Back to Basics. State Power in a Contemporary World. and EDITED BY MARTHA FINNEMORE JUDITH GOLDSTEIN

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1 Back to Basics State Power in a Contemporary World EDITED BY MARTHA FINNEMORE and JUDITH GOLDSTEIN

2 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto For Stephen Krasner, whose intellectual integrity, clarity of mind, and fearless curiosity have made us all better scholars With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without die prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Back to basics ; state power in a contemporary world / edited by Martha Finnemore and Judith Goldstein. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN SBN (pbk) 1. Power (Social sciences) 2. International relations. 3. World politics. I. Finnemore, Martha. II. Goldstein, Judith..IC '1 dc Printed in the United States of America

3 2 Power Politics in the Contemporary World Lessons from the Scholarship of Stephen Krasner MARTHA FINNEMORE AND JUDITH GOLDSTEIN When Hans Morgenthau reformulated realism for modern scholars in 1948, he began with the concept of state power. Just as wealth was the goal and domain of economists, so power was the goal and domain of international politics. Politics, in Morgenthau's view, was about states pursuing interests, and in international politics interests were defined in terms of power.' By defining politics as the pursuit of power and by conflating power with interests, Morgenthau set the stage for decades of debate about these two terms and the proper relationship between them. Both state power and state interests turned out to be elusive concepts, and figuring out how to use them as effective guides to analysis or policy proved difficult. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of international relations scholars tried to make sense of a failed US policy in Southeast Asia, but few could find a material basis for US interest in Vietnam or, equally problematic, explain US military failure against an apparently far weaker opponent.' Simultaneously, the fundamental building blocks of foreign policy analysis, states, were themselves being challenged by an array of new organizations, both public and private multinational corporations, international organizations, domestic insurgencies. The world was increasingly messy, and it was hard to imagine that state power and state interests were, as Morgenthau had claimed, one and the same. By the late 1980s, exploring the effects of varied state interests interests beyond simple power maximization had become the central concern of international relations scholars whose focus now was on strategic interaction among rational actors in pursuit of diverse goals. This new focus on divergent interests and bargaining tended to downplay power and the power asymmetries between states that had been the backbone of earlier realist analyses. No scholar better exemplifies the intellectual challenges foisted on Morgenthau's disciples than Stephen Krasner. Throughout his career he has 18

4 Power Politics in the Contemporary World 1 9 wrestled with realism's promises and limitations. He reinvigorated concepts of relative state power in his analysis of foreign policy and international institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the 1990s came to question realism's assumptions about unitary states and the fundamentals of state sovereignty. By the turn of the century, he was abandoning his neorealist colleagues and pointing out fundamental contradictions between realism's ontology of fully sovereign autonomous states and its assumption of anarchy in which states can further their interests in any way they choose. In an anarchical world, altering the domestic authority structures of other states and violating their autonomy could be more attractive strategies for states than war or diplomacy, the conventional tools of realist statecraft among sovereigns. The evolution in Krasner's scholarship illustrates both how scholars have used realism, with its focus on states and power, as an intellectual template to explain a wide range of international behavior and the challenges entailed in applying realism today. As Robert Keohane argues in the next chapter, the changing nature of Krasner's work suggests that the dual concepts of power and interest are often incomplete, and sometimes unhelpful guides for scholars confronted by foreign policy behavior at odds with expectations. Similarly, the authors in this volume were challenged by the theoretical stumbling blocks that faced Krasner throughout his career. Some conclude that the traditional realist understandings of power, interests, and states are an insufficient basis for an explanation of real-world events. Others, like Krasner, remain more wedded to realism's fundamental premises. All agree, however, that ignoring state power and state interests makes little sense, since these remain the basic building blocks of international relations analysis. Power and Realism in a Changing World Inspired by the ideas of Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, as well as economists like Albert Hirschman and Charles Kindleberger, Krasner began his career as a prominent defender of realism and the importance of state power understood in material terms, whether military or economic. Power was central to international politics for Krasner, and he took realist premises very seriously. In the ensuing years, however, Krasner found that empirical analysis using a realist framework rarely provided a complete explanation for outcomes. If states seek power, he asked, why do we see cooperation? If hegemony promotes cooperation, why does cooperation continue in the face of America's decline? Do states reliably pursue their national interests, or do domestic structures and values derail the rational pursuit of material objectives? Krasner's answers to these questions were as diverse as the problems he tackled. While they started from realist premises, they pushed, to use his phrase,

5 20 POWER AND REALISM AS A N I N T E L L E C T U A L T R A D I T I O N "the limits of realism.' he argued that relevant actors were usually states and that outcomes were determined by the distribution of power they faced in pursuing their goals. his long career, however, he never settled for a simple explanation of the national interest, and though he paid much attention to the material basis of state power, he understood the independent importance of ideas or cognitive beliefs and the challenge this admission posed to a straight power-politics approach. In more recent work, he relaxed even the statist ontology of realism and argued that non-state actors and failed states have altered the basic structure of the international system, which for several hundred years had been defined by the distribution of capabilities among major powers.' Like many of his contemporaries, Krasner also recognized that markets were a constant and powerful constraint on state action, but believed ultimately that state power was the necessary requisite for markets to function smoothly. Although Krasner turned his attention to myriad empirical problems over his long career, three central themes run through his scholarship: state power and hegemony; the relationship between states and markets; and conceptions of the nation state in international politics. Each of these raises problems with basic realist assumptions and logic, yet all have been central to pressing realworld political problems in recent years. As the chapters in the volume suggest, these themes remain important launching points for current research and analysis of international politics by scholars of many types. For that reason, revisiting Krasner's insights on each is instructive, State Power, Hegemony, and Cooperation 'Theory Initially, like Morgenthau, Krasner gave pride of place to sovereign states as his unit of analysis; unlike Morgenthau he constantly reexamined that assumption. He recognized, especially in his work on sovereignty, that realist assumptions about unitary states and state autonomy were empirically and theoretically problematic. Even in his early work, Krasner recognized that domestic factors could shape conceptions of national interest. Further, international constraints on most states were so large that the notion they were autonomous in their foreign policy choices was a fiction. Most states were limited in their international reach, and some were even unable to act autonomously within their own borders. To better understand the origins of foreign policy, Krasner's early work focused on rulers or political leaders: leaders could exercise power in ways that were sufficiently autonomous to make realist assumptions about unitary states with unified national interests plausible and useful.' His early work also focused on the other core realist concern the effects of state power. Even

6 Power Politics in the Contemporary World 21 before notions of "failed" states had come into the lexicon, emerging arguments about transnationalism and interdependence presented a challenge to realism's claims about state power and state autonomy.' In 1976, Krasner attempted to reinvigorate realism through a study of the international trading regime.' Noting that the world economy had alternated between periods of openness and closure, Krasner argued that this variation and the nature of the trade regime were products of the distribution of power among states. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, open trade or a liberal trading regime was not a natural outcome of domestic interests or economic ideas; rather, it was an outcome of concentrated state power and hegemony. When a hegemonic state was rising, that state had an interest in providing the leadership necessary to open world markets. Given its wealth-enhancing advantage, open trade served the rising hegemon's economic interest. The argument drew on ideas from economists like Hirschman, who showed that trade dependence could be used as a source of power, and Kindleberger, who argued that a hegemonic nation should be willing to provide the collective good of an open trade regime.' As the field increasingly looked to economics as a model for theory building in the late 1970s, what earlier scholars had thought of as "leadership" by great powers was subsumed into a larger conversation about "providing public goods." Market failure, rather than conflict and war, came to be viewed as the defining problem in international relations, and understanding when and why nations provide international collective goods became a critical research agenda in the 1980s. Scholars wondered whether hegemony was really necessary to create and maintain open trade, monetary stability, and robust military alliances, or whether other groupings of states would be willing to cooperate and jointly expend resources for a collective good.'' The result was a lively research debate on the more general issue of explaining interstate cooperation. To explore this theme further, in 1982 Krasner assembled a group of authors, four of whom join us in this volume, to explain the roots of international cooperation in a pathbreaking project on what they termed "international regimes: Krasner defined regimes here as principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge." The definition was one reached through group consensus but was strongly influenced by John Ruggie, an important founder of what later became constructivism. In a later essay reflecting on this experience, Krasner distanced himself from this definition as too constructivist. He wrote that if he were to redo the regimes volume, he would have offered different definitions of regimes reflecting different theoretical perspectives. For realists, international regimes and the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures they embodied reflected the preferences of the powerful. For liberals, these same regimes were efficient solutions to market failure problems. diverse group was to establish the existence of cooperative arrangements, even in

7 22 POWER AND REALISM AS A N I N T E L L E C T U A L T R A D I T I O N a world of anarchy, and to provide ways to analyze the causes and consequences of this international political form. The regimes concept fueled much of the later work on international institutions, and firmly established that there were multiple levels of international institutions, which, along with states, exerted influence on political outcomes. While rich and fruitful in many ways, the cooperation focus papered over the role that power asymmetries played in the provision of collective goods. Cooperation almost always produced uneven benefits, and strong states had no interest, theoretically or practically, in being shortchanged. Fifteen years later, Krasner would revisit the puzzle of international cooperation and regime creation to explore this distribution of benefits in an article that appeared in World Politics in for international communications. Yes, the regime was of broad benefit, but Krasner argued that its particular form reflected the power and desires of its strong state creators, not abstract functional needs of public goods provision. Reacting to the liberal institutional rationale for the creation of international institutions, Krasner argued that the organization of regimes was less about how to solve some common problem faced by the signatories to an agreement and more about how specific rules favored particular (usually powerful) members. While agreeing that regimes did make members better off, he returned to his realist roots and argued that that there were multiple places on the "Pareto frontier" that cooperation could occur." It was power, he suggested, and not other attributes of the regime that determined the particular choice of regime rules and the degree to which the regime furthered the interests of particular members. States and Markets: Explaining Foreign Economic Policy Markets have been one of the most visible and vexing forces shaping state power since World War II. They provide sources of power, especially to hegemons, but also place constraints on state action, and Krasner explored both throughout his career in his work on the politics of economic policy making. His earliest work looked at the politics of the international coffee cartel, foreshadowing his later work on international regimes, but much of his effort in the 1970s went into understanding American economic policy more generally. In the special issue of International Organization in 1977, titled Between Power and Plenty, he offered the first of what he would label "statist" explanations of US commercial and monetary policy in the post World War II era. His focus here was on the robustness and coherence of internal state structures relative to other domestic actors rather than capabilities vis-à-vis other states. Such state strength could vary, he argued. In monetary policy, the state was "strong" that is, able to develop a coherent

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9 24 POWER AND REALISM AS A N I N T E L L E C T U A L T R A D I T I O N global notions about sovereignty, and that international law, norms, and practice empowered nations with rights that had little to do with their intrinsic capabilities. concluded that sovereignty and the system of sovereign states were a form of, not all equally sovereign on the ground, and many lacked the core attribute of being able to defend the autonomy of their domestic authority structures much less provide basic services to citizens. The hypocrisy ran deep. Nations that gave lip service to the norm of state sovereignty could be quick to ignore its precepts, as an examination of state meddling in each others' affairs showed. For Krasner, decoupling the idea of sovereignty from the actual practices of statehood in the international system was necessary to explain the behavior of political leaders and outcomes in the international system. Sovereignty was not an organic package: a state could have some elements of sovereignty, such as recognition in international law, and not others, such as the ability to effectively govern its own territory. Studying the historical construction of the nation-state system led Krasner to consider more closely whether and when social ideas constructed states as actors, as well as other aspects of the international system. Whereas early in his career Krasner saw state action as dominated by material concerns and rational action, now he considered whether norms, values, and identities could play important roles. Certainly they mattered in domestic politics and at critical historical moments could set future trajectories for state development.'" They were weaker in the international environment than in the domestic but were still consequential. While taking norms and ideas seriously, Krasner ultimately concluded that social factors did not dominate behavior, as suggested by constructivist approaches. Krasner agreed that norms constrained behavior, but in a more strategic sense, rather than a "taken for granted" sense. Norms were "hooks" on which a leader could mobilize a domestic population around some set of social ideas. Domestic society is "thickly normed," so we should expect norms to play a large role; the international environment, by contrast, is "thinly normed," thus limiting norms' role internationally. Material power continues to dominate in the international realm. Krasner was able to apply these ideas to foreign policy when he served in the Bush administration in and then again from 2005 until the middle of During this period, state building was a major concern of the US government a project for which realism provides little guidance. State building explicitly involved violating the Westphalian/Vattelian sovereignty of states that were weak both domestically and internationally. It thus violated a major assumption of realism. Realism's power predictions were similarly challenged by these weak states whose underlying material capabilities and ability

10 Power Politics in the Contemporary World 2 5 to do harm had become decoupled. A newly nuclear North Korea could kill hundreds of thousands of people in neighboring countries whose GDP dwarfed its own. Similarly, weak terrorist non-state actors could successfully attack hegemons. What mattered in this world was not the international distribution of state power but rather the domestic capacity and ideological predispositions of weak or failed states. Krasner's work both before, during, and after his time in g tive and benign (from an American perspective) domestic authority structures in target states, a challenge that involved not only power but also attention to ideas, culture, and norms. Krasner's return to his realist roots since leaving government was in part a result of his experiences there. Confronted with an increasing number of "failed" states perceived as security threats, US policy became increasingly focused on state building and ways the United States could use its influence to create more efficient institutions in these nations. Building a world of states might seem a very realist enterprise, but there was a twist: the states being constructed were not equally sovereign. Despite great effort and vast resources, these reconstructed states were effectively sovereign only in the legal or juridical sense. Outside actors other states, international organizations might recognize them as legitimate sovereigns with juridical authority over their territory, but sovereignty in the sense of effective control over borders and populations was very weak. These were hardly states of the type imagined by classical realism that is, autonomous actors able to protect and pursue their own interests. Stranger still, the interests of the powerful were now to create robust domestic governing structures in the weak and to create well-being for populations in these states. Realism was now being turned on its head! This is not a world Morgenthau would recognize. On the one hand, Morgenthau was right: strong state power is at the center of these sweeping changes, and strong states engage in state building because they believe it serves their interests. What is new is the nature of those interests. Reconceptualizing Power The theme that runs throughout Krasner's work is the importance of power. Morgenthau had seen power and interests as associated terms a nation's interests derived from its relative power in the international system. Power, he argued, was the defining element of international politics. Krasner, however, was no simple neophyte. As Robert Keohane argues in the next essay, IKrasner's perspective on the relationship between power and politics evolved quickly away from classical realism. Still, throughout his long career, the theme of power was always present sometimes front and center in his explanation for policy outcomes, and at other times behind the scenes in the relationship between leaders

11 26 POWER AND REALISM AS A N I N T E L L E C T U A L T R A D I T I O N or in the role of dominant cognitive beliefs. If scholars are to take away any lesson from this work, it is that we cannot and should not ignore power relations, even if the concept of power is hard to define. Thus for Krasner, and for the authors in this volume, power remains a central concept connecting otherwise disparate scholarship on international politics. While authors may disagree on its purposes and effects, they agree that at the most fundamental level the study of power involves an analysis of inequalities. In most, if not all forms, power exists as "asymmetry"; it exists because actors are unequal in endowments or situation. It causes asymmetries as well as being caused by them. Thus our authors in different ways all consider a world of inherently unequal actors, whether states or not, and all explore the ways this inequality creates political outcomes. In this sense, we return to the fundamental questions addressed by Morgenthau a generation ago. Notes 1. "The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power:' (Morgenthau 1948/1960,.5). 2. With over fifty thousand dead, it was hard to defend the later argument of failure as a result of a lack of commitment. 3. Krasner 1983b. 4. Krasner 1978, S. Krasner 2004, ; Krasner and Pascual 2005, Krasner , Probably the most prominent and enduring version of this challenge has been Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye's Power and Interdependence (1977), early versions of which appeared in International Organization as a special issue, "Transnational Relations in World Politics" (vol. 24, no. 3, summer 1971). 8. Krasner 1976, Hirschman 1945; Kindleberger See, for example, Snidal Krasner I983a, For Krasner's rethinking on regime definitions, see Krasner 2009, Krasner 1991, 14. Others, notably Gruber, argued that regimes were not just about the division of benefits favoring the powerful but that some regime members were made worse off. See Gruber Krasner 1978, 1977, and Schurmann Krasner would conclude that interests are determined by the material aims of a country's social and physical existence, while ideological concerns related to more fundamental questions of beliefs about order, security, and justice. Krasner 1978, Krasner 1993; Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 1998, 19. Brunsson 1989; Krasner Krasner 1984 and Krasner 2004, 2009, and 2010.

12 Power Politics in the Contemporary World 2 7 References Brunsson, Nils The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions, and Actions in Organizations. New York: Wiley. Gruber, Lloyd Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hirschman, Albert O State Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade. Berkeley: University of California Press. Katzenstein, Peter J., Robert O. Keohane, and Stephen D. Krasner "International Organization and the Study of World Politics." International Organization 52(4): Keohane, Robert, and Joseph Nye Power and Interdependence. New York: Little, Brown. Kindleberger, Charles The World in Depression, Berkeley: University of California Press. Krasner, Stephen D "State Power and the Structure of International Trade World Politics 28(3): "US Commercial and Monetary Policy: Unraveling the Paradox of External Strength and Internal Weakness:' International Organization 31(4): Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and US Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press a. "Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables." In International Regimes, edited by Stephen D. Krasner, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press b. "Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables." In International Regimes, edited by Stephen D. Krasner, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press "Approachest othestate:alternativeconceptionsandhistoricaldynamics." Comparative Politics 16(2): StructuralConflict:TheThirdWorldagainstGlobalLiberalism.Berkeley:University of California Press "Sovereignty:A ninstitutionalperspectivecomparativepoliticalstudies, 21(0: GlobalCommunicationsandNationalPower:LifeontheParetoFrontier.World Politics 43: "WestphaliaandAllThat."I nideasandforeignpolicy:beliefs,institutions,and Political Change, edited by Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press Sovereignty:OrganizedHypocrisy.Princeton,NJ:PrincetonUniversityPress "SharingSovereignty."InternationalSecurity29: Power,theStateandSovereignty:EssaysonInternationalRelations.NewYork: Routledge "TheDurabilityofOrganizedHypocrisy"InSovereigntyinFragments,editedby Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krasner, Stephen D., and Carlos Pascual "Addressing State Failure Foreign Affairs 84(4): Morgenthau, Hans. 1948/1960. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schurmann, Franz Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics. New York: Pantheon Books. Snidal, Duncan "The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory:' International Organization 39: