The Political Economy of Nuclear Restraint

o f Nuclear Restraint IT h e choice between establishinga regional nuclear regime and maintaining an ambiguous nuclear status among the second tier or would-be nuclear powers is at the heart of debates about global security in the aftermath of the Cold War era.' The study of nuclear postures of regional powers (beyondthe originalfive nuclear states) in the last three decades has traditionally emphasized their external security concerns. Such emphasis provided a powerful tool to explain the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent by countries like South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan, on the basis of legitimate existential fears. However, while their security concerns have been more or less constant for over thirty years, the nuclear postures of some of these countries have shifted over time. The external security context in and of itself is not enough, therefore, to advance our knowledge about why these states embraced different instruments, at different times, for coping with such fears. More recently, the notion that the democratic nature of states explains their reluctance to wage wars against their democratic brethren (but not against others) has become central to theoretical endeavors in international relations theory. The explosion of studies on the relationship between liberal democracy and peace has not yet included a systematic extension to the study of nonproliferation, but it is often asserted that democratization will have a Etel Solingen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Zrvine. For their helpful comments I would like to thank Harry Eckstein, Ted Hopf, Miles Kahler, Robert R. Kaufman, Timur Kuran, Stephen Krasner, Peter Lavoy, Pat Morgan, Kongdan Oh, Mark Petracca, Jim Ray, Richard Rosecrance, Wayne Sandholtz, Susan Shirk, Jack Snyder, Dorothy Solinger,Jessica Stern, Alec Stone, and two anonymous reviewers for Znternational Security. 1. Regimes involve mutual policy adjustments through a joint process of coordination and collaboration leading to the establishment of binding principles, rules, and decision-making procedures. See Stephen D. Krasner, International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983);Friedrich Kratochwil and John G. Ruggie, "International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State," International Organization, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Autumn 1986), pp. 753-776; Stephan Haggard and Beth A. Simmons, "Theories of International Regimes," Znternational Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer 1987),pp. 491-517; Oran R. Young, International Cooperation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989);and John G. Ruggie, "Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution," International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Summer 1992), pp. 561-598. ~ ~ ~ ~ International Securrty, Vol 19, No 2 (Fall 1994), pp 126-169 Q 1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the MassachusettsInsbtute of Technology 126 The Political Economy of Nuclear Restraint I 127 benign effect on denuclearization. However, this apparent connection may be less solid than we might like to expect: I argue that examining the economic component of domestic liberalization in the different regional contexts may bring us closer to identifying an important engine of regime creation. In particular, ruling coalitions pursuing economic liberalization seem more likely to embrace regional nuclear regimes than their inward-looking, nationalist , and radical-confessional counterparts.2 I do not suggest that security considerations are irrelevant to nuclear postures. Rather, I suggest an interpretation for why differentstates chooseover time-different portfolios to cope with their respective security concerns . My emphasis is more on explaining a favorable disposition to enter regime-like arrangements in nuclear matters than on listing incentives to procure nuclear weapons, as in the classical tradition of nonproliferation scholarship. Moreover, my argument is only relevant to would-be or secondtier nuclear powers-”fence-sitters”-whose choices have taken place at a different world-time than that of the great power^.^ Finally, although I refer to nuclear-weapons-free-zones (NWFZ) as the ultimate form of a regional nuclear regime, there may be other points ”along the Pareto frontier” that might help avoid the dangers of nu~learization.~ The next section summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of two alternative ways of conceptualizing the choices of ”fence-sitters”:neorealism and liberal-democratic theories of peace. I then explore the link between the nature of domestic political coalitions (liberalizingversus nationalist-confes2 . I am aggregating under the ”nationalist” rubric an...