DU321 - CDA5548 Audia 2a transcript

DU301/DU321 – CDA5548 Audio 2a: Cooperation, Anarchy and Interdependence Speaker 1 - William Brown Hello and welcome to Audio 2A, Cooperation, Anarchy and Interdependence for courses DU301 and DU321. My name is William Brown, member of the DU301 course team and with me today are: Speaker 2 – Jef Huysmans Jef Huysmans, member of the course team. Speaker 3 - Simon Bromley And Simon Bromley, also a member of the course team. William Brown The main aim today is to bring to the fore some aspects of the course that emerged through the first three parts of Making the International. What we want to do is to sit back and review those first three parts and to look at some of the stories and some of the contrasting views of international order at a more general level that emerged through those three parts. Now, by way of example and to get the discussion going, we wanted to look at two contrasting stories that one might tell about the World Trade Organisation which is discussed in Part 1. For our purposes today we might usefully distinguish between a rather more sceptical view of the World Trade Organisation and a view which presents a rather more sanguine view of that organisation. Jef, can I begin with you and ask you to outline what the sceptical view of the WTO is? Jef Huysmans On the one hand the WTO is an international organisation in which states are to be treated equally, in principle, but of course, it doesn’t work like that in practice. In practice it’s easy to see the WTO as a club of the powerful. Going back to the organisation that went before it, from out of which it emerged, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which started working in 1948, that was before actually many of the current countries were independent sovereign states. Now the central states in the WTO are the most rich states who do deals behind doors etc., etc. which raises a big question about, why are the weak states part of the WTO. Well one of the reasons for this could be there is a cost of staying out. When the WTO and before that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was up and working it made sense to be part of it because it was a powerful organisation in terms of organising free trade in the world. So that’s one of the elements. The other is that, of course, big powers wield powers, explicitly or implicitly, implicitly means just by having it, so there’s not necessarily much of a choice for weaker countries than to get on board and, when they are on board, to do as they are told to some extent. So in that sense it’s an arena, you could say, or a forum for negotiating all kinds of trade related aspects in the world but in which not the rules of the game so much, the official formal rules of the game mattered, first and foremost, but that the most important is how much power as a state you actually have and therefore it’s a club of the powerful and the rich. William Brown So from that point of the view the WTO is not only a creation of the powerful states, it’s also an arena in which they are able to exercise their power and their will over the weaker states in the international system. Jef Huysmans Yes that would be a good summing up of the view. William Brown Okay. Now in contrast to that Simon, is a much more sanguine view of the WTO, a much more positive view and, we might say, the view that the WTO presents of itself.

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Simon Bromley Indeed. Jef mentioned the costs of staying out but there are also the benefits of membership and the more sanguine, optimistic view of what the WTO represents would argue that, once you weigh the benefits against the costs, there are still net benefits for weaker states to be within the organisation. I think another argument that one might make is to go back to the point that Jef made about rules. Jef argued in effect that the formal rules of the WTO are not what’s really going on but behind closed doors: the powerful states are cutting deals amongst themselves which they benefit from and others simply have to live with. But there is a difference, you could argue, between organisations which have formal rules and a pure situation of power bargaining. The WTO does have rules. In some instances the powerful are constrained to live by those rules and there are many examples, increasingly so one might argue, of formerly peripheral countries playing an important role in the WTO. One thinks of Brazil or China in recent developments. And a further argument I think is that, if you consider the position of the weaker countries in the system, there might be something to be said on their part of being part of an organisation where they can act collectively vis-à-vis the more powerful states, rather than having to deal with the powerful states on a purely bi-lateral basis that may provide opportunities for coalition building which in a sense enables them to leverage their power. So I think there are a number of other aspects of the organisation which might suggest it’s a slightly more cooperative venture, a venture in which many states potentially benefit than the rather gloomy scenario that Jef has painted. William Brown So that’s a view of the organisation as a genuine example of international cooperation and indeed international governance from which states collectively benefit. Simon Bromley Yes indeed and the argument there would be that weaker states are in the system, or in the WTO rather, primarily on the basis of their consent rather than they’ve been coerced into it. William Brown We could go on debating the particular case of the WTO and students will have engaged with a lot of debates around the WTO during their study of Part 1. However, what we want to do today is to think about what lies behind these debates and, in fact, when we think about it, what lies behind some of the contrasting views of the World Trade Organisation are actually some rather different approaches to understanding the nature of the international system as a whole. In fact what emerges over the three parts of Making the International, as students progress from Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, is a debate between two different models of international order as a whole, what we call realism and liberalism and we want to highlight and explore these two contrasting models in what follows in this audio. Jef, can you outline for us what the key building blocks, what the core steps are in the realist argument about international order. Jef Huysmans There are three central building blocks to the realist understanding of international order and international politics. It starts from the idea that, unlike states where you have a sovereign and a rule of law which can be imposed by police, the government, the military, or whomever so there’s a strong hierarchy, in the international system there is no world government, there is no-one basically who can impose globally and legitimately a rule of law or make sure that when states don’t operate according to the rules that have been agreed, for example, in the WTO, that they will be sanctioned and therefore have to obey the rules. The idea behind this is that the international system is anarchical, it’s an anarchy, it’s a horizontal system that has no hierarchy, at least not a top power. Now one of the consequences is if you don’t have anyone, any state or any big organisation that will look after the interests of all the people and of all the states involved, that you have to look after yourself, therefore, in direct implication which is still part of the first building block, a direct implication of anarchy is that self-preservation is the over-riding goal. So states can do all kinds of things but ultimately they will calculate always whether they can survive in the world as it exists. So that’s the first building block which arises from anarchy. Now this first building block has another implication which leads me to the second building block, which is what can a state do in a world of anarchy when there’s no-one who can actually impose a rule of law or co-operation for that matter. They can’t really specialise, like domestically you could have firms specialising in doing economic benefits and playing the market

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game, artists doing art, priests doing religion. You can’t do that as a state because you become dependent. If you would specialise in economics you would become dependent for your military protection on another state. What if this state suddenly decides to turn against you? There’s no fall back option but yourself. Therefore the second building block implies that you can’t specialise which one calls that states in more technical terms are functionally not differentiated from one another. They are basically the same units. They do the same kinds of things which ultimately means they do all kinds of things including economics, kinds of art, moral discourses, protecting values etc, but they have to do all of this so they can’t differentiate, so that’s the second building block. Now out of these two, what that means is that what centrally differentiates states is their power, that’s why it’s so important in the sceptical view to see that you’ve got weak states and strong states and the strong will have a capacity to control the weak to some extent. What you then get is that international politics differs or is often identified according to the number of great powers you have in it, for example, multi-polar system which has at least five or more great powers in it. A bi-polar system with two or a uni-polar system so that’s the third building block; it’s power as capacity that differentiates states. William Brown Just to recap: that for realists the system as a whole is anarchic because there is no world government, there are multiple sovereigns. In Chapter 5 the analogy is made with Hobbes’s idea of a state of nature, internationally we’ll have an international state of nature with competing sovereigns. Secondly because of that, states have to rely on their own resources to secure their own survival and so they all do similar things. They all seek to defend themselves and their own futures. Thirdly, therefore, what differentiates states is their power in relation to each other. What are the consequences then for understanding, particularly the potential for cooperation internationally? What follows on from these building blocks? Jef Huysmans It has very important consequences, for example, it means that cooperation always has to be limited even in a big strong organisation with a long history like the WTO because you can’t create what’s called dependencies. You can’t, even if you see there’s benefits coming out of participating in the WTO, you can’t become dependent upon other countries. For example, if you were to open your borders for agricultural import and export there are some countries who actually are not competitive at all in the global market. Now that would be very good to some extent if they could get cheaper food, that could be good for consumers and in a certain way you could say, therefore, that nationally there is more money in the system to do other kinds of things, for example, to spend on defence. But what happens if you end up in a war? You rely on food supplies coming from far away possibly so you easily end up with very vulnerable food supplies and therefore a high risk of famine which then demoralises your population, therefore you’ve got all kinds of spin-offs in terms of weakness. So you can’t afford to create dependencies. That limits considerably the scope of cooperation. The other element that limits it is that states, or regional blocks in this case, sometimes like the European Union, they are not calculating primarily their benefits from cooperation in terms of what they would gain, but how much they would gain in comparison to their major competitors, because what matters is not how much richer I become as a state, what matters is how much richer I become as a state compared to you, because then I’m more powerful, can translate to military power, economic power and so on. William Brown So from these limited building blocks the three points you outlined before, there are actually farreaching claims made about the expectations of what will happen in the international system and, in particular, that cooperation internationally between states will be limited; firstly by their fear of dependence on others, of becoming vulnerable to others, particularly in matters that may affect their future survival and, secondly that cooperation would be limited because they are worried primarily about relative gains, about how they fare in comparison to their main rivals and that they won’t engage in cooperation that weakens significantly their relative position compared to other powers. So, taken as a whole, what we have presented in the realist model is a very neat and quite constrained view of the international order that, although it starts from limited beginnings, makes quite far-reaching claims about what we can expect internationally. Now what emerges over Parts 2 and 3 of Making the International, in particular, Chapter 6 by Sudipta Kaviraj and Chapter 9 by Rafael Sanchez, is a different view based on a different model of international order. This is both a more complex model – there are more elements to it – and it comes to rather different conclusions about the scope for cooperation in an anarchic international system. 3

If I can turn to you now, Simon, what are the main elements of the liberal model in contrast to the realist picture Jef has just painted? Simon Bromley The realist model works as it were from the state system to defining the state’s interest. You look at the position of the state in the state system: that tells you where its interests come from. The liberal model really starts at least the other way round. It starts like the realist model in saying the system is anarchic but it argues that the interests that states seek to pursue in conditions of anarchy are shaped very much by the nature of the society, domestic and transnational over which they seek to rule and, particularly, liberals stress the role of dominant powerful groups within society in shaping the nature of the national interests and that’s illustrated in a story about the development of India’s national interest in Chapter 6 of Making the International. In order to move forward to a model of international order as a whole the liberal model says, well what we need to look at is the way in which the different national interests of states, that are shaped by the societies over which they rule, are configured together when put together at an international level. So what you have is a number of states all interacting with one another, all seeking to pursue their national interest, as defined by their dominant groups, and that those interests will configure in different ways and that, in particular, the ways in which interests configured amongst states might be conflictual, they might be situations where states are in conflict with one another but they might also be cooperative and mutually beneficial. Trade liberalisation is an obvious example where, arguably, the interests of states that are mutually engaging in trade liberalisation are not in conflict. They can both benefit from it. So that the liberal model argues that, if you want to analyse the behaviour of states in an anarchic system, what you first need to specify is the configuration of these interests. How are they socially shaped and then, when they come together at an international level, how actually are the interests configured. And the specific difference there from the realist model is really I think two-fold. It’s first is the argument that in order to understand the system it’s not just anarchy plus the distribution of power, it’s anarchy and the distribution of power plus interdependence. That when states interact internationally what they can achieve depends on what other states do. So that states face an environment of what’s called ‘strategic inter-dependence’, the strategies that they can pursue are conditioned by their anticipation of the strategies that others will pursue. The other important difference from realism is the assumption that when states’ interests interact internationally, it’s not always the case that states will focus on their relative position or be worried about dependence and the reason for that is that it’s argued that security is only one value amongst others, that security will be balanced alongside considerations of economic welfare, or promotion of cultural values, or whatever. And formally one can say that states interact in ways which may be, and this is the way it’s done in Chapter 9, that states interact sometimes in positive- sum ways, in other words, when they interact they both gain, sometimes they interact in ways that are zero-sum, what one state gains another state loses and sometimes it’s a negative-sum interaction in which both lose. The realist model that Jef outlines tends to assume that all interactions, because they are about relative gains, are zero-sum; if I gain, you lose. The liberal model argues that’s not necessarily the case, there are many kinds of interactions where I might gain and you might gain. The liberal model argues that there are many cases where mutual dependence does not imply vulnerability vis-à-vis security and that there are also many cases where states will not worry overly about their relative position vis-à-vis other states, they will be primarily concerned about their absolute gains vis-à-vis where they were before the interaction. So that that provides the basis in the liberal model for, at least, the possibility of extensive and durable cooperation. That, where the interaction takes the form of a positive sum interaction, that is, where both or many parties can benefit from it; and where states are interested in their absolute gains, rather than their relative gains; then one would expect extensive and durable cooperation. And on the liberal account examples like the WTO or patterns of integration within the European Union over the last thirty or forty years or, as we will come on to, regional trade agreements like NAFTA, are all examples of cooperation that result from interdependence as well as anarchy. So I suppose, to put it in summary form, the core claim is that once you recognise the strategic nature of interdependence and once you recognise that the national interest is socially shaped by society and not just deriving from your position in the state system, then the possibilities of cooperation are much, much greater. William Brown

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So, if I’ve got you correctly there, the key differences from realism that the liberal model presents are that what states seek to do is not simply determined by their position in the international system but is affected internally as well as internationally and because states seek to do a variety of things, alongside the anarchic structure that realism focuses on alone, liberals would say there exist patterns of interdependence which will vary between different kinds of interactions amongst states. Simon Bromley Yes that’s precisely it but once you recognise the importance of interdependence the pessimistic conclusions from anarchy that Jef drew earlier don’t necessarily follow. William Brown Okay. And, if I understand your last point correctly, the consequences of the liberal model are that these patterns of interdependence can create the opportunity for quite wide-ranging cooperation between states in the international system. Can you just highlight the circumstances under which that cooperation can emerge? Simon Bromley Remember that one of the key differences is that for realism in a sense the national interest is fixed, it’s given by the place of the state in the state system. For the liberal model the national interest is a variable, it’s a variable that is an outcome of social processes within the state, it’s about domestic groups struggling to get a particular definition of the national interest. So that one might have, for example, powerful business groups and economic lobbies and consumer groups and so on arguing that a pursuit of freer trade and higher growth is a core aspect of the national interest. So countries may come to define their national interest in terms, not of how are we doing vis-à-vis another country but how are we doing vis-à-vis last year, that we want our growth rate to be as high as it possibly can, never mind what other people’s growth rate is. That’s the first step of the argument. The second step of the argument is, if you’ve got several countries that come to define the national interest in that way, if you’ve got several countries that are pursuing absolute gains, not worrying so much about their relative position and if you’ve got a case like trade liberalisation where, in many circumstances, not all but in many circumstances, freer trade does bring economic gains to many parties, then if you put those two together, states pursuing absolute gains plus the possibility of positive-sum interactions where many can gain, then states will cooperate to do that and they might then even set up institutions like the WTO or the North American Free Trade Agreement to oversee those agreements and, to some extent, even to police them. William Brown Let’s pick up on the case of Mexico’s accession to NAFTA because, in fact, this is a good example of how we can explore these contrasting approaches between realism and liberalism. Can you begin by explaining how a liberal might give an explanation of the North American Free Trade Agreement based on those two key concepts of absolute gains and a positive sum gain. Simon Bromley The liberal interpretation of NAFTA would look at Mexico’s decision to approach the United States to form NAFTA broadly along the following lines. In the 1980s there were significant domestic changes in Mexican politics which moved Mexico economically away from a protected model of import substituting industrialisation to a much more liberal, indeed even neo-liberal model of economic development. That occurred, on the liberal analysis, primarily as a result of the exhaustion and problems of the previous model of development, so what you have there is an essentially domestically generated transformation of Mexican politics and economics such that Mexican elites came to define the national interest in Mexico in terms of an increasingly liberalised and increasingly open economy. Now there were international developments as well, the fall of the Soviet Union, the loss of export markets in Eastern Europe and so forth but the primary motivation for Mexican elites was the exhaustion domestically of the old model and hence the reorientation. That provided a new definition of the Mexican national interest in terms of economic openness, liberalisation. The second element of the liberal model would be to argue that in pursuing those policies the Mexican elite was increasingly focusing on the absolute gains that Mexico might make through those policies rather than worrying about it’s position vis-à-vis its dominant northern neighbour, the United States, 5

and that by pursuing freer trade with the United States it could enter into a positive-sum game, that is, an interaction with the United States, where the United States would benefit and Mexico would benefit. And so putting those two together – a reorientation of the national interest towards a focus on absolute gains plus the possibility of a positive-sum interaction with the United States – produces institutionalised cooperation and that’s what we know as the North American Free Trade Agreement. Jef Huysmans I think from a realist perspective there’s two remarks to be made. One is that this interpretation, the liberal interpretation, does not undermine the realist nature of international politics in the sense that the power difference between Mexico and the US is so big that US does not actually care too much, that even if there are some relative loss it wouldn’t matter much because it would be at such a scale that it wouldn’t affect the global position of the United States and it’s capacity to preserve itself. So that’s actually an argument that liberal gains and cooperation can be played but under peculiar circumstances when the relative gains and losses do not dramatically affect because of the difference in position you start from, in power position, is so big that they do not matter in the global picture of international politics. The second comment from a realist perspective would be that the positive-sum game is actually a very rosy picture of what happened because it pictures as well if Mexico had a choice to some extent or they made the choice in their internal politics. If you look at how NAFTA came about, it was started off with an agreement between Canada and the US, so the two big ones agreed and what choices did Mexico actually have? So the only way to cover a bit of what they were losing anyway was actually to step in which is not really a choice, it’s a form of cooperation but it’s almost coerced cooperation, not in a literal sense. This leads me to the second bit. Even if the United States, for example the big powers, don’t overly play the power game in terms of coercive game where you try to bully the other ones into an agreement very visibly, the weaker states always know how powerful the big one is and they anticipate because they know what will happen if they don’t do. So, in that sense, there is a less rosy picture. William Brown So, Simon from Jef’s realist corner what we have is a charge that the liberal case is really a rather woolly, perhaps inconsequential in terms of the big picture view of an agreement between a tiny power, Mexico and a great power, the United States. Simon Bromley I think there are two replies to that. The first is to concede straight away that liberalism doesn’t have to be a theory of cooperation. As soon as you focus on interdependence it’s perfectly possible that some states are in a position to manipulate that interdependence at the expense of others and in a sense that’s what you’re describing with the Canada/US agreement. There’s a pattern of inter-dependence amongst three countries, Canada, Mexico and the United States. Two of them are in a position to strike a deal which adversely affects the third. So Canada and the US sign a free trade agreement. That worsens Mexico’s position and then, as you suggest, Mexico in a sense has to run to catch up. So the liberal model can cope with those kinds of circumstances where coercion is applied through manipulating interdependence and I think it’s quite important that we don’t give a picture of the liberal model as just a theory of cooperation. It can be a theory of coercion and of conflict. All the liberal model is committed to is that cooperation is, in principle, possible. It’s not saying that is always what is going on. So, in a sense it’s not damaging to the liberal model to concede your second claim that, in joining NAFTA, Mexico in a sense was running to catch up. Jef’s first point is that the liberal story, in a sense, is the icing on the cake: it’s fair weather cooperation that doesn’t affect the big relations of power. I think that’s a much more difficult one to answer but let me just throw in one consideration. The United States is engaged with extensive trade liberalisation and investment liberalisation vis-à-vis China currently. China’s position in the international system is rising very rapidly, it’s growth rates over the last two or three decades have been many, many times those of the United States and thus far there’s very little sign of the United States trying to change that situation, trying to slow down China’s much more rapid growth. So, presumably the United States is concerned about it’s relative power vis-à-vis China – it would be bizarre if it wasn’t – but it is also engaged in very, very extensive economic cooperation which thus far has resulted in a rise in China’s relative power vis-à-vis the United States.

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Now the jury’s still out on that one and things may well change but there might be grounds there for a more optimistic liberal assessment than a view that we’re always locked in zero-sum rivalries. William Brown Presumably a realist response to that would be that once China’s gains are of a significant magnitude to bother the United States then the relative consideration comes in and in some ways a good deal of this debate hangs on the relative importance of relative gains on the one hand and absolute gains on the other in the calculations that states make about their relationships to one another. Simon Bromley At the heart of the realist view, I think, is the assumption that, in the end, because of security and because of anarchy relative gains will trump absolute gains and I think that the heart of the liberal view is the view that there is no reason in principle why absolute gains couldn’t become to be defined as more important than relative gains, that in a sense the security issue can be finessed by interdependence. William Brown Jef, what’s the realist response to this? Jef Huysmans Well there are several elements one could throw into the pot from a realist perspective but let me just mention one which is that, of course, the US is building up and stimulating free trade with China, but at the same time it has been successfully putting a lot of pressure upon the European Union so as not to increase arms sales to China, which shows again that it’s fine to cooperate but at some point when it comes to the hard core of survival China can increase economically but when it comes to getting sophisticated armoury, which then leads into increasing its military power considerably, the big powers call a stop to it. So, in that sense, I think it’s important to see that absolute gains, free trade, cooperation can work but ultimately at some point one reaches a limit and that’s the point when security starts playing and at that point one calls a halt to cooperation. William Brown Okay. Let me try and draw some of the threads of this together and to think forward about what the implications of these contrasting and contesting views of the international system are. In response to the realist model we have a liberal case which presents a more complex picture of the international system and seeks to look at patterns of interdependence within an anarchic system. I think I’m right in saying, Simon, that the liberals would argue that this presents a broader framework within which to analyse the international system among which you might have realist looking interactions but also scope for cooperation between states that go far beyond that. The realist response to this is a kind of ‘yes but’. It’s, yes these areas of cooperation may emerge, but ultimately the sanction of selfpreservation, of worrying about threats from other states, of other states that become significant enough and powerful enough to pose a potential threat will always be the limit on how far cooperation can go. The realist case in that sense presents one view of the likely extent of cooperation internationally and, in contrast, the liberal view presents something rather different. Just to finish off with, let me invite you each to make a simple statement about what the model that you have been expanding says about the likelihood of cooperation in the international system. Simon. Simon Bromley For liberalism I think the core claim is there’s nothing fixed about states’ concern with their relative position. States could come to view their positions in much more absolute terms and as a result of that and as a result of the fact that the structure of the international system is interdependent as well as anarchic, durable cooperation is at least a possibility. William Brown And Jef. Jef Huysmans From a realist perspective cooperation will always remain limited and states will guard their sovereignty, not because they want to but because they have to because of the way the international 7

system is structured. And even if there is a situation of interdependence they will either try to avoid it, at least in crucial areas, or they will try to limit the impact of dependency that comes with some forms of interdependence by reducing vulnerability. William Brown Okay. Thanks. We hope that this discussion has helped you to see the main elements of both the realist model and liberal model of international order and we also hope it has helped you to see how you can draw out from the first three parts of Making the International some of these big picture debates that are about the nature of the international system as a whole and all that remains is to thank Simon and Jef for taking part in this discussion today.

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