The Impact of Norms in International Society: The Latin American Experience, 1881-2001 (review)

Arie Kacowicz thoughtfully argues that regional international norms helped to maintain the peace in South America after the settlement of the War of the Pacific in 1883, thereby creating one of the world's longest-lived "zones of peace." In many cases, regional norms influenced the way South American states defined their foreign policy interests. The norms reinforced the peaceful nature of interstate relations in South America, especially in the southern part of the continent in the final quarter of the twentieth century, and thus helped to consolidate a pluralistic security community. Kacowicz argues that by shaping the procedures and context of interstate politics in South America, regional norms helped to determine the outcomes of territorial disputes and the manner in which states addressed the international security issues they faced.

International norms, according to Kacowicz, are "standards of behavior . . . that reflect a set of collective expectations regarding the proper behavior of states (and other actors) in a given context or identity" (p. 180). Kacowicz reasons from what he calls a neo-Grotian perspective, akin to the "English School" regarding international society, most closely identified with Hedley Bull. Kacowicz uses ten case studies to assess his theoretical claims. Six of these, all from South America, focus on territorial disputes. The four other cases, three of which are also from South America, address international security issues.

Kacowicz shows that all Latin American states that were parties to disputes invoked normative justifications for their actions. More importantly, the regional norms that committed states to the peaceful resolution of disputes played significant roles in five of the six settlements of territorial disputes (the Chaco War excepted). In all such cases, the disputes focused on the demarcation of boundaries from the administrative divisions inherited from the Spanish colonial empire as modified by subsequent treaties. Other inter-American states attempted mediation in these six cases, either as requested by the disputants or on their own initiative. Norm-abiding behavior also marked the four case studies regarding international security.

Kacowicz, to his credit, provides evidence and commentary to show that alternative explanations are also pertinent to his chosen cases. What he calls geopolitical concerns or third-party threats were significant in seven of the ten cases, and he also demonstrates that rationalist cost-benefit calculations, including economic motivations, mattered in all ten instances. Therefore, although the book highlights the importance of including the norms as an analytical explanation, it does not establish the supremacy of any one explanation over others.

Realists might counter that Kacowicz, though presenting alternative explanations and evidence for them, should have accorded these other explanations greater weight. In particular, his information shows that U.S. mediation played a role in five of the six territorial disputes and that U.S. power was of considerable influence in three of those five cases. The U.S. role was also more salient in three of the four international security cases than Kacowicz implies. An alternative explanation regarding U.S. hegemony, to which Kacowicz may give too little credence, seems relevant.

A greater challenge to Kacowicz's claim regarding the explanatory power of international norms is evident from the final outcome of the territorial disputes. International legal norms explain the result in only one of the six cases. Actual possession was decisive in five of the six definitive settlements. The only exception—Chile's return of Tacna to Peru in 1929—is partial at best. Chile retained mineral-rich Tarapacá province and the port of Arica, both of which it had seized from Peru in the War of the Pacific. The Chileans thus returned only the least important part of the booty. From this perspective, international norms were rhetorical fluff, a mere decoration to beautify the exercise of interstate power, and international mediation served simply to ratify one state's victory over the other.

Finally, one of the norms that Kacowicz claims should matter is the role of...