Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America

2. Parochial Interest and Policy Change

c h a p t e r t w o Parochial Interest and Policy Change Nor is the task of the President in the leadership of federal administration simply one of the issuance of directions to subordinates: the arts of compromise, of negotiation, of persuasion have as great a relevance in the White House as in Congress. —V. O. Key Jr. Although I should have known better, I only slowly developed a sense of unease that something was seriously wrong with the premise of the information-analysis-directive approach to the management of the public sector. Briefly, this approach fails to account for the institutions of bureaucracy and representative government. By 1964 I came to realize that there is nothing inherent in the nature of bureaus and our political institutions that leads public officials to know, seek out, or act in the public interest. Cynics and a few political scientists could have told me this earlier—but without effect, prior to my personal experience in the bureaucracy. —William A. Niskanen Jr., Assistant Director for Evaluation, White House Office of Management and Budget In this chapter, I develop a parochial interest theory of international rivalry maintenance and the prospects for rapprochement. I argue that government agencies with vested interests in the policies associated with rivalry will act to prevent national leaders from achieving cooperation with the rival country, except when two conditions are satisfied: first, the emergence of an alternative mission for those agencies in the form of a common foe, and second, state resource constraints that force budgetary tradeoffs among policy priorities.1 This Parochial Interest and Policy Change 27 argument resolves the empirical puzzle raised in chapter one by explaining why a common foe induces rapprochement between some rivals but not others. Rivalry , like other stable government activities, is essentially a bundle of public policies that is deeply resistant to change. This resistance, as studies of policy termination, major policy change, and institutional reform on both domestic and foreign fronts have noted, largely comes from the intransigence of organizations with vested interests in the status quo.2 If bureaucracy is “the least understood source of unhappy outcomes,” then the relationship between state actors and the unhappy outcome (from the national interest standpoint, at least) of protracted international rivalry clearly merits new research.3 Parochial interest also sheds light on additional puzzles of protracted con- flict. First, rivalries often exhibit several failed attempts at cooperation and many instances of thawing and subsequent re-freezing of relations; this suggests that leaders are neither socialized into hatred or mistrust of the other state nor especially afraid of being voted out of office by an outraged, nationalistic populace.4 Although it is possible that these cooperative overtures fail through poor diplomacy or a refusal by leaders to engage one another, it is also plausible that rapprochement fails because it is dragged down intentionally from within each state, a line of argument I take up in this book.5 Studies of civil wars have demonstrated the role of spoilers in making conflicts intractable and in torpedoing compromise attempts by leaders, and I see little reason why international rivalries would be immune to these dynamics.6 In fact, the organizational apparatus of the state and its position atop a steady stream of resources through taxation and expenditure might make parochial interest dynamics even stronger in interstate rivalries than in civil wars or ethnic conflicts. Furthermore, if conflict ripeness matters for timing successful cooperative initiatives, then for interstate rivalries, we need to know more about the domestic obstacles to rapprochement and about the institutional sources of ripe moments for conflict resolution.7 Second, rivalries often exist for decades without a war or even a major crisis, suggesting a degree of stability, domestic functionality, or even tacit bilateral collusion in the propagation of low-grade interstate conflict.8 As Harold Lasswell argued in his classic essay on the garrison state, the ceremony of national defense—the policies, behaviors, and attitudes of preparation for militarized conflict—can substitute for war itself in perpetuating the political dominance of the specialists on violence.9 While articulating this source of rivalry persistence and this road to rapprochement , I readily concede that others may exist and that, like any model of the foreign policy process, my argument will fit some classes of countries and 28 Rivalry and...