International institutions: two approaches

Indeed, the greatest weakness of the reflective school lies not in deficiencies in their critical arguments but in the lack of a clear reflective research program that could be employed by students of world politics. Waltzian neorealism has such a research program; so does neoliberal institutionalism, which has focused on the evolution and impact of international regimes. Until the reflective scholars or others sympathetic to their arguments have delineated such a research program and shown in particular studies that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field, largely invisible to the preponderance of empirical researchers, most of whom explicitly or implicitly accept one or another version of rationalistic premises. Such invisibility would be a shame, since the reflective perspective has much to contribute.

As formulated to date, both rationalistic and what I have called reflective approaches share a common blind spot: neither pays sufficient attention to domestic politics. It is all too obvious that domestic politics is neglected by much game-theoretic strategic analysis and by structural explanations of international regime change. However, this deficiency is not inherent in the nature of rationalistic analysis: it is quite possible to use game theory heuristically to analyze the "two-level games" linking domestic and international politics, as Robert Putnam (1988) has done. At one level reflective theory questions, in its discussion of sovereignty, the existence of a clear boundary between domestic and international politics. But at another level it critiques the reification of the state in neorealist theory and contemporary practice, and should therefore be driven to an analysis of how such reification has taken place historically and how it is reproduced within the confines of the domestic-international dichotomy. Such an analysis could lead to a fruitful reexamination of shifts in preferences that emerge from complex interactions between the operation of international institutions and the processes of domestic politics. Both Kenneth Waltz's "second image"--the impact of domestic politics on international relations--and Peter Gourevitch's "second image reversed" need to be taken account of, in their different ways, by the rationalist and reflective approaches (Waltz, 1959; Gourevitch, 1978).¹² institutional choices and those practices of cooperation that will be essential to human survival, and progress, in the twenty-first century.

CONCLUSION

I believe that international institutions are worth studying because they are pervasive and important in world politics and because their operation and evolution are difficult to understand. But I also urge attention to them on normative grounds. International institutions have the potential to facilitate cooperation, and without international cooperation, I believe that the prospects for our species would be very poor indeed. Cooperation is not always benign; but without cooperation, we will be lost. Without institutions there will be little cooperation. And without a knowledge of how institutions work - and what makes them work well - there are likely to be fewer, and worse, institutions than if such knowledge is widespread.

A major challenge for students of international relations is to obtain such knowledge of institutions, through theory and the application of theory to practice, but especially through empirical research. Neither pure rationalistic theory nor pure criticism is likely to provide such knowledge. We should demand that advocates of both rationalistic and reflective theory create genuine research programs: not dogmatic assertions of epistemological or ontological superiority, but ways of discovering new facts and developing insightful interpretations of international institutions.

Both rationalistic and reflective approaches need further work if they are to become well-developed research programs. Rationalistic theories of institutions need to be historically contextualized: we need to see specific institutions as embedded in practices that are not entirely explicable through rationalistic analysis. And the many hypotheses generated by rationalistic theory need to be tested empirically. Reflective approaches are less well specified as theories: their advocates have been more adept at pointing out what is omitted in rationalistic theory than in developing theories of their own with a priori content. Supporters of this research program need to develop testable theories, and to be explicit about their scope. Are these theories confined to practices or do they also illuminate the operations of specific institutions? Above all, students of world politics who are sympathetic to this position need to carry out systematic empirical investigations, guided by their ideas. Without such detailed studies, it will be impossible to evaluate their research program.

Eventually, we may hope for a synthesis between the rationalistic and reflective approaches--a synthesis that will help us to understand both practices and specific institutions and the relationships between them. Such a synthesis, however, will not emerge full-blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus. On the contrary, it will require constructive competition and dialogue between these two research programs--and the theoretically informed investigation of facts. Thus equipped with our new knowledge, we can intervene more persuasively in the policy process, by drawing connections between

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay was written while the author was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1987-88. I am grateful for financial support to the Social Science Research Council Foreign Policy Program and to National Science Foundation grant #BNS-8700864 to the Center. My colleagues in the institutional theory seminar at the Center provided inspiration, advice, and literature references; and helpful comments on earlier drafts were received from James A. Caporaso, Glenn Carroll, Lawrence Finkelstein, Ernst B. Haas, Peter J. Katzenstein, Nannerl O. Keohane, John Kingdon, Stephen D. Krasner, Douglass C, North, Claus Offe, John Gerard Ruggie, Barry Weingast, and two editors of International Studies Quarterly, Richard K. Ashley and Patrick McGowan.

NOTES

Bull also declares that "states themselves are the principal institutions of the society of states" (1977:71), which implies that he subscribed to the view, discussed below, that the international institution of sovereignty is prior to the state.

International regimes are specific institutions involving states and/or transnational actors, which apply to particular issues in international relations. This is similar to the definition given by Krasner (1983), but makes it clearer that regimes are institutions, taking advantage of the definition of institutions given above. Formal international organizations are purposive institutions with explicit rules, specific assignments of roles to individuals and groups, and the capacity for action. Unlike international regimes, international organizations can engage in goal-directed activities such as raising and spending money, promulgating policies, and making discretionary choices.

Young defines institutions in terms of practices: "Social institutions are recognized practices consisting of easily identifiable roles, coupled with collections of rules or conventions governing relations among the occupants of these roles" (1986:107). This is quite an acceptable definition, although it does not emphasize the distinctions among different types of "institutions" that I wish to make.

These practices have evolved over the course of decades or centuries and can therefore be considered in Young's terminology to be spontaneous orders: "the product of the action of many men but . . . not the result of human design" (Young, 1983:98, quoting Hayek, 1973:37).

Morgenthau's language is remarkably close to the language of transaction costs employed by rationalistic theorists discussed in the next section.

Mcllwain (1939) is particularly good on this point; see also James (1986). Waltz confuses this issue by stating that "to say that a state is sovereign means that it decides for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems, including whether or not to seek assistance from others and in so doing to limit its freedom by making commitments to them" (Waltz, 1979:96).

The assertion that hegemony is necessary for institutionalized cooperation, and the less extreme view that hegemony facilitates cooperation, can both be interpreted within this framework as declaring transaction costs to be lower when a hegemon exists than when power resources are more fragmented.

For a pioneering exploration of these issues, see Young (1979).

The theoretical indeterminacy of rationalistic theory suggests that in international relations, as in the economics of institutions, "theory is now outstripping empirical research to an excessive extent" (Matthews, 1986:917).

Some work by sociologists, although not applied to international relations, seems relevant here since it focuses on the role played by professional and personal networks in facilitating social cooperation. See Dore (1983), Granovetter (1985), and Powell (1987).

This does not mean, however, that rationalistic theory is incapable of contributing to our understanding of the evolution of practices. As Wendt argues, "there is no a priori reason why we cannot extend the logic of [rationalistic] analysis to the analysis of generative structures" (Wendt, 1987:368). In notes to the author, Barry Weingast has illustrated this point by sketching a functional, transaction-cost argument for the existence of sovereignty, as a set of relatively unambiguous conventions, known to all players and not revisable ex post, which facilitate coordination and signaling.

Recently major work has been done on links between domestic and international politics, by scholars trained in comparative politics. Unlike the critics of rationalistic theory discussed above, however, these writers emphasize international structure, material interests, and state organization as well as the role of ideas and social patterns of learning. Also unlike the critics of rationalist international relations theory, these writers have engaged in extensive and detailed empirical research. See Zysman (1983), Katzenstein (1985), Gourevitch (1986), and Alt (1987).

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