Ideology and International Institutions

Erik Voeten

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691207339
• Sujet: Politique et relations internationales
• Sous-sujet: Relations internationales

A new theoretical framework for understanding how social, economic, and political conflicts influence international institutions and their place in the global order Today's liberal international institutional order is being challenged by the rising power of illiberal states and by domestic political changes inside liberal states. Against this backdrop, Ideology and International Institutions offers a broader understanding of international institutions by arguing that the politics of multilateralism has always been based on ideology and ideological divisions. Erik Voeten develops new theories and measures to make sense of past and current challenges to multilateral institutions.Voeten presents a straightforward theoretical framework that analyzes multilateral institutions as attempts by states to shift the policies of others toward their preferred ideological positions. He then measures how states have positioned themselves in global ideological conflicts during the past seventy-five years. Empirical chapters illustrate how ideological struggles shape the design of international institutions, membership in international institutions, and the critical role of multilateral institutions in militarized conflicts. Voeten also examines populism's rise and other ideological threats to the liberal international order. Ideology and International Institutions explores the essential ways in which ideological contestation has influenced world politics.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

UKR AINIAN POLITICIANS faced a stark choice in 2014. They could sign a free trade agreement with the European Union (EU) or opt for closer economic cooperation with Russia and its proposed customs union. The tensions culminated in a revolution, the ouster of then incumbent president Viktor Yanukovych, and a Russian military invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. How did trade agreements turn into such a high-profile political issue? The economic stakes alone cannot explain this. Two-thirds of Russian exports to Ukraine were energy resources. A trade agreement with the EU did not threaten this market. Why couldn’t Ukraine sign trade agreements with both Russia and the EU?

The most plausible answer is that the conflict was not just about trade but also about Ukraine moving closer to the “West.” The West refers not to a geographic direction but to an ideological vision of how international and domestic societies should be organized and an accompanying understanding about the countries the Ukraine is likely to form closer ties with. Russia’s government feared that Ukraine would adopt rules, policies, laws, and institutions that are shared by the United States and Western European countries but not by Russia. The two agreements were incompatible in their policy implications and in terms of which security, economic, and diplomatic relationships are valued more.

The politics of multilateralism have always been about ideology. Multilateralism, as John Ruggie has pointed out, is a distinct form of cooperation because it is based on general principles of appropriate conduct that apply irrespective of particularistic interests.¹ These principles are not neutral.² The United States promoted multilateral institutions that advanced rules, norms, and policies that constitute a desirable world order from an American vantage point. Some refer to this constellation of institutions as the “liberal international order.”³ Ideology structures multilateral cooperation and competition. During the Cold War, participation in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other Western-dominated institutions signified how a government positioned itself in broader global ideological conflict between a Soviet-led communist bloc and a U.S. led capitalist bloc.

Such ideological conflict continued after the Cold War ended. Russia fought a war with Georgia in 2008 that was triggered by Georgia’s desire for closer institutional ties to the West. The United States opposed the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) not because it feared China’s development aid, which China can and does deliver unilaterally, but because the AIIB challenges values, practices, and policies that the United States–dominated World Bank cherishes. When U.S. president Barack Obama said about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that “we can’t let countries like China write the rules of the global economy,”⁴ he communicated not just something about a choice between the United States and China but also something about the types of rules that the TPP would embrace versus the types of rules an agreement with China might entail. By contrast, Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump, has preferred bilateral informal negotiations. This transactional approach privileges the advancement of short-term particularistic interests over the pursuit of an ideological vision of how global society should be organized.

This book contends that much, though not all, distributive conflict over multilateral institutions takes place in a low-dimensional ideological space. This low-dimensional space structures cooperation and conflict in the global arena in ways that are measurable and important but often ignored in academic studies. Most rationalist theories paint a rather apolitical picture of why international institutions are created and what they do. Institutions reduce transaction costs, coordinate policies, provide impartial information, deliver independent dispute settlement, and offer good reputations to those who conform to communal norms and standards.⁵ Scholars have, of course, long recognized that institutional politics is also distributive politics. As Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye pointed out in their seminal 1977 book, “We must therefore be cautious about the prospect that rising interdependence is creating a brave new world of cooperation to replace the bad old world of international conflict. As every parent of small children knows, baking a larger pie does not stop disputes over the size of slices.”⁶

This book contends that contestation over international institutions is not just about the size of slices. Institutional politics is often about moving a status quo in one’s preferred direction in a relatively low-dimensional ideological space. Ideology provides much of the glue in the international order. Trade agreements are in part about the specific interests of importers and exporters. Yet multilateral trade agreements are also about advancing certain principles, such as nondiscrimination and the protection of intellectual property, that are favored more by some than by others. The politics surrounding the IMF and World Bank is about who gets what loans at what conditions. But these multilateral institutions also advance a set of economic principles that compose a contested ideology.⁷ States form military alliances to protect specific assets or interests. Yet multilateral alliances often form in the pursuit of more ideological goals,⁸ and multilateral military coalitions often act against ideological challengers.

The argument is not that particularistic interests are unimportant. Yet even if distributive conflict over institutions is not always about ideology, the geopolitical implications often are. The Ukrainian government may well have favored the preferential trade agreement with the EU for particularistic reasons, for instance because its domestic producers wanted access to an attractive export market. However, the broader implications of this institutional choice can be understood only in the context of global ideological conflict.

The point of this book is not just to argue that ideological contestation matters but also to offer measures, a modeling framework, and empirical illustrations. The theoretical framework helps us better understand how institutional commitments hang together and may unravel together as challenges to the liberal institutional order mount. If multilateralism is distinct because it advances general principles, then we must understand challenges to the multilateral order in terms of domestic and international challenges to those principles.

The Argument in Brief

This book’s argument fits in the family of rationalist distributive theories, which understand institutions as by-products of social, economic, and political conflicts.⁹ Efforts by powerful actors to constrain others with whom they interact can become more general rules for how actors should cooperate and compete in the international system. This view contrasts with a rational functionalist understanding that institutions are solutions to strategic problems that impede social welfare enhancing opportunities for cooperation.

For example, chapter 8 juxtaposes two ways to understand the contemporary regime to protect foreign investments. The functionalist understanding is that the regime allows capital-importing countries to make credible commitments to refrain from expropriating foreign investments, which in turn incentivizes socially beneficial investments. The distributive ideological understanding is that the regime arose from efforts by the United States and Western capital exporters to generalize their understanding of what proper protections for foreign investments should look like.

Institutions can serve functional and distributive purposes. As Terry Moe points out,

Political institutions serve two very different purposes. On the one hand, they help mitigate collective-action problems, particularly the commitment and enforcement problems so debilitating to political exchange, and thus allow the various actors in politics to cooperate in the realization of gains from trade. On the other hand, political institutions are also weapons of coercion and redistribution. They are the structural means by which political winners pursue their own interests, often at the great expense of political losers. If we are to understand where political institutions come from and why they take the specific forms they do, we have to pay serious attention to both sides of their theoretical story.¹⁰

The TPP’s aims were both to facilitate trade and to create rules that favor the West more than China. The UN Security Council (UNSC) helps finance public goods, such as peacekeeping missions. But the UNSC is also the means by which some states try to get what they want at the expense of others. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) facilitates exchange in peaceful nuclear energy. It also prolongs a status quo that favors certain nuclear weapon states over others. The IMF provides information that helps states cooperate on monetary policies. It also pursues policies and programs favored by the United States and other states with the largest voting shares in the institution.¹¹

The basic point that distributive conflict matters is neither new nor controversial.¹² This book departs from the literature in its emphasis on ideological conflict. The international relations literature has mostly used the term “ideology” in a pejorative sense, if at all.¹³ By contrast, scholars of domestic politics commonly conceptualize political competition in ideological terms. This book follows the lineage of scholarship on spatial models and ideology pioneered by Anthony Downs.¹⁴ Much contestation over international institutions can be conceptualized as conflict over moving a status quo toward one’s ideal point in a low-dimensional ideological space.

An ideology is a set of more or less cohesive ideas about how a set of issues should be resolved and who should resolve them. An ideology reflects core principles about how society should be organized, including how resources should be distributed and where power appropriately resides. An ideology is thus by definition distributive: accepting a set of principles about how domestic and international societies should be organized predictably grants advantages to some states and non-state actors.

Conflict over principles exists alongside conflict over particularistic interests. For example, voting behavior of U.S. congresspeople is driven both by ideological interests, how liberal or conservative they are, and by “pork-barrel” politics, how many specific benefits they can capture for their constituents.¹⁵

Table I.1 offers examples of principled and particularistic interests from the U.S. perspective. The United States has an interest in advancing the principles that private property should be protected and that foreign investors should be treated at least equally to national investors (national treatment). The United States also has particular interests in protecting corporate assets. The United States can protect its particular interests without institutions, for example by threatening to punish states that expropriate the property of U.S. firms. Institutionalized principles can advance U.S. particularistic interests, but they also have broader effects on other capital-exporting and -importing states. Moreover, there is ideological competition over what principles should spread. The Soviet Union advocated for the principle that states had the right to nationalize industries and expropriate foreign investments. Latin American countries and other former colonies favored principles that would protect their ability to regulate multinational corporations. Institutionalizing principles can be an important tool in broader geopolitical conflict.

Table I.1. Examples of principled and particularistic interests for the United States

Principled interests	Particularistic interests
Free trade, nondiscrimination Private property rights, national treatment	Protect U.S. textile industry, get export market access for U.S. technology firms Protect investments from specific U.S. firms
No recognition of territory acquired through force	Protect Estonia’s territorial boundaries, recognize Kosovo
Freedom of religion	Protect Christian minorities in the Middle East
Free and fair elections	Advocate for free and fair elections in Venezuela, protect regime stability in Saudi Arabia

Principled and particularistic interests sometimes clash. The United States had a principled interest in creating an international trading regime that spread free trade and nondiscrimination.¹⁶ Yet in areas where the United States did not have a comparative advantage, deviations were often accommodated.¹⁷ In most contexts, the United States behaves as if spreading democracy is in its interest. Yet governments have always been willing to oversee democratic failings in key strategic allies. The point of this book is not to argue that principled interests dominate particularistic interests but that contestation over principles fundamentally shapes the politics of multilateralism.

The literature conceives of institutional principles as shared norms that define standards for appropriate behavior.¹⁸ Instead, I argue that states have relatively well-ordered preferences over the principles multilateral institutions should advance and that they act purposively in pursuit of outcomes that match those preferences. Moreover, this book shows that we can estimate the ideal points of states in a low-dimensional ideological space and that we can explain a good deal of institutional conflict and cooperation using simple spatial models. Multilateral politics is often about moving a policy status quo in a low-dimensional ideological space.

So what is ideological conflict about? The precise meaning of “liberal” in liberal international system is contested and dynamic. There is broad-based consensus on some general liberal principles, such as free and fair elections as the appropriate way to compete over leadership, private property rights, and the rule of law. Yet there are considerable differences across time and space over what exactly liberalism means or what principles liberal institutions should spread. Left-wing and right-wing parties differ substantially in their views on how resources should be distributed or how conflicting principles, such as liberty and equality, should be weighted and realized. There are stark ideological differences within and between liberal democracies about how domestic societies should be organized that also have consequences for how international society should be organized.

During the Cold War, communism was liberalism’s preeminent ideological contender. Communism rejects liberal principles on all dimensions. It envisages a society based on common ownership of property ...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1. Introduction
• CHAPTER 2. Global Ideological Conflict: Concept and Measurement
• CHAPTER 3. Ideology and Theories of International Institutions
• CHAPTER 4. A Spatial Modeling Framework
• CHAPTER 5. Expertise, Ideology, and Distributive Politics
• CHAPTER 6. Ideological Structure and Membership in International Institutions
• CHAPTER 7. Ideology, Institutions, Power, and Militarized Disputes
• CHAPTER 8. Ideology and the Investment Regime
• CHAPTER 9. Populism and Backlashes against International Courts
• CHAPTER 10. Conclusion: Implications for the Liberal International Order
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index