Martha Finnemore, Judith Goldstein-Back to Basics_ State Power in a Contemporary World-Oxford University Press (2013).pdf

Back to Basics

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Back to Basics State Power in a Contemporary World

E D I T E D B Y M A RT H A F I N N E M O R E and

J U D I T H G O L D S T E I N

1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Back to basics : state power in a contemporary world / edited by Martha Finnemore

and Judith Goldstein. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780199970087ISBN 9780199970094 (pbk.)

1. Power (Social sciences) 2. International relations. 3. World politics. I. Finnemore, Martha. II. Goldstein, Judith.

JC330.B255 2013 327.11dc23

2012029550

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

For Stephen Krasner, whose intellectual integrity, clarity of mind, and fearless curiosity have made us all bett er scholars

vii

C O N T E N T S

Preface ix Contributors xi

PART ONE POW ER AND RE ALISM A S AN INTELLECTUAL TR ADITION

1 . Puzzles about Power 3 M a r t h a F i n n e m o r e a n d J u d i t h G o l d s t e i n

2 . Power Politics in the Contemporary World: Lessons from the Scholarship of Stephen Krasner 18

M a r t h a F i n n e m o r e a n d J u d i t h G o l d s t e i n

3 . Stephen Krasner: Subversive Realist 28 R o b e r t O . K e o h a n e

PART T WO THEORETIC AL REFLECTIONS ON POW ER , STATES, AND SOVEREIGNT Y

4 . Authority, Coercion, and Power in International Relations 55 D av i d A . L a k e

5 . Governance under Limited Sovereignty 78 T h o m a s R i s s e

6 . Th ree Scenes of Sovereignty and Power 105 E t e l S o l i n g e n

C onte nt sviii

7 . States and Power as Ur -Force: Domestic Traditions and Embedded Actors in World Politics 139

P e t e r J . K at z e n s t e i n

PART THREE STATE POW ER AND THE GLOBAL ECON OMY

8 . Currency and State Power 159 B e n j a m i n J . C o h e n

9 . International Trade Law as a Mechanism for State Transformation 177 R i c h a r d H . S t e i n b e r g

10 . Choice and Constraint in the Great Recession of 2008 196 P e t e r G o u r e v i t c h

PART FO UR THE SUBVER SIVE EFFECTS OF GLOBALIZ ATION

11 . Power Politics and the Powerless 219 A r t h u r A . S t e i n

12 . Globalization and Welfare: Would a Rational Hegemon Still Prefer Openness? 249

L l o y d G r u b e r

13 . Th e Tragedy of the Global Institutional Commons 280 D a n i e l W. D r e z n e r

PART FIVE SOVEREIGNT Y AND POW ER IN A COMPLE X WORLD

14 . Causation and Responsibility in a Complex World 313 R o b e r t J e r v i s

15 . New Terrains: Sovereignty and Alternative Conceptions of Power 339 S t e p h e n D . K r a s n e r

Index 359

ix

P R E F A C E

No one in the fi eld of international politics has been more central to our under-standing of the sources and eff ects of power than Stephen Krasner. Whether in his early work to refi ne realism or in his later work on failed states and sover-eignty, Krasner has never let us forget that politics is still, and will always be, fundamentally about power relations.

In honor of his many contributions to the fi eld of international studies, we asked some of the fi elds top scholars to refl ect on the role state power plays in contemporary politics and how a power politics approach is still relevant to the-oretical issues in political science today. Th ese authors make up a diverse group. All agree on the centrality of state power, but, not surprisingly, they off er very diff erent visions of powers role. Many of our authors engage with some of the same intellectual dilemmas we see in Krasners long career, struggling to defi ne power and its relationship to both interests and states. Some of our authors largely agree with Krasners theoretical perspective but explore new applica-tions created by contemporary political problems. Others see power very diff er-ently and show how their diff erent perspectives open up new lines of inquiry. Together, these essays provide a rich array of approaches to state power that we hope will reinvigorate research on power in coming years.

Renewed att ention on Krasners work on power is particularly fruitful today. For all its proclaimed centrality in world politics, state power has not been a major focus of international relations scholarship in recent decades. Realism has declined as a tool of research inquiry and been eclipsed by rational choice and game theory, neither of which puts power front and center. Liberals and constructivists have similarly focused on other topicsthe spread of democ-racy, norms, identities, and institutionsbut have also not made powers role in these processes central. At the same time, the world we want to understand has changed. New actors are exercising power in new ways, creating puzzles about power that are hard to explain. It is these puzzles that motivate our

x P re fac e

contributors. Each of the chapters asks questions about new kinds of power and new ways power works in the world. Th ey tackle these problems from a diverse array of theoretical perspectives, but one refreshing feature of all the chapters is how uninterested they are in batt les of the isms. In these chapters, senior scholars show how real-world puzzles can and should drive research, and how we can use diverse theoretical tools depending on the question asked.

Papers that became these chapters were initially prepared for a conference held at Stanford University in December 2009 and then revised for a second meeting at Princeton University in October 2010. During these lively meetings and subsequently, in pulling the book together, we accumulated a number of debts and owe thanks to the volumes many supporters. Foremost, we want to thank the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton and the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford for supporting the book con-ferences. In particular, Pat Trinity at Princeton and Jackie Sargent at Stanford provided invaluable administrative help. Numerous colleagues att ended these conferences and off ered outstanding critiques and advice. Th ese included David Baldwin, Christina Davis, Erica Gould, Joanne Gowa, Ron Hassner, Joseph Joff e, Moonhawk Kim, Charles Kupchan, Edward Mansfi eld, John Meyer, Helen Milner, Andrew Moravcsik, Mark Peceny, Tonya Putnam, Ronald Rogowski, John Ruggie, Kenneth Schultz, Jack Snyder, Janice Stein, and Michael Tomz. Michelle Jurkovich ably provided research assistance and thoughtful comments, and special thanks to David McBride at Oxford University Press for shepherding the volume through the review process.

Martha Finnemore and Judith Goldstein June 2012

xi

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Benjamin J. Cohen is the Louis G. Lancaster Professor of International Political Economy, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Daniel W. Drezner is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tuft s University.

Martha Finnemore is University Professor of Political Science and International Aff airs at the George Washington University.

Judith Goldstein is the Janet M. Peck Professor in International Communication and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

Peter Gourevitch is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Lloyd Gruber is Dean of the Institute of Public Aff airs at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Robert Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Aff airs at Columbia University.

Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University.

Robert O. Keohane is Professor of International Aff airs at Princeton University.

Stephen D. Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Studies at Stanford University.

David A. Lake is the Jerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

xii C ont r ib utors

Th omas Risse is Professor of International Relations at Freie Universit t, Berlin.

Etel Solingen is Chancellors Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.

Arthur A. Stein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Richard H. Steinberg is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Back to Basics

P A RT O N E

POWER AND REALISM AS AN INTELLECTUAL TRA DITION

3 1

Puzzles about Power M a rt h a F i n n e m o r e a n d J u d i t h G o l d s t e i n

We live in a diverse world. States, organizations, and the people in them are diff erently endowed with wealth, knowledge, capacity, and intent. Th ey are also diff erently situated, confronting varied arrays of incentives, opportunities, constraints, and threat. Th e roots of power lie in these diff erences, but fi gur-ing out the process by which diff erence becomes power or what its eff ects may be has been a challenge for scholars of world politics. Even actors blessed with resources and opportunities suff er bad outcomes if they pursue unrealistic goals or employ bad strategies.

Th e fact that building-blocks of powerendowments, structures, goalsdo not map neatly onto political outcomes motivates our volume. Most of us would expect bett er-endowed and bett er-situated actors to be more successful on the world stage. Oft en they are, as the rise of US power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests, but not always. States endowed with abundant resources may remain weak, and even fail. We oft en speak of a resource curse to describe resource-rich states like Venezuela or Congo that seem unable to convert endowments into power or well-being. Conversely, small island nations with relatively few resources may become major political or economic pow-ers, as Britain did in the eighteenth century and both Japan and Singapore did in the twentieth. Th e same paradox appears in actors other than states. Th e International Labor Organization (ILO), with one of the largest budgets among international organizations, has failed to eff ect sought-aft er labor policies, while the World Trade Organization (WTO), with a far smaller budget, has been highly effi cacious in regulating trade. 1 Similarly, resource-poor NGOs, like the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, may succeed in reconfi guring poli-cies of major militaries. Why resource endowments sometimes create power and success, but not always, is a puzzle.

Even when resources create powerin the form of troops, guns, and mon-eythat power does not always translate into policy success. Overt exercises of power like repression and threat can backfi re; they may breed resistance rather than compliance. Insurgencies against existing powers oft en thrive on repression. Victims can become martyrs and help recruitment into the ranks of the weak.

P o w e r a n d R e a l i s m a s a n I n t e l l e c t u a l T r a d i t i o n4

Similarly, vast sums of money may be funneled to poor countries in the form of development assistance without making appreciable diff erences in quality of life for people living in those places. One can hypothesize many possible reasons for these failures. Goals may be unrealistic; strategies may be bad. But, again, the link between power and outcomes is not clear.

Power is ubiquitous in all social relations, but as scholars of international politics we have a particular and long-standing interest in the power of states. State power has been foundational for our discipline since its inception, and understanding it is crucial to our fi eld. Even when narrowing their focus to states, scholars oft en disagree about how to defi ne state power and have very diff erent understandings of its consequences in contemporary international politics. Th ese divergent perspectives can be fruitful. As these essays show, att ention to multiple dimensions of state power is helpful, even essential, to understanding many of the puzzling manifestations of it we see in contempo-rary politics.

Th e essays in this volume point to three possible reasons why debates over state power and its defi nition continue and why contemporary scholars remain puzzled about powers workings and eff ects. First, our understand-ing of what state power is and how it creates eff ects is oft en too limited. By att ending to more faces of power and more diverse pathways by which it creates eff ects, our authors suggest that events that were previously mysteri-ous may be explained. Second, our notions about the environment in which states wield their power need to be broadened. Power politics is not just a game for states anymore, if it ever was, and the assumption that the distribu-tion of power among states is the only relevant feature of the international environment is rarely suffi cient to explain real-world politics. Th e diversity of powerful non-state agents and autonomous institutions, both domestic and international, has led to new theories about these non-state agents and struc-tures, but it is also challenging to some of our basic notions about states own roles and how state power works. Th ird, dilemmas of sovereignty make states and their power much more complex. Many of the worlds 190-odd states are problematic sovereigns in some way, creating challenges to the exercise of power not just by them, but also upon them. Th e traditional assumption of autonomous states, sovereign within and rational without, is unhelpful in explaining behavior of these states. Th ese sovereignty dilemmas are not lim-ited to the weak; even very strong, consolidated states face constant trade-off s in managing diff erent aspects of sovereignty and power.

We are not the fi rst to make these observations. For decades, even cen-turies, theorists and policy makers have noted that the political environment infl uences how power is manifest and when it has eff ects. Similarly, scholars have wrestled with a general defi nition of power while trying to get a bet-ter understanding of how and when sovereign units become powerful. Our

P u z z l e s about Pow e r 5

contribution is less to off er a new approach or a defi nitive answer to how power should be measured and studied, but rather it is to bring power back to center stage of thinking about international relations. Th eoretical trends in the IR fi eld have favored extensive work on topics related to information, identity, interests, audiences, and other important topics. While these have produced important results, they have (perhaps inadvertently) diverted att ention from what used to be our core concept. Although power politics rarely explains all international outcomes, ignoring relations of power risks missing the under-lying dynamic of international aff airs. Instead of off ering a general theory, our essays point readers to an agenda for theorizing about power, specifi cally state power, in coming years. As Stephen Krasner discusses in the conclusion, scholars have yet to operationalize a general state power theory to deal with many of the empirical changes and theoretical challenges highlighted by these chapters. Clear thinking about what the challenges are, though, is an obvious fi rst step toward that goal.

States, Power, and State Power

We begin with two concepts that have been central to IR scholarship for centu-riesstates and power. Power, particularly state power, has always been at the core of our discipline. Policy makers going back to Machiavellis prince have eagerly sought good advice about how best to wield their power to achieve desired goals. Now, as then, scholars have off ered ideas on how rulers, states, and organizations can best achieve their ends, but that advice is usually con-tested and oft en wrong.

One can imagine several possible explanations for this state of aff airs. One is that scholars have mistaken or misleading understandings of state power and the way it works. Another is that power itself has changed in contemporary politics in ways that create new puzzles not easily understood with old concepts. Yet a third is that states have changed in some fundamental way that alters their rela-tion to power and their ability to use it. Our authors do not all agree on which of these best explains the failure of conventional thinking about power politics. All three may contain elements of truth.

Th ere is good reason to think that our academic understandings of state power are inadequate and, at least in recent decades, have changed more in response to scholarly fashions than they have in response to transformations in the real world. Consider the changing ways in which the theory most concerned with state power, realism, has understood that concept. Within the fi eld of inter-national politics, the study of state power has been long associated with real-ism. Indeed, the modern term power politics is largely synonymous with the realpolitik statecraft informed by realist theory. Realism, however, makes power


central to its understanding of the world in very particular ways, and that under-standing has changed over realisms history.

Th e earliest, classical realist thinkers emphasized not just power but also fear as crucial drivers of politics. It was not just growing Athenian power that caused the Peloponnesian War, in Th ucydidess view; it was also the fear this created in Sparta that made war inevitable. 2 Similarly, Machiavelli emphasized fear, rather than love, as the most eff ective way to exercise power and rule others. Entering the more modern era, we see realists acknowledging the growing complexity of political life in their expansion of what is said to be components of power. For example, E. H. Carrs analysis in Th e Twenty Years Crisis gives a central role to the power of international opinion created by growing democratization and economic inclusion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 3 In all these analyses, power is coupled with and/or fi ltered through other factorsemotions, leaders skill, mass opinionto produce eff ects in the world.

Over time, however, these contextual and tempering factors were stripped away as scholars sought parsimonious theory. Individual passions such as fear fi gured less into scholarly thinking, and concerns with mass opinion largely disappeared from realist power analysis. 4 In the postWorld War II era, realism looked less at the intent of politicians or the emotions that drove themfear, love, honorand more at the constraints they faced from countervailing state power. Why this should be is unclear, since the postwar world with its new nuclear technologies would seem, objectively, to be at least as fear-inducing as previous periods. Th is was also a period in which constraints on US power were smaller, not larger, than they had been before. But emotion, which was so central to early realist logic, was largely eclipsed by a concern to present real-politik behavior as a rational response to constraints imposed by the environ-ment in which decision making occurred. Opinion suff ered a similar fate. While the late twentieth century was an unprecedented period of democratization in which public opinion held more sway in more places than ever before, realists of the period moved away from Carrs formulation and actively rejected it as a consequential source of power. Th e change refl ected a shift in realisms goals. While realpolitik survived, even thrived, as a school of foreign policy making, in academic circles the goal of off ering prescriptions to leaders took a backseat to developing realism as an explanatory theory.

As realists, and the IR fi eld in general, sought more-generalized explanations for political phenomena, they became interested in developing grand theory. Again, though, they understood this enterprise in very particular ways. Th eir aim, fi rst articulated by Hans Morgenthau in his pursuit of a science of pol-itics and elaborated by systems theorists in the 1950s and 1960s, was most fully realized by Kenneth Waltz in his systemic theory of neo realism. 5 Th is pursuit of grand theory, particularly that off ered by Waltz, had important eff ects on how scholars understood politics and what power meant in world aff airs. It


imposed a form of rigor and demanded logical consistency in ways that had big benefi ts for scholars and the fi eld. It made scholars, both realists and their crit-ics, self-conscious about their thinking. It forced them to be transparent about their defi nitions and assumptions, and opened them to criticism by others in ways that earlier, more philosophic or poetic, forms of realism had managed to avoid.

But the pursuit of grand theory, as understood by Waltz and others of this period, could also become a straitjacket. Its demands for parsimony and logi-cal consistency oft en forced IR scholars to be procrustean in their approach to the world. Events and phenomena that did not fi t with prior assumptions were ignored or neglected, and the fi elds treatment of power fell prey to these tendencies. Power was still central to many scholars thinking, but state power became the only power that matt ered. Material power, which was thought to be more objective and easier to measure, ergo more tractable for scientifi c theory testing, dominated the fi eld; other forms of power faded to the background. Th e distribution of power in the system constituted the international structure within which states acted and determined interests. Power was understood primarily as a constraint, preventing states from acting and defi ning what they could not do. Structural realism was notably silent about what states actually could do; it off ered no theory of statecraft and few predictions about what states, particularly great powers with few constraints, might actually do with their power. Some parts of the fi eld resisted these changes, but these changes transformed most leading journals and dominant modes of scholarship.

Few scholars would want to return to the analytic style of Morgenthaus day. Scholars now demand transparent assumptions, conceptual clarity, and logical consistency in ways they did not fi ft y or sixty years ago, and rightly so. At the same time, they are grappling with political events and policy problems that did not much concern earlier generations of scholars, and these have implications for the way we theorize. Concepts change to refl ect the reality we want to under-stand and manage, or so one would hope. Th e increasing number of failed states has made realists core assumption of states as actors problematic. Likewise, the inability of American military power to achieve goals of stability and democrati-zation in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that seeing power as fl owing simply from resource endowments remains problematic. A great many standard IR assump-tions about the way power works in the world need to be reexamined.

As our authors rethink the role of state power, they are not following the old realist power politics templatefar from it. Th ey are incorporating power into their analyses in new and diff erent ways; they are exploring new forms of power, new ways of wielding it, and new eff ects it might have on the world, some intended, others not. Like earlier analysts of power, they are developing new understandings suited to the contemporary problems they seek to explain. Th e chapters in this volume exemplify some of these innovations but are by


no means exhaustive. Diverse understandings of how power is expressed today suggest critical potential pathways by which power may be manifest in political outcomes.

Th e Many Faces of State Power

No single defi nition of power satisfi ed all of our contributors. Some focus on material power wielded by states, but show how changes in the world force us to reconsider even this understanding. Benjamin Cohen, for example, explores the way in which changes in the global economy may be creating new power for some and weakening others as reserve currency status shift s. In the days of unquestioned and seemingly unending US hegemony, this was never a worry. Others explicitly reject a purely material conception, as David Lake does in his arguments about the importance of authority in world politics, or as Peter Katzenstein does in quite a diff erent way with his discussion of the varied ways political actors may be embedded in diverse social contexts.

Rather than fall into some myopic defi nitional trap, we fi nd it most useful to typologize the diff erent kinds of power our authors see at work in contemporary politics. Th is allows us, and we hope encourages readers, to think about the ways in which various forms of power might interact in politics today. As Stephen Krasner usefully recounts in his conclusion, concepts of power have expanded over the past fi ve decades. Robert Dahls now-classic 1957 notion that A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do is certainly one important form of power, but our understandings have grown since then. Bachrach and Baratz alerted us to the ways in which a larger environment of values and institutions conditions power and prevents A and B from interact-ing at all by keeping some issues off the agenda. 6 Steven Lukes expanded notions about power further by emphasizing the way social systems and cultures are cen-tral to power in that they generate and structure the interactions and relation-ships between A and B. 7 Michel Foucault broadened our view still further with his infl uential arguments about powers connection to discourse and knowledge, and powers work through social relations from the most micro to the most macro levels of society. Power clearly exists in multiple forms, as David Baldwin pointed out in 1985 and Barnett and Duvall have discussed more recently in 2005. Being alert to powers diff erent forms and the ways in which these forms interact can be useful in any context but is particularly so for our study of state power. 8

To help us organize our thinking about the types of state power we may be seeing in our chapters, Krasner turns to Barnett and Duvalls (2005) typology. As he explains in the conclusion, Barnett and Duvall conceptualize power along two dimensions that capture the concerns of our authors. On one dimension, they distinguish between mechanisms through which power works: does power


work through the interaction of specifi c actors, as Dahl might claim, or does power work also through social relations of constitution, as Lukes suggests. On the other dimension, Barnett and Duvall distinguish types of relations actors might have. Relations can be direct, which is consistent with Dahls approach, or diff use, something he did not consider but occurs when As interaction is with the market or nationalism. Th e result is a two-by-two matrix identifying four ideal types of power: compulsory, structural, institutional, and productive. In his conclusion to this volume, Krasner uses this matrix to show how and why diff er-ent authors choose to focus on diff erent types of power, depending upon their empirical project.

Th inking about power in typological terms allows us to identify diff erent aspects of power that may be at work in these chapters and, importantly, allows us to recognize the interactions among diff erent aspects of power in the world. Lloyd Grubers analysis in this volume shows how US power works, not just as a form of Dahlian compulsion but as a form of power that is both institutional and productive: All states try to infl uence their external environments, but the United States didnt just tryit has succeeded. By creating new international institutions, such as the GATT in Richard Steinbergs chapter, and disseminating new values, such as economic liberalism, the United States both exercised and is subsequently aff ected by several types of power. Likewise, Arthur Stein explores the way terrorist power diff ers from conventional compulsion through its manip-ulation of more diff use and social aspects of its relations with its targets: creating fear rather than destroying military capability is analytically a very diff erent form of power, one totally inexplicable in our conventional focus on military power.

Th is multifaceted understanding of power encourages us to think more broadly about the relationship between states and power, and our authors do this in a variety of ways. Two themes are particularly striking. Many of these authors see a need to reconceptualize the environment in which states act to accommodate contemporary changes. Th ese new relations between states and their environment are a logical outgrowth of the broader views of power that att end to institutions and structures, mentioned above. In addition, a number of authors also found that conventional IR assumptions about states themselvesabout their coherence and sovereign controlneeded reexamination. We take these up in the next two sections.

What Kind of World Do States Live In?

Th e old realist mantra was We live in a world of states. Th at world is gone, if it ever really existed. In this volume, a number of our authors asked a diff erent ques-tion: In what kind of world do states live? States remain important, oft en the most important, actors in world politics, but as our authors make clear, states today


are not the only agents wielding power. A host of other actorssome new, some notare crucially important to understanding the politics we see. Corporations, terrorist groups, international organizations, empires, polities, NGOs, and substate groups all emerge from this collection as central components of contemporary politics. Not only do our authors encounter diverse actors, but also these actors are navigating a complex structural topography of international law, norms, rules, and economic arrangements that manifest themselves in all kinds of diverse struc-turespublic-private partnerships, institutions, hierarchies, polities, and empires. Th is is a far cry from the parsimonious Waltzian notion of structure as distribu-tion of material state power. Th ese structures of ideas, laws, and economic ties are oft en not anchored in any single state or even in states at all. Th ey oft en take on a life of their own and create eff ects that are oft en hard to trace back to states.

Our notions of structure in the international system have clearly become more complex, and these demand new thinking about how power works through and on those structures. For example, Daniel Drezner fi nds that instead of exist-ing in an atomized environment created only by state capabilities, states live in a very institutionalized world where cooperation under anarchy is no longer a cen-tral problem. He argues that states face complex legal and technical rules and, like David Lake, sees authority relationships to be far more consequential than is normally recognized in realist power analysis. Steinberg also sees legal struc-tures as a centerpiece of the international environment facing developing states especially and argues that these international trade structures actually reconfi g-ure states themselves in the developing world. Here, international structures like law and organizations are doing far more than merely encouraging cooperation between nationsthey are actively reshaping domestic institutions, oft en in ways that bolster states, rather than threaten or weaken them. Global markets shape and constrain state choice, Cohen tells us, and these eff ects, according to Gruber, have increased with the deepening and broadening of globalization. Th e result of this is not simply sovereignty at bay, where strong states, even hegemons, may fi nd themselves at the mercy of private economic actors. 9 Th e eff ects of markets and globalization are more profound; they reconfi gure domes-tic electoral politics inside powerful states, as in Grubers chapter, and gener-ate new social realities, such as complex fi nancial instruments, new hierarchies of reserve currencies, and a changing consensus on the legitimate relationship between markets and government, as Benjamin Cohen and Peter Gourevitch point out. Shared ideas and norms, too, exercise power over national leaders by galvanizing new social groups domestically and transnationally and convincing publics of the value of new goals and policies.

Eff ects created by this richer international environment vary, and diff erent aspects of the environment interact in diverse ways with nation states. States also vary in their ability to both control events within their own borders and to proj-ect their interests onto the world stage. In part, this refl ects the interpenetration


of states with their environment. Corporations, transnational interest groups, even terrorist cells are not completely separate from states. Corporations are cre-ated by states, are subject to state laws, and have interests that overlap with those of states. Transnational interest groups, too, are composed of citizens and oft en work through or with states. Th e same applies, perhaps in a more limited way, to terrorist and criminal groups. Th e existence of these cross-national identities, interests, and norms shapes states and the ways they exercise power. While we have long been aware that non-state actors, and structures of law, norms, and identities matt er, the fi eld has not reached a consensus on how they matt er and the eff ects they create. Still, no analysis of international politics in the twenty-fi rst century can ignore their role in international politics.

What Happens When States Become Problematic Sovereigns?

Coupled with the assumption that states are the actors that matt er, many IR scholars routinely assume that states are competent and reasonably eff ective in their exercise of power. When pressed, they would of course acknowledge excep-tions, but the prevailing view, all too oft en, is that state control and competence can be taken for granted in the construction of IR theory and analysis of politics. Waltz himself had self-consciously black boxed the state and set aside internal processes of foreign policy making, believing that this simplifying move assisted theory building. Th e consequence for the IR theory enterprise was to downplay, for several decades, fundamental diff erences in states internal structures, values, and goals. Th us, a generation of students was taught to think about nations as billiard balls and political outcomes as a result of their relative material power. Th is theoretical formulation put all the analytic weight on the international dis-tribution of state power as scholars investigated the extent to which anarchy dictated state action. Th e internal workings of states, their goals and their com-petence to pursue national interests, were of secondary consideration.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, this assumption came under intense scrutiny. Real-world events played a role in this change. Failed states became a topic of concern for IR scholars as they became a pressing concern for US policy. Places like Somalia, Haiti, and Chad that were nominally states lacked the institutions and internal coherence to perform the most basic state functions of provid-ing security and order, much less a functioning economy or human rights. Th e decoupling of externally recognized sovereignty from any kind of internal com-petence or control raised a host of policy challenges as well as theoretical issues for scholars. Th e result has been a more nuanced set of arguments about stateswhat they are, how they exercise power, and how power is exercised upon them. Th e failed state problem rests on a paradox. Such places are states on some


dimensions, notably under international law. Th ey have juridical sovereignty, or what Krasner has termed international legal sovereignty, and are recognized by other states as states. At the same time, they lack empirical sovereignty, or what Krasner has called domestic sovereignty and interdependence sovereignty, and cannot carry out many of the functions of a state. 10 Can they control their bor-ders? Can they collect taxes? Th e answers are sometimes surprising.

Problematizing the state-as-sovereign assumption has been a fruitful way to understand bett er the various dimensions of state power for a number of our authors. For Th omas Risse, investigating new modes governance in the absence of consolidated statehood shows how such alternative governing arrangements can be eff ective if there is a credible shadow of hierarchy from businesses, international organizations, or other external actors. His suggestion that there may be functional equivalents for statehood raises interesting questions about ways to create some of the eff ects of state power through other structures and actors, without functioning states. Katzenstein also suggests that we treat state-ness as something that varies, rather than as an assumption, and explores a variety of institutional contexts in which rulers may rule. Like Lake, he deploys the notion of authority, which he treats as distinct from power, but he does so in very diff erent ways and with diff erent conclusions. In a related vein, Etel Solingen explores what she calls dilemmas of sovereignty and the kinds of trade-off s states face. How states manage their sovereignty can have long-term implications for their power. At the same time, a states power infl uences the range of options available to manage sovereignty. Th is is true not just for failed states but also for some of the most robust and powerful states in the system. Using China as an example, Solingen analyzes the ways in which Chinese lead-ers have sometimes been willing to compromise some aspects of sovereignty, while other times holding fi rm. For example, Chinas internationalizing lead-ers were willing to compromise what Krasner calls Westphalian sovereignty (autonomy) for gains in interdependence sovereignty and integration into global market structures. Th ey were far less willing to make that trade when it came to nuclear weapons matt ers. Th e eff ects of these choices then feed back into Chinas power over time.

States and Power in the Twenty-First Century

Understanding contemporary politics requires varied and multifaceted under-standings of what state power is and the relationship between states endow-ments, situations, and goal att ainment. Th e chapters in this volume work to that end, providing richer empirical accounts of the varied types of power exerted by and upon states, as well as the diverse pathways and sources of that power. Taken together, they provide at least three insights.


First, the authors remind us that the context of politics matt ers. Th is sounds obvious but in fact cuts against the grain of many long-standing approaches to the study of politics and power in our fi eld. Oft en, theories abstract from context, and they may do so to good eff ect. But when we move to the empirical study of policy and outcomes, there is no state of nature. Rather, politics, domestic and international, occurs in a densely normed and thickly institutionalized set-ting. Th is social environment not only fi lters and channels power exerted by (or upon) states; it also creates new sources of power that states must reckon with. To study state power is thus to study the context of that power. Today, foreign policies must accommodate a dense international environment that includes international institutions, changing normative and social expectations, an intru-sive global economy, and a rapidly changing threat environment. Analysis can-not and should not ignore the nuances of this environment, and we should be wary of universal claims about powers eff ects across time and space.

Grubers chapter, for example, looks at eff ects of globalization on political, rather than economic, structures within states. Yes, globalization has important economic eff ects on growth, but it also has important political eff ects, created by the patt erns of population movement within economically open states: the more open a societys economy, the more likely are that societys haves to be geographically isolated from the have-nots. Th is spatial segregation of global-ization benefi ciaries and globalization losers has implications for geographically bounded electoral districts and representative government. Openness does not necessarily lead to a confl ict between those that do and do not benefi t from the expansion, but geographic clustering of haves in one place and have-nots elsewhere may mean we will see increased political polarization around diff er-ent views on economic openness. For Gruber, the global economys eff ects on inequality are likely to be mediated by changes in domestic political institutions, which have to adapt to migration fl ows and population changes.

Drezner also sees the international system as having eff ects, but in his case the systemic constraints vary, depending on the thickness of international (rather than domestic) institutions. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the 1980s and 1990s, when IR scholars emphasized the varied ways international institu-tions promoted cooperation, Drezner argues the opposite. According to Drezner, institutional thickening erodes the causal mechanisms that foster cooperation in an anarchic world. As the rules surrounding international regimes become more complex and unwieldy, only the strongest states will have the capacity to navigate them successfully. Increased complexity of the structures of international rules thus increases national autonomy for the more powerful countries, while weak states are left behind. Drezner calls this institutional viscosity or the amount of resistance to change present in the international environment; as the number and variety of international agreements increase, forum-shopping opportunities arise, but we should expect the most capable states to be the best shoppers.


Viscosity may also be an appropriate description for the constraints nations face in coordinating economic policies. Gourevitch points to structural shift s in the world economy over several decades [that have] generated imbalances. Th ese imbalances favored some actors over others; growth was uneven around the globe. When the worlds fi nancial structure teetered in 20072008, how-ever, credit everywhere was aff ected, and state leaders could do litt le to shield their nation from economic forces. As Cohen points out, bad policy by a large nation ripples throughout the system. Gourevitch agrees: Strong states can pose a threat to others as well as themselves. It is not the failure of weak states, but the policy failure of strong states that causes systemic problems.

A second implication of these chapters is that a focus on power is inexpli-cably tied to the analysis of inequality and/or asymmetries. Again, this sounds obvious, but the character and the structure of much IR theory have diverted att ention from the implications of this. We live in a world not of like units, but of units that vary dramatically in their endowments, capacities, and situation, as well as their goals. Moreover, the simple existence of these diff erences is a poor predictor of a states manifest power, since the ability to mobilize resources and the depth of those resources may not be related in a linear fashion to policy suc-cess. Similarly, the existence of an opportunity or advantageous situation is no guarantee that an actor can or will exploit it.

Figuring out the processes by which actors use their endowments (or not) and how diff erent situations create possibilities for action (or not) is a major challenge. It will require IR scholars to think much more seriously about a fi eld they have oft en neglectedforeign policy analysis. Strategy and tactics become important here, and can produce unexpected results. Smart choices by savvy actors can surprise us, producing policy success that might on its face appear unlikely. Of course, foolish choices may have the reverse eff ect.

Stein, for example, argues that the weak can exercise power with great suc-cess when they identify vulnerabilities in their more powerful targets and lever-age even limited resources to exploit them. Th e weak, he says, depend critically on technology: unable to defeat an opponent militarily, the strategy of the weak is to use explosives against soft targets, oft en civilians. Th e result is a power paradox: vast resources have been mobilized to hunt down individual terrorists possessing rifl es and dynamite. Conventional understandings of state power, for Stein, are problematic, given his case study. In refl ecting on US relations with the Arab world, he fi nds, for example, that eff orts of Al Qaeda refl ected not its extant power but its assessment of its prospective power. Further, the weak rely on some ideational and more diff use power resources not always well captured by analyses focused on asymmetries of material power. In particular, fear (or terror) and propaganda play a big role as weapons of the weak. 11 As Stein shows, the traditional notions of power are poor predictors of behavior for both weak and strong. Not only do the weak att ack, even in the face of apparent overwhelming


strength, but also and more telling, the strong spend vast resources on defending themselves from actors that by every indicator should be of no concern.

Th e diffi culty of predicting behavior using traditional views of the interna-tional distribution of power is also a theme in Solingens chapter. Leaders do not always make decisions that maximize conventional notions of power. Perhaps more interesting, leaders oft en face decisions that involve trading off one kind of power for another. In her analysis, leaders repeatedly make compromises that appear to undermine their sovereignty, but the consequences of such choices for power are mixed. Maximizing sovereignty/autonomy does not necessarily entail maximizing power, and reductions in sovereignty dont automatically lead to reductions in power, she argues. Th ere is not a set of policies that are the cor-rect international policies for any state. Compromising autonomy (one form of sovereignty) by ceding authority to an international institution (e.g., the WTO) as a strategy to gain more wealth may be the good choice at one moment but not the next. Th ere is no obvious single equilibrium or Pareto optimal strategy guiding state choices in many, even most, of the situations that might interest us. Rather, leaders face trade-off s across multiple domains of action. Th eir options are oft en painful and their choices far from foreordained.

Th ird, the world of politics in the twenty-fi rst century is one in which states rarely govern alone. Non-state actors and institutions of many kinds are car-rying out functions all over the globe that we used to att ribute to states. Th is is obviously true in weak states where NGOs and IGOs may be the princi-pal, even the only, actors providing security, education, and economic develop-mentall standard hallmarks of stateness. But it is also true in the developed world where non-state actors are oft en based, are politically powerful, and transnationally organized. 12 As Risse points out, areas of limited statehood are ubiquitous and may occur in US cities (think New Orleans post Katrina) as well as Afghanistan or Congo.

All this makes applying classical state-centric power analysis diffi cult, yet abandoning such an approach may be premature. States, power, and state power are still very much with us, and several of our authors explore the role of states and power in these overlapping jurisdictions and functions among state and non-state actors. Recognition that states and state power cannot explain every-thing does not mean that they explain nothing. States continue to be central, powerful actors in the world. Ironically, we can see this clearly in reactions to weak or failing states: where states are weak, that weakness oft en galvanizes oth-ers to intervene to rebuild and reconstruct them. When other types of actors are weak, they are ignored. When states are weak, strengthening them becomes an international project carried out not just by other states, but by a host of diverse actors and institutions, as Risse clearly shows. Th is is hardly a new phe-nomenon. Historically many, perhaps most, states have not been self-made; they are conscious creations of other actors. Creating state power, or at least state


competence, oft en serves the interests of others and is a product of power exer-cised by others who may or may not be states. Th is suggests scholars need new ways of thinking about the interaction of state power projection with that of other actors and institutions.

At the same time, these varied actors on the world stage are bound together in quite diverse power relations. One such concept that surfaces in several chap-ters is authority as an important relationship among international actors. IR scholars traditionally have not traffi cked much in authority. We have tradition-ally considered this a comparative politics concept, something that exists within states, not among or outside them. Th e authors in this volume provide strong arguments to rethink that position, and to rethink authority as a concept. David Lake makes this argument central to his chapter: we should be investigating authority and not just power. Lake focuses on authority among states, and the creation of legitimate authority as the result of hierarchy; but legitimate power or authority appears to be associated with a range of other international actors. Authority is at least an equal form of power, he suggests, and indeed, given that it is usually easier to gain compliance by obligating others to follow ones will rather than through force of arms alone, authority may actually be a pre-ferred form of power.

In Steinbergs chapter the authority that is granted to these legitimate non-state actors is aptly illustrated in the case of trade and the WTO. He argues that the rules have pressured not just for the abandonment of certain national policies [e.g., pro-protectionism] in other countries, but also for shift s of authority within the state, the creation of new kinds of state capacities, new processes of policy making, and development of some dimensions of rule of law. Joining the WTO is not just a change in commercial policy but also, more fundamentally, a shift in the form and locus of authority within the state. Membership in the WTO demands a shift in the purpose of state institutions and state authority structures so that they refl ect not just US and European trade policy preferences, but also the capacities and form of the state in Europe and the United States. Membership is transformative. According to Steinberg, this is all occurring in contradiction to a Westphalian sovereignty model of international politics. Th e nature of the state is changing because of participa-tion in the trade regime.

We close with the observation that understanding power today is diffi cult, not because it is hard to fi nd asymmetries, but because they are everywhere. Causality is overdetermined in some cases while inexplicable in others. Still, power is the glue that connects interests and ideational factors with policy out-comes. More than ever today we must seek to understand the pathways by which individuals, organizations, and states are able to reach their chosen goals. Th is process, far messier and more diff use than in earlier times, remains as important today as when Morgenthau wrote his classic text.


Notes

1 . Th e ILOs 2010 budget was almost (US) $727 million; the WTOs budget was less than one-third of this amount (at $232 million).

2 . Stein (this volume) also notes the role that hope plays in Th ucydidess analysis, and com-ments on its applicability to Al Qaeda and contemporary power politics.

3 . Carr 1939. 4 . Th eorizing about public opinion mostly shift ed to the study of ethics, rather than power,

and played a much larger role in liberal thought than in realist theories. 5 . Morgenthau 1948; Kaplan 1957; Rosecrance 1963; Waltz, 1979. 6 . Bachrach and Baratz 1962. 7 . Lukes 1974. 8 . Dahl 1957, 201215; Bachrach and Baratz 1962, 947952; Foucault 1975/1995, and

1982, 777795; Barnett and Duvall 2005, 3975. See also Baldwin 1985 and 2002. 9 . Vernon 1971.

10 . Krasner 1999, 342. 11 . Scott 1987. 12 . Avant, Finnemore, and Sell 2010.

References

Avant , Deborah, Martha Finnemore , and Susan Sell , eds. 2010 . Who Governs the Globe? Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .

Bachrach , Peter , and Morten S. Baratz. 1962 . Two Faces of Power . American Political Science Review 56 (4): 947952 .

Baldwin , David. 1985 . Economic Statecraft . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press . . 2002 . Power and International Relations. In Handbook of International Relations , edited

by Walter Carlsnaes , Th omas Risse , and Beth Simmons , 177191 . London : Sage . Barnett , Michael , and Raymond Duvall. 2005 . Power in International Politics . International

Organization 59 (1): 3975 . Carr , Edward Hallett . 1939 . Th e Twenty Years Crisis, 1919 1939 . New York : St. Martins Press . Dahl , Robert A. 1957 . Th e Concept of Power . Behavioral Science 2 (3): 201215 . Foucault , Michel. 1975/1995 . Discipline and Punish: Th e Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. New York :

Vintage . . 1982 . Th e Subject and Power . Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777795 . Kaplan , Morton. 1957 . System and Process in International Politics . New York : Wiley . Krasner , Stephen D. 1999 . Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University

Press . Lukes , Steven. 1974 . Power: A Radical View . London : Macmillan . Morgenthau , Hans. 1948 . Politics among Nations: Th e Struggle for Power and Peace . New York :

Alfred A. Knopf . Rosecrance , Richard N. 1963 . Action and Reaction in World Politics . New York : Litt le, Brown . Scott , James C. 1987 . Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance . New Haven,

CT : Yale University Press . Vernon , Raymond. 1971 . Sovereignty at Bay: Th e Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises . New

York : Basic Books . Waltz , Kenneth. 1979 . Th eory of International Politics . New York : Random House .

18

2

Power Politics in the Contemporary World

Lessons fr om the Scholarship of Stephen Krasner

M a rt h a F i n n e m o r e a n d J u d i t h G o l d s t e i n

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 Morgenthaus view, was about states pursuing interests, and in inter-national politics interests were defi ned in terms of power. 1 By defi ning politics as the pursuit of power and by confl ating 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 fi g-uring out how to use them as eff ective guides to analysis or policy proved diffi -cult. 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 fi nd a material basis for US interest in Vietnam or, equally problematic, explain US military failure against an apparently far weaker opponent. 2 Simultaneously, the fundamental building blocks of foreign policy analysis, states, were themselves being challenged by an array of new organizations, both public and privatemultinational corporations, international organizations, domestic insurgencies. Th e 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 eff ects of varied state interestsinterests beyond simple power maximizationhad become the central concern of international relations scholars whose focus now was on strategic interaction among rational actors in pursuit of diverse goals. Th is new focus on divergent interests and bar-gaining tended to downplay power and the power asymmetries between states that had been the backbone of earlier realist analyses.

No scholar bett er exemplifi es the intellectual challenges foisted on Morgenthaus disciples than Stephen Krasner. Th roughout his career he has

Pow e r Pol i t i c s i n th e C onte m porar y World 19

wrestled with realisms 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 realisms assump-tions 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 realisms ontology of fully sovereign auton-omous 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 att ractive strategies for states than war or diplomacy, the conventional tools of realist statecraft among sovereigns.

Th e evolution in Krasners 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 apply-ing realism today. As Robert Keohane argues in the next chapter, the changing nature of Krasners work suggests that the dual concepts of power and interest are oft en 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 under-standings of power, interests, and states are an insuffi cient basis for an explana-tion of real-world events. Others, like Krasner, remain more wedded to realisms fundamental premises. All agree, however, that ignoring state power and state interests makes litt le sense, since these remain the basic building blocks of inter-national 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 Americas decline? Do states reliably pursue their national interests, or do domestic structures and values derail the rational pursuit of material objectives?

Krasners answers to these questions were as diverse as the problems he tack-led. While they started from realist premises, they pushed, to use his phrase,


the limits of realism. 3 For some problems, Krasner hewed to the realist line: he argued that relevant actors were usually states and that outcomes were deter-mined by the distribution of power they faced in pursuing their goals. 4 During his long career, however, he never sett led for a simple explanation of the national interest, and though he paid much att ention 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 interna-tional system, which for several hundred years had been defi ned by the distri-bution of capabilities among major powers. 5 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 requi-site for markets to function smoothly.

Although Krasner turned his att ention 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 real-world political problems in recent years. As the chapters in the volume suggest, these themes remain important launching points for current research and analy-sis of international politics by scholars of many types. For that reason, revisiting Krasners insights on each is instructive.

State Power, Hegemony, and Cooperation Th eory

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 fi ction. Most states were limited in their inter-national reach, and some were even unable to act autonomously within their own borders.

To bett er understand the origins of foreign policy, Krasners early work focused on rulers or political leaders: leaders could exercise power in ways that were suffi ciently autonomous to make realist assumptions about unitary states with unifi ed national interests plausible and useful. 6 His early work also focused on the other core realist concernthe eff ects of state power. Even


before notions of failed states had come into the lexicon, emerging arguments about transnationalism and interdependence presented a challenge to realisms claims about state power and state autonomy. 7 In 1976, Krasner att empted to reinvigorate realism through a study of the international trading regime. 8 Noting that the world economy had alternated between periods of openness and clo-sure, 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 hegemons eco-nomic interest. Th e 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. 9

As the fi eld increasingly looked to economics as a model for theory build-ing 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 confl ict and war, came to be viewed as the defi ning 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 cre-ate 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. 10

Th e 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 inter-national regimes. Krasner defi ned regimes here as principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge. 11 Th e defi nition was one reached through group consensus but was strongly infl uenced by John Ruggie, an important founder of what later became constructivism. In a later essay refl ecting on this experience, Krasner distanced himself from this defi nition as too constructivist. He wrote that if he were to redo the regimes volume, he would have off ered diff erent defi nitions of regimes refl ecting diff er-ent theoretical perspectives. For realists, international regimes and the princi-ples, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures they embodied refl ected the preferences of the powerful. For liberals, these same regimes were effi cient solu-tions to market failure problems. 12 At the time, however, the shared goal of this diverse group was to establish the existence of cooperative arrangements, even in


a world of anarchy, and to provide ways to analyze the causes and consequences of this international political form. Th e regimes concept fueled much of the later work on international institutions, and fi rmly established that there were multi-ple levels of international institutions, which, along with states, exerted infl uence 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 benefi ts, and strong states had no interest, theoretically or practically, in being shortchanged. Fift een years later, Krasner would revisit the puzzle of international cooperation and regime creation to explore this distribution of benefi ts in an article that appeared in World Politics in 1991. 13 Here, he took up the case of the regime for international communications. Yes, the regime was of broad benefi t, but Krasner argued that its particular form refl ected 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 agree-ment and more about how specifi c rules favored particular (usually power-ful) members. While agreeing that regimes did make members bett er off , he returned to his realist roots and argued that that there were multiple places on the Pareto frontier that cooperation could occur. 14 It was power, he sug-gested, and not other att ributes of the regime that determined the particu-lar 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. Th ey 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 coff ee cartel, foreshadowing his later work on international regimes, but much of his eff ort 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 off ered the fi rst of what he would label statist explanations of US commercial and mone-tary policy in the postWorld 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- -vis other states. Such state strength could vary, he argued. In monetary policy, the state was strongthat is, able to develop a coherent


view of its interests and to isolate policy making from particular interest-group pressures. In commercial policy making, by contrast, the state was weak because domestic groups had tools to pursue sectoral interests and move policy away from any national interest that would have been optimal for the country as a whole. Variation in state strength vis- -vis societal groups was crucial to pol-icy success. In some domains, foreign economic policy making was akin to secu-rity politics: policy makers could pursue their conception of the national interest unfett ered by domestic constraints in ways consistent with a realist view. Not so for other areas of economic policy making, like trade. Here Krasner found that interests were not necessarily national and power was rarely used to purse national interests. Instead, policy was driven by the self-interested actions of domestic groups and could deviate from any national interest as deduced from the international power structure.

Th ese ideas were developed more fully in Defending the National Interest . Using US policy on raw material acquisition as a case, Krasner found that at times policy resulted from a careful consideration of overarching national inter-ests, but just as oft en, the patt ern of policy intervention did not. 15 To explain this inconsistency, he turned to the work of Franz Schurmann. 16 Schurmann was not constrained by a realist vision of interests as a set of material goals; rather he suggested that state interests could be shaped by a combination of both material and ideational factors, including cognitive ideas held by central deci-sion makers. 17 Using this insight, Krasner argued that apparent inconsistency in policy could be explained by the fact that US power and hegemony gave the United States room to pursue both material and ideology goalsthe two coex-isted and shaped US policy. Ideological goals were likely to be most important when a states material interests were secure. In these cases, a hegemon could be tempted to follow policies based on ideological objectives, without careful weighing of material costs and benefi ts. Th us, there was no reason to search for a materialist goal in the minds of central decision makers who embarked on the Vietnam War, a pressing policy puzzle of the day. It was a war of ideological ori-ented against communism. Not everything was ideologically driven; other poli-cies that assured US access to needed raw materials were materialist based. But being powerful meant that a nation could att empt to maximize both material and ideological goals.

Th e Status of Nation States

Th e fi nding that ideological variables explained some aspects of US foreign policy led Krasner later to explore these more fully and, indeed, to reexamine ontological assumptions about the nation state. In a series of articles beginning in the mid-1990s, Krasner argued that states were embedded in a larger set of


global notions about sovereignty, and that international law, norms, and practice empowered nations with rights that had litt le to do with their intrinsic capabili-ties. 18 Drawing on work in sociology by Nils Brunsson and John Meyer, Krasner concluded that sovereignty and the system of sovereign states were a form of organized hypocrisy. 19 States formally recognized as such by other states were not all equally sovereign on the ground, and many lacked the core att ribute of being able to defend the autonomy of their domestic authority structures much less provide basic services to citizens. Th e 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 aff airs 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 lead-ers 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 eff ectively 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 ratio-nal action, now he considered whether norms, values, and identities could play important roles. Certainly they matt ered in domestic politics and at critical his-torical moments could set future trajectories for state development. 20 Th ey 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 20012002 and then again from 2005 until the middle of 2007. During this period, state building was a major concern of the US governmenta project for which realism provides litt le guidance. State building explicitly involved violating the Westphalian/Vatt elian sovereignty of states that were weak both domestically and internationally. It thus violated a major assumption of realism. Realisms power predictions were similarly chal-lenged by these weak states whose underlying material capabilities and ability


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 att ack hege-mons. What matt ered in this world was not the international distribution of state power but rather the domestic capacity and ideological predispositions of weak or failed states. Krasners work both before, during, and aft er his time in government att empted to come to grips with the challenge of creating eff ec-tive and benign (from an American perspective) domestic authority structures in target states, a challenge that involved not only power but also att ention to ideas, culture, and norms. 21

Krasners 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 infl uence to create more effi cient 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 eff ort and vast resources, these reconstructed states were eff ectively sovereign only in the legal or juridical sense. Outside actorsother states, international organizationsmight recognize them as legit-imate sovereigns with juridical authority over their territory, but sovereignty in the sense of eff ective control over borders and populations was very weak. Th ese were hardly states of the type imagined by classical realismthat 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! Th is 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

Th e theme that runs throughout Krasners work is the importance of power. Morgenthau had seen power and interests as associated termsa nations interests derived from its relative power in the international system. Power, he argued, was the defi ning element of international politics. Krasner, however, was no simple neophyte. As Robert Keohane argues in the next essay, Krasners per-spective on the relationship between power and politics evolved quickly away from classical realism. Still, throughout his long career, the theme of power was always presentsometimes front and center in his explanation for policy out-comes, and at other times behind the scenes in the relationship between leaders


or in the role of dominant cognitive beliefs. If scholars are to take away any les-son from this work, it is that we cannot and should not ignore power relations, even if the concept of power is hard to defi ne.

Th us for Krasner, and for the authors in this volume, power remains a cen-tral concept connecting otherwise disparate scholarship on international politics. While authors may disagree on its purposes and eff ects, 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. Th us our authors in diff erent 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 . Th e main signpost that helps political realism to fi nd its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defi ned in terms of power. (Morgenthau 1948/1960, 5).

2 . With over fi ft y 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, 1985. 5 . Krasner 2004, 85120; Krasner and Pascual 2005, 153163. 6 . Krasner 1978. 7 . Probably the most prominent and enduring version of this challenge has been Robert

Keohane and Joseph Nyes 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, 317347. 9 . Hirschman 1945; Kindleberger 1973.

10 . See, for example, Snidal 1985. 11 . Krasner 1983a, 1. 12 . For Krasners rethinking on regime defi nitions, see Krasner 2009, 12. 13 . Krasner 1991. 14 . Others, notably Gruber, argued that regimes were not just about the division of benefi ts

favoring the powerful but that some regime members were made worse off . See Gruber 2000.

15 . Krasner 1978, 1977, and 1976. 16 . Schurmann 1974. 17 . Krasner would conclude that interests are determined by the material aims of a countrys

social and physical existence, while ideological concerns related to more fundamental questions of beliefs about order, security, and justice. Krasner 1978, 334.

18 . Krasner 1993; Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 1998. 19 . Brunsson 1989; Krasner 1998. 20 . Krasner 1984 and 1988. 21 . Krasner 2004, 2009, and 2010.


References

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Gruber , Lloyd. 2000 . Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Hirschman , Albert O. 1945 . State Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade . Berkeley : University of California Press .

Katzenstein , Peter J. , Robert O. Keohane , and Stephen D. Krasner . 1998 . International Organization and the Study of World Politics . International Organization 52 (4): 645686 .

Keohane , Robert, and Joseph Nye. 1977 . Power and Interdependence . New York : Litt le, Brown . Kindleberger , Charles. 1973 . Th e World in Depression, 19291939 . Berkeley : University of

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. 1998 . Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press . . 2004 . Sharing Sovereignty . International Security 29 : 85120 . . 2009 . Power, the State and Sovereignty: Essays on International Relations . New York :

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Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinners . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . Krasner , Stephen D. , and Carlos Pascual. 2005 . Addressing State Failure . Foreign Aff airs

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Martha Finnemore, Judith Goldstein-Back to Basics_ State Power in a Contemporary World-Oxford University Press (2013).pdf