Anti-Climacus

LINKS: I've been vaguely following Matt Yglesias'a attempts to bring back Norman Angell and Idealism (in the international relations sense) into political discourse, which strikes me for the most part as strictly dog-returning-to-its-vomit-type stuff (for the liberal who finds pacifism appealing and yet just a touch too unsophisticated). In that vein, I mostly ignored this post the first time I read it, being mired as it is in the typically faulty assumptions of the Liberal Institutionalist. Then I read the 'realist' reply to Yglesias, and I was, in a word, horrified. Both sides in this debate seem eager to perpetuate the stereotypes about themselves, and I found myself wondering: are these really my options?

First Matt:

"My big meta-point on the UN is that we should desire a world in which the UN can efficaciously handle global security issues, and, as we manage global security in the interim, one eye should be kept on the ball of bringing that about and not doing things that make that harder to accomplish. The EU and NATO are examples of, to my way of thinking, highly efficacious international institutions that can be discussed in terms of why we should desire the creation of a more efficacious UN."

thus:

"Justin raises the expected realist objection to the view that NATO and the EU are responsible for the long post-1945 peace among the western powers. Rather, he says, we should credit the threat posed by the USSR and the post-1945 bipolar power dynamic. I don't think that's wrong, as such. It's worth noting, however, that the Cold War ended some time ago. When then happened many prominent realist scholars followed John Mearsheimer in predicting that with the Soviet threat lifted and bipolarity gone, the process of European integration would fall apart and the main European powers would return to armed competitiion"

But this is, of course, wrong. Mearsheimer predicted that the end to the Cold War plus U.S. military withdrawl from Europe would lead to armed competition. But the latter condition was not satisfied (perhaps because it was in the security interests of the US not to let the further-down-the-road possibility of European war have even a chance of happening, perhaps because the realist-friendly relationships between the US military and European nations were still in the collective interests of both sides). One can criticize Mearsheimer for incorrectly predicting history, but the fact that we didn't go down that portion of the game tree doesn't mean his hypothetical is incorrect.

But further:

"NATO provision of absolute security guarantees altered, over the decades, the whole orientation of western security establishments and defense industries to create a situation where nobody thinks of capacity-building in arms-race or power-competition terms. At the same time, the EEC (the EU's precursor) created a kind of hyperinterdependence which has made the costs of defection from the institutions that built up around the long peace extraordinarily high. The evolution of the EEC into the EU has created institutional mechanisms for disagreements among European countries to be resolved purely through diplomacy, and treaty-revision process has created a precedent for handling things that can't be handled through the existing formal mechanisms of the EU."

Which is a pretty typical line of argument from liberal institutionalists, except that this seems to explicitly lead us to ask whether it's the institutions doing the work or the state interests. Certainly, state regimes make security arrangements (like NATO) for obvious realist reasons, and economic arrangements may be similarly based. But consider the implications of a buried bit of Matt's argument:

"At the same time, the EEC (the EU's precursor) created a kind of hyperinterdependence which has made the costs of defection from the institutions that built up around the long peace extraordinarily high."

The argument, then, is that states will choose to join the EU not because of the inherent desirability of joining, or out of some sense of higher moral duty, but because a state does marginally worse by not joining than it does by joining; states will stay in because to leave will impose higher costs than any arrangement in the EU, no matter how undesirable, leading us thus to the somewhat worrisome conclusion:

"A better way of putting my point is that the creation of these institutions worked, at first, to facilitate a policy of cooperation that was adopted for independent reasons. Over time, however, those institutions began to gather momentum of their own, reaching a point where, today, they are basically self-sustaining"

But why exactly is this worrisome? Because it works on the unspoken assumption that states more or less can have a harmony of interest. It might be the case that an institution can work amongst the (small-l) liberal and democratic states of Europe, all being (for the most part) equally economically advanced and (for reasons of history) ill-prepared to engage in any military operations of any kind (and with the US still looking over at Europe and providing at least a bit of external stabilizing and balancing against threat). Look, if it's true that every state really wants nothing but economic growth and people are generally good, progressive beings, then we should probably all go out and become liberal institutionalists. But one could probably put together a pretty decent historical narrative that would make one doubt whether those assumptions are true, or could be true widely enough to be meaningful.

The second problem is that institutions adhere around norms, which are by nature constituitive and ungrounded. Just because path dependence and orientations happened to resolve happily in one or two cases provides no evidence (and one might look at the League of Nations or the UN as counterpoints) that one can expect them to always resolve happily.