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Two Challenges to Institutionalism
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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This century has seen no shortage of effort to think about how to improve the workings of global governance. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration’s unilateralist response, the blowback from this response, and the rise of China and India have all posed challenges to existing global governance structures. Within the academic study of international relations, institutionalists in particular have been prodigious in their efforts to build a better mousetrap on the global stage.1 These efforts proceed from a distinguished and important theoretical policymaking tradition that focuses on how governments can cooperate in a world defined by anarchy. They build on the efforts of liberal internationalists responsible for the most significant international institutions operating today, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Daniel W. Drezner * * * I am grateful to Alan Alexandroff, Karen Alter, Ann Florini, Brink Lindsay, Sophie Meunier, Jennifer Mitzen, Jeremy Rabkin, Kal Raustiala, Gideon Rose, and Alex Thompson for comments on suggestions. This paper builds on prior work, particularly Drezner (2007a, 2007b). 1. See Ikenberry in this volume; Fukuyama (2006); Ikenberry and Slaughter (2006); Wright (2006); and Daalder and Lindsey (2007). Two Challenges to Institutionalism In light of this tradition, it is understandable that institutionalists would propose reinvigorating existing international organizations while buttressing them with additional rules, laws, and organizational forms. This kind of “renewal strategy,” however, rests on a dubious foundation. Simply put, the world today poses a set of challenges that institutionalist theory has not previously considered. Institutionalists traditionally have been concerned with creating regimes when none previously existed. An emerging problem in global governance is the proliferation of nested and overlapping regimes. If institutionalists cannot cope with the politics of institutional choice, then policy makers should be wary of their advice. This chapter looks at the origins of institutionalism in international relations, to see why today’s challenges to global governance might lie beyond their paradigm. Two problems in particular bedevil the functioning of global governance structures: how to redistribute power among participating actors within international organizations, and how to manage nested and overlapping mandates between a growing number of international regimes. Unless and until institutionalists can devise governance solutions that avoid these problems, renewal strategies will be of little use. Back to the Future: Why International Institutions Matter To understand the current challenges to institutionalism, it is worth reflecting why the paradigm considered international regimes to be important in the first place. In the debate that took place between realists and institutionalists a generation ago, the latter group of theorists articulated in great detail how international regimes and institutions mattered in world politics. Although this scholarly debate ran its course some time ago, the institutionalist logic permanently shifted the terms of debate. The primary goal of institutionalism was to demonstrate that cooperation was still possible even in an anarchic world populated by states with unequal amounts of power. 2 According to this approach, international 140 l Daniel W. Drezner 2. SeeAxelrod (1984); Keohane (1984);Axelrod and Keohane (1985); Oye (1986); Baldwin (1993); Keohane and Martin (1995); Hasenclever, Mayer, and Rittberger [44.203.235.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:18 GMT) institutions are a key mechanism through which cooperation becomes possible. A key causal process through which institutions facilitate cooperation is by developing arrangements that act as “focal points” for states in the international system (Schelling 1960). Much as the new institutionalist literature in US politics focused on the role that institutions played in facilitating a “structure-induced equilibrium” within domestic politics, neoliberal institutionalists made a similar argument about international regimes and world politics.3 By creating a common set of rules or norms for all participants, institutions help intrinsically to define cooperation while highlighting instances when states defect from the agreed-upon rules. The importance of institutions as focal points for actors in world politics is a recurring theme within the institutionalist literature. Indeed, this concept is embedded with Stephen Krasner’s commonly accepted definition for international regimes: “implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decisionmaking procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (1983, 2; see also North 1991, 97). More than a decade later, Robert Keohane and Lisa Martin reaffirmed that, “in complex situations involving many states, international institutions can step in to provide ‘constructed focal points’ that make particular cooperative outcomes prominent” (1995, 45). By creating focal points and reducing the transaction costs of...