three perspectives on international regimes

Introduction: three perspectives on

international regimes

More than twenty years after students of international relations began to ask questions about "international regimes" (Ruggie 1975), scholarly interest in the "principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures" (Krasner 1983c: 2) that govern state behavior in specific issueareas of international relations continues to be strong. It may be the case that the term "regime" has lost some of its earlier charm (Milner 1993: 494). But the substantive questions that define the regime-analytical research agenda - whether couched in terms of "regimes," "institutions" or otherwise - still count among the major foci of International Relations scholarship in both Europe and North America. What accounts for the emergence of instances of rule-based cooperation in the international system? How do international institutions (such as regimes)1 affect the behavior of state and non-state actors in the issueareas for which they have been created? Which factors, be they located within or without the institution, determine the success and the stability of international regimes? Is it possible to come up with non-idiosyncratic explanations for the properties of particular institutional arrangements (such as the extent to which they are formalized)?

Various theories have been proposed to shed light on at least some of the^e questions. According to the explanatory variables that these theories emphasize, they may be classified as power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based approaches, respectively. In fact, we may talk of three schools of thought within the study of international regimes: realists, who focus on power relationships; neoliberals, who base their analyses on constellations of interests; and cognitivists, who emphasize knowledge dynamics, communication, and identities. The use of the term "schools" does not imply that there are no significant differences among the positions taken by members of the same school with respect to international regimes. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, there are many such differences. It does imply, though, that the disagreements between members of different schools of thought are of a

more fundamental nature.

One major difference separating the three schools of thought is the degree of "institutionalism" that power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based theories of regimes tend to espouse. By "institutionalism" we mean the view that (international) institutions matter. Such a view may be, and actually is, held in minimalist and maximalist versions. To see just what this view involves, a basic distinction, to which we will return repeatedly throughout this book, is helpful. Analytically,

institutions can be significant in two respects: they may be more or less effective, and they may be more or less robust (or resilient). While effectiveness involves a static perspective in the sense that it can be

determined at and for any given point in time, resilience (robustness) is essentially a dynamic measure of the significance of regimes, the application of which presupposes a relevant change in the regime's

environment (Powell 1994:340f.).

To be more precise, regime effectiveness comprises two overlapping ideas (Underdal 1992; Young 1994: ch. 6). First, a regime is effective to the extent that its members abide by its norms and rules. (This attribute of regimes is sometimes also referred to as "regime strength/') Second, a regime is effective to the extent that it achieves certain objectives or fulfills certain purposes. The most fundamental and most widely discussed of these purposes is the enhancement of the ability of states to cooperate in the issue-area. In contrast, regime robustness (resilience) refers to the "staying power" of international institutions in the face of exogenous challenges and to the extent to which prior institutional choices constrain collective decisions and behavior in later periods, i.e. to the extent to which "institutional history matters" (Powell 1994:341). In other words, institutions that change with every shift of power

among their members or whenever the most powerful participants find that their interests are no longer optimally served by the current regime, lack resilience. "Change" in this context may mean either a fundamental alteration of the regime's normative content or a drastic change (usually,a decline) in the exent to which the regime's prescriptions are actually complied with by its members (or both). At least in principle, therefore, a regime may turn out brittle, even though it continues to exhibit a high degree of effectiveness: compliance with the new norms and rules may be just as high as it was with the previous ones. The two dimensions of regime significance are conceptually independent (although they may

be correlated empirically), i.e. a regime's robustness cannot be inferred from its effectiveness nor vice versa.2

None of the theories that we review in this book denies international regimes any impact whatsoever on world politics, but the degree of "institutionalism" implicit in these theories varies considerably. This variance can, to a large measure, be attributed to the "behavioral models" (Young 1989a: 209-13) upon which realists, neoliberals, and cognitivists tend to base their analyses, i.e. to the assumptions they make about the nature of state actors and their motivation. Power-based theories of regimes, which assume that states care not only for absolute, but for relative gains as well, are least inclined to ascribe a considerable degree of causal significance to international institutions, although they

acknowledge that regime-based inter-state cooperation is a reality that is in need of explanation. In a sense, power theorists of regimes face this need even more than others, since sustained international cooperation which is not readily reduced to a form of external balancing represents a major "puzzle" to the realist research program. Realists who take international institutions seriously3 argue that power is no less central in cooperation than in conflict between nations. According to these authors, the distribution of power resources among actors strongly affects both the prospects for effective regimes to emerge and persist in an issue-area and the nature of the regimes that result, especially as far as the distribution of the benefits from cooperation is concerned. Other realists have stressed the way in which considerations of relative power - forced upon states by the anarchical environment in which they struggle for survival and independence - create obstacles for international cooperation that tend to call into question the  effectiveness of international regimes (at least on the assumption that the leading school of thought in regime analysis, neoliberalism, has stated the functions that regimes may perform correctly).

Neoliberal or interest-based theories of regimes have been extraordinarily influential in the past decade and have come to represent the mainstream approach to analyzing international institutions. Though not completely insensitive to the effects of power differentials, they emphasize the role of international regimes in helping states to realize common interests. In so doing, they portray states as rational egoists who care only for their own (absolute) gains. Neoliberals have drawn heavily on

economic theories of institutions focusing on information and transaction costs. Game-theoretic models have been applied to characterize the constellations of interests that underlie different types of regimes and also affect the likelihood of a regime being created in the first place Deliberately appropriating essential elements of the realist approach to world politics, neoliberals have challenged the rationality of orthodox  realism's skepticism vis-a-vis international institutions by attempting to show that this skepticism cannot in fact be based on the assumptions realists make about the nature of states and the international system. Whereas power-based theories may well be regarded as a borderline case of institutionalism, interest-based theories of regimes adopt an unequivocally institutionalist perspective, i.e. they portray regimes as both effective and resilient. Regimes help (self-interested) states to coordinate

their behavior such that they may avoid collectively suboptimal outcomes, and states can be shown to have an interest in maintaining existing regimes even when the factors that brought them into being are

no longer operative. Nevertheless, the institutionalism of neoliberals is a bounded one. This is implicit in the rational choice models upon which their theories are based. For these models treat actors' preferences

and identities as exogenously given and thus as essentially unaffected by rule-governed practices or institutions.

Realists have taken up the neoliberal challenge by pointing out that their opponents' argument is flawed because it fails fully to appreciate the meaning of those realist assumptions that neoliberals claim to have incorporated into their theory, including assumptions about the basic motivation of states dwelling in anarchy.4 Members of the third school of thought in regime analysis, cognitivism, have subjected interestbased theorizing to a similarly thorough criticism. Yet, the thrust of this criticism is directly opposed to that of the former one: from the cognitivist point of view, the problem with neoliberalism is not that it has misconstrued some of the realist assumptions about the nature of world politics. Rather, its limits as a theory of international institutions can be traced back directly to three realist "heritages" still operative in interestbased theories: (1) the conception of states as rational actors, who are

atomistic in the sense that their identities, powers, and fundamental interests are prior to international society (the society of states) and its institutions; (2) the basically static approach to the study of international relations, which is ill-equipped to account for learning (at the unit level) and history (at the system level); and (3) the positivist methodology that prevents students of international institutions from understanding central aspects of the workings of social norms (including norms at the inter-state level).

Hence, knowledge-based theories of regimes have focused on the origins of interests as perceived by states and, in this connection, have accentuated the role of causal as well as normative ideas. Part of their contribution may thus be seen as complementary to the rationalist neoliberal mainstream in regime analysis, attempting to fill a gap in interest-based theorizing by adding a theory of preference formation. This strand of knowledge-based theorizing will be referred to here as "weak cognitivism." But the criticism of some cognitivists runs deeper, suggesting that an institutionalism that is informed by a sociological rather than a rational choice perspective is appropriate for the international system as

well. Thus, "strong cognitivists" have pointed out that interest-based theories have provided a truncated picture of the sources of regime robustness by failing to take adequate account of the repercussions of

institutionalized practices on the identities of international actors. At least in a great many situations, it is suggested, states are better understood as role-players than as utility-maximizers. Consequently, knowledge- based theories of regimes tend to embrace an institutionalism that

is much more pronounced than that which we find in either neoliberalism or realism.

One word of caution is in order at this stage. We use the term "school of thought" to refer to ideas, i.e. sets of theories, rather than to people: schools of thought, in our parlance, are constituted by contributions which share certain assumptions and emphases in making sense of regimes, rather than by contributors. They are intellectual, not sociological, entities. It is therefore not inconsistent with our claim that three schools of thought define the contemporary study of international regimes to find that, occasionally, individuals have contributed to more than one "school." A case in point is Robert Keohane who, although his work is most closely associated with neoliberalism, has also made notable contributions to the power- and knowledge-based research agendas (Keohane 1980; Goldstein and Keohane 1993a). This said, most authors whose works we discuss in this book can be unambiguously

attributed to a particular school of thought. (In this sense, one can talk of "members" of a school.) And even those who, like Keohane, have straddled the lines are more strongly associated with one school (in

Keohane's case, neoliberalism) than with others.5

In this book we review recent and not so recent contributions to all three schools of thought. Since interest-based theories represent the mainstream approach to analyzing international regimes and, consequently, have attracted criticism from opposed perspectives, we address their arguments first (ch. 3). Subsequently, we look at various powerbased theories of regimes (ch. 4), before we discuss some of the work on international institutions that has been done from a cognitivist point of view (ch. 5). In each case, we pay special attention to the points of disagreement with neoliberalism as the leading school of thought in regime analysis. The conclusion (ch. 6) seeks to draw these threads together by focusing on the question of to what extent syntheses between two or even all three of these schools of thought appear possible and desirable. We begin, however, by addressing a set of very fundamental questions that cut across these paradigmatic divisions, although it would be naive to assume that they are strictly prior to them: What exactly is an international regime? Is the concept of an international regime precise enough to guide potentially cumulative empirical

research? Insofar as it is not, how can this problem be remedied? And

how does the concept of international regime relate to cognate concepts

such as international institution or international organization? It is these

conceptual issues that are the subject of the following chapter.