Keene

The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Abstract

This paper develops a conceptual framework for thinking about international hierarchy based on Weberian ideas about social stratification and mechanisms of social closure. The model allows us to categorise hierarchical international systems in terms of three dimensions: the primary axis of stratification (class, status or authority); the basis for the legitimation of the distribution of authority (charismatic, traditional or rational-legal); and the form of closure through which the hierarchy is maintained (collectivist or individualist). This framework is then used to analyse the changing nature of diplomacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from a charismatic status hierarchy based on a collectivist method of exclusion, to a rational-legal bureaucratic hierarchy based on a more individualist form of closure in the form of credentialism. The conclusion discusses how this perspective opens up new research questions in the comparative-historical analysis of international order and the normative analysis of international justice.

 

Introduction

At the beginning of Diplomatic Investigations, Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight say that they and other members of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics adopted as their ‘frame of reference…not the limits and uses of international theory, nor the formulation of foreign policy, but the diplomatic community itself, international society, the states-system’; their primary goal was to investigate ‘the nature and distinguishing marks of the diplomatic community, the way it functions, the obligations of its members, its tested and established principles of political intercourse’ (Butterfield & Wight 1966, 12). My purpose in this paper is very similar: to examine the nature of the diplomatic community, how it functions and the principles according to which its members interact with one another.

            More specifically, I will attempt to interpret the significance of the shift from the ‘old’ diplomacy of the nineteenth century to the ‘new’ diplomacy of the twentieth. To the advocates of the new diplomacy, the most important dimension of this change was the belief that diplomatic interaction should become less secretive and more accountable to the public: in brief, more democratic (for example, Ponsonby 1915). This was bound up with the growing prominence of ‘conference diplomacy’, both at the League of Nations and in the frequent high profile, if not always productive, gatherings of world leaders that marked the end of WW1 and the inter-war period (Hankey 1946). Here, however, I want to concentrate on another, not unrelated, aspect of the emergence of the new diplomacy: the changing social composition of the diplomatic community. This particular issue has received a great deal of attention from diplomatic historians (Anderson 1993 is a good overview), and the main thrust of the change can be summed up quite simply: between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, say from about 1815 to 1920, the diplomatic community was transformed from an ‘aristocratic international’ dominated by a small clique of European nobility and gentry, into a larger and more varied society that included significant numbers of non-European and bourgeois diplomats.

            International relations theorists have often interpreted this development as a deterioration in the cosmopolitan environment of the nineteenth century, and hence as a contributory factor to the emergence of the more divided and conflictual international society (if that term can even still be used) of the early twentieth century. This position has its roots in much of the writing on diplomacy that was done by more conservative-minded members of the profession, who bemoaned what they saw as the coarsening of diplomatic interaction in the 1920s and 1930s — Harold Nicolson’s influential work Diplomacy is perhaps the best-known example (as well as Nicolson 1939, see Kennedy 1922; Huddleston 1954; and Webster 1962) — and the theme runs, in a more muted form, through several of the more recent diplomatic histories (see, for example, Lauren 1976, 28; Anderson 1993, 121-22). A very similar point of view, expressed in more general theoretical terms, is evident in Hans Morgenthau’s contention that, as a result of the decline of the old diplomacy,

Reinventing Diplomacy: A Virtual Necessity

By Gordon S. Smith¹

 

Introduction

As the world changes, so too must the means by which states conduct their international relations and advance their interests. Diplomacy can be said to consist of two elements. Over the past century, diplomacy referred to the art of advancing national interests through the sustained exchange of information among governments, nations, and other groups. Its purpose is to change attitudes and behavior as a way of reaching agreements and solving problems. It is the practice of persuasion.² This paper argues diplomacy is at present undergoing a major transformation, close to a revolution, in response to the recent rapid changes in information technology, the evolving global agendas of states, and the sudden explosion of new international “nonstate actors” in the post-World War II era. Today, diplomacy refers not only to the advancement of national interests and the practice of persuasion but also to the management of global issues.

A “revolution in diplomatic affairs” suggests major changes are afoot. Yet it is not clear that the sweep of change is widely accepted or recognized, much less welcomed. If this is correct and a revolution is indeed occurring in diplomacy, scarce resources will be misspent, opportunities will be missed, and the results will be judged to be generally unsatisfactory.

Diplomacy has long roots. Its modus operandi is well established. The very mention of diplomacy indeed suggests conservatism and tradition. Revolutions are not generally welcomed in the world of diplomacy. Revolutions connote instability and uncertainty.