INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION AND REGIME CHANGE
How do we account for the failure of basic structural models to explain all cases of regime change well, particularly during the last decade? Their failure is particularly marked for the oceans issue area. How do we account, for instance, for the inability of the preponderant naval state to deter the use of force against its tuna fishermen in a geographic area (Latin America) where its overall hegemonic power was alleged to be great? During the Cold War, bipolarity in the overall power structure provided part of the explanation, but it is not adequate for the period since 1967. How do we account for the fact that tiny Iceland prevailed over Britain in the cod wars? How do we explain the fact that the two preponderant naval powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were, after 1967, on the defensive in negotiations over the governance of oceans space and resources?
If power were analogous to money in a domestic economic system, these discrepancies would rarely occur, and when they did, they would not long persist.
Actors strong in overall military power resources would redistribute them to achieve equal marginal utility of outputs across issue areas. Similarly, actors with power at the underlying structure level of an issue area would try to make the regimes more consistent with the underlying structure. In political terms these attempts would often take the form of linkages among issues—improving one’s position where weak by linking results there to an issue in which one was strong. There would be a tendency toward congruence between structures and regime—both within issue areas and between overall military structure and various issue areas.
In our monetary cases we found such a tendency toward overall congruence in the 1940s and 1950s, and within the issue area in 1931 and 1971. Yet in monetary politics, and even more in recent oceans politics, incongruities between structure and regime exist. These incongruities suggest that power resources in situations of complex interdependence are neither fully homogeneous nor fungible. Capabilities in one area may not be easily translated into influence in another—or even, under existing regimes and procedures for decision, into influence in the same issue area.
One of our most important analytical tasks is therefore to understand the exceptions and limitations to basic structural hypotheses that rest on assumptions about the fungibility of power and predict high degrees of structure-regime congruence. Or, to return to the metaphor we used in Chapter 3, power like water may seek a common level, but the analytical challenge is to understand the heights and strengths of the dikes and dams that maintain separate levels and areas of power in world politics.
The international organization model developed in Chapter 3 helps to account for some of these discrepancies between the underlying power structure (overall or issue-specific) and regime change. It assumes political processes typical of complex interdependence, and an independent effect of rules and norms both within and surrounding an issue area. Regimes established in conformity with the underlying power structure in one period may later develop lives of their own. Underlying power resources may be immobilized by norms and political processes so long as the regime remains in place. For example, the rules of the Bretton Woods regime immobilized underlying American monetary power in the 1960s, and allowed
European countries to put more pressure on the United States through the balance of payments, as De Gaulle did in converting dollars into gold.
According to an international organization model, outcomes are predicted by regime-dependent capabilities; that is, capabilities that are legitimized and made possible by norms and processes that characterize a regime. It should be clear that the power relations in a regime process model are weakly based on sensitivity dependence, and are thus constantly susceptible to being overturned by strong military states or by states that have more power in terms of vulnerability inter-dependence within the issue area. It is remarkable that states are constrained by regimes and organizations at all. Under realist conditions, the overall or issue structure models should account for regime change, and an international organi-zation model should only help account for regime persistence or lags in the timing of changes.
A major contribution of the international organization model is indeed to explain regime persistence, but one can also derive predictions from it about regime change. In this model, the breakdown or weakening of a regime is explained by changes in the norms and organizational processes of world politics. A regime may be altered by the emergence of new norms in other areas of world politics, which are then transferred to the particular issue area, or by the application of established norms (which operate in other issue areas or in particular organizations) to that issue area. Similarly, a regime may be altered by political bargaining processes that diminish the position of the states with underlying power that gave rise to the regime. Or, the development of networks of political interaction, often centered on international organizations, may facilitate agreement on new principles for an international regime.
As we have seen, if issue structure explanations are added to the overall approach of traditional theory, they (combined with the economic process approach) can explain fairly well three of the four cases of regime breakdown or weakening in Table 6.2. Yet the basic structural explanations do not adequately explain erosion of the oceans regime after 1967.
Oceans Politics
The erosion of the free seas regime since 1967 has been caused largely by the norms and the political processes of the United Nations. As we noted in Chapter 5, the norms and procedures of international organizations in the oceans issue area emphasize sovereignty and state equality. This was true in 1930 and 1958; but force still played a greater role in 1930, and the coalition patterns at the Geneva Conference of 1958 reflected the overall bipolar division of the world. By the mid-1960s, the two naval powers, the United States and Soviet Union, were less antagonistic and were both concerned over possible extensions of coastal states’
claims to territorial seas. They discussed the possibility of a narrowly defined conference to deal with the issue. The 1967 speech by the ambassador from Malta, anticipating a technological breakthrough that would unlock the treasure chest of the deep seabed, not only speeded up the agenda for the great powers, but also recast
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the issue more in terms of distributing ocean resources than managing oceans space as a public highway. After the establishment of a Seabed Committee, the linkage of additional issues by weak states, and the General Assembly call for a Conference on the Law of the Sea, oceans issues were determined as much by egalitarian organiza-tional procedures and by confrontation between rich and poor nations as by naval power or oceans capabilities.
The result, according to one observer of the negotiations, was that
major maritime countries no longer control the process. The process is now controlled by the coalition which largely lacks major ocean-related capabilities yet seeks to redress inequalities in the distribution of world income via the medium of the ocean. Moreover, this coalition was mobilized, some opponents would even say “captured,” by two groups: (1) those states pushing the 200-mile territorial sea claims; and (2) those states ideologically seeking a redistribution of resources and therefore income.22
Patterns of influence in international organizations and conference diplomacy are often quite different from what one would predict from the underlying structure.
Moreover, the broader and more general the forum, the greater the divergence is likely to be. The structure of influence in the International Oceanographic Commission (IOC) or International Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), each with about seventy members and a specific functional jurisdiction, is quite different from the structure of influence in a Law of the Sea Conference with twice as many members and a virtually unlimited agenda. Negotiating law of the sea questions in the UN General Assembly resulted in an organization-dependent structure of capabilities resembling that of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in which the coalition of less developed countries (the Group of Seventy-seven) first formed and earned its label. A study of influence in UNCTAD in 1969 found the correlation between influence in UNCTAD and structural power as measured by a general index of overall power was only .43, and as measured by issue-specific power (based on share of world exports) was only .41.23Edward Miles found a similar pattern of regime-dependent influence in the UN Seabed Committee; the Latin American and African groups were most influential, and group cohesiveness was a much more important source of influence than country capabilities or global status.24
Not only did international organization create a separate organization-dependent structure of influence among states, but it also weakened the bargaining position of the leading naval power. Potential coalitions at international conferences are not restricted merely to states. Sometimes, subgovernmental agencies’ interests are more like those within another country than those of competing domestic agencies.
International meetings sponsored by the United Nations provided the physical contact and legitimacy for some of these potential transgovernmental coalitions to become active. The functional clubs at the Law of the Sea negotiations had this effect.
As we saw earlier, American fallback positions in bargaining were often disclosed in advance. A particularly important instance was the lobbying by United States Interior Department and oil company officials with less developed countries in favor of broad
coastal state jurisdiction over the continental shelf (contrary to then official United States policy) at the Geneva sessions of the Seabed Committee.25Besides lobbying governments at international conferences, transnational oil and mining companies have sometimes formed joint ventures in several countries to affect governments’
perceptions and definitions of their interests in hitherto uncharted areas. In Chapter 5 we presented further examples of transnational and transgovernmental networks affecting political bargaining. All these cases indicate that some “domestic” interests in the leading naval power were not constrained by national boundaries in their choice of political strategies or coalition partners.
One should remember that the international organization model does not completely ignore the underlying power structure. In oceans negotiations the structure of force lurks in the background. After all, the United States could always refuse to ratify the outcome of the conference and could send naval ships to defend, for example, deep-sea mining operations. This possibility enters into the organization-dependent structure of influence that statesmen weigh in conference diplomacy, but force must compete with many other sources of influence peculiar to conference diplomacy. As the politics of rule-making in the oceans issue area worked after 1967, however, naval force played a role only after passing through the distorting prism of international organizations. And regardless of whether the United Nations Law of the Sea Conference will produce a treaty that will be ratified by most states, by 1976 the free seas regime had been permanently altered by the political changes best explained by the international organization model.*
Why did the predominant naval power allow these changes to occur? The answer lies mainly in the growth of conditions of complex interdependence. The multiplicity of issues and channels made the United States’ “national interest” in freedom of the seas more difficult to define and put into practice. At the same time, the fact that using force was more costly for great powers had a pronounced effect on rule-making in the oceans issue area. Unlike the monetary issue area, in which economic power is the basis of the underlying power structure, in the oceans issue area the traditional structure was based largely on naval force. In recent decades, force, unlike financial power, has become much more costly for great powers to use against small states. Its use, or even the public threat of its use, is highly visible, provokes immediate and intense opposition, and frequently contradicts important domestic values.
This change is not completely new. Early in the last century,
little headway in restricting belligerent rights was made until Great Britain, under the pressure of humanitarian considerations, the protests and threats of retaliation by neutrals, complaints from British shipping interests over the uncertainty of their (neutral) rights during the Russo-Japanese War, and other influences, voluntarily began to surrender her more extreme demands.26
*Note (March 2000). A law of the Sea Treaty was negotiated under U.N. auspices in 1982 and is now in force. Although the United States is not a party to the treaty, it nevertheless conforms its policy to the treaty’s provisions regarding coastal state jurisdiction.
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Changes in public attitudes and interests helped to make force less useful, but the advent of nuclear weapons after 1945 was more important, particularly for the superpowers. As we saw in Chapter 5, as gunboat diplomacy became less usable for the large states, paradoxically, the smaller powers began successfully using gunboats in the postwar (but rarely in the pre-war) era. As naval force became more costly for the great powers, they became more willing to tolerate rule-making politics characterized by the organization-dependent power structure rather than resorting to the underlying power structure.