Institutions and Cooperation: Sanctions During the Falkland Islands Conflict

cooperation 1 Sanctions During the Falkland Islands Conflict A t the beginning of April 1982, a long-running dispute between Great Britain and Argentina about sovereignty over the Falkland Islands (called the Malvinas in Latin America) broke into open conflict when Argentine forces invaded the islands. During the next two months, at Britain’s urging, many states imposed economic sanctions against Argentina. Sanctions both preceded and accompanied British military action. In this article I examine Britain’s success in gaining the cooperation of other states, particularly the members of the European Economic Community (EEC).The high level of cooperation cannot be explained on the basis of narrowly-defined national self-interest, because only Britain had a strong interest in reacting to Argentina’s moves, while other states had good reasons to prefer to avoid imposing sanctions.’ Resistance to imposing sanctions increased as the crisis escalated and derived primarily from political concerns about supporting Britain in war and, to a lesser extent, from the economic costs of sanctions. I argue that British manipulation of the EEC’s institutional incentives overcame members’ resistance . A number of international relations theorists have presented arguments about the role that international institutions might play in facilitating cooperation among states. By means such as providing information about the actions of other states, setting standards by which to evaluate others’ behavLisii L. Martin is a Natiorial Ft‘//OW at the Hoorvr lnstifutiori on War, Reuolutiori and Peace, Stanford Uiirziersity, atid Assistant Professor of Political Scictice at the Uiirzrersifyof Califorrfia, Sun Diego. She is the author of Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions (Princetori Uiiizwsity Press, forthcoriiirig 1992). My thanks to James Alt, Robert Keohane, Gary Kmg, Stephen Krasner, Peter Yu, and three anonymous readers for their comments and suggestions. This research was assisted by an award from the Social Science Research Council’s Program in Foreign Policy Studies. 1. The level of cooperation achieved in this case is well above the average for post-1945 cases of economic sanctions. One comprehensive study gives the Falklands case a cooperation score in the top 25 percent of all sanctions episodes since 1945. See Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott, Ecoiioriiic Satictioiis Rccorzsidered: Supplemental Case Histories, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990), p. 544. [ntrrirnfru?in/Srcurrty, Spring 1992 (Vol 16, No. 4) 0 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 143 lnternational Security 16:4 I 144 ior, or establishing penalties for non-compliance, such institutions may allow states to overcome collective action problems.2Studies have also shown how, in domestic contexts, institutions can provide for cooperation among selfinterested individuals by allowing them to make credible commitments and by assigning property right^.^ Yet, on the international level, scholars working in the realist tradition maintain a well-founded skepticism about the empirical impact of institutional factors on state behavior. This skepticism is grounded in a lack of studies that show precisely how and when institutions have constrained state decision-making4 This study addresses the question of institutional constraint by providing micro-level evidence that decisions made by the EEC directly influenced the foreign policy decisions of its members , even when governments faced political and economic incentives to defect from the sanctions effort. While a single case cannot conclusively prove a particular hypothesis correct, process-tracing such as this is a necessary complement to aggregate-level results showing correlations between institutions and cooperati0n.j This article begins with a brief chronology of the Falklands War and economic sanctions imposed during this episode. While Britain took the lead in imposing sanctions, gaining the cooperation of other states and the approval of international institutions were also matters of high priority for the British government. After this overview, I discuss in more depth the involvement of the EEC and the decisions that led to the Community’s imposition of 2. A collective action problem results when states can only achieve their goals through joint action, while each has incentives to defect from joint efforts. See Robert 0. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Ecoiiomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Keohane, “International Institutions: Two Approaches...