Security Studies Program Seminar

Circles of Trust:
The Creation of International Security Organizations and the Domestic Politics of Multilateralism in the U.S.

Brian Rathbun
Department of International Relations
University of Southern California

April 1, 2009

• Tentative book project
• “Circles of Trust”
• Looks at design of 3 international security orgs:
• League of Nations
• United Nations
• North Atlantic Treaty
• Basic Premise
• The rationalist approach to institutional design is wrong
• Suggests institutional design emerges from the desire to mitigate prevailing mistrust of other parties
• States create institutions in order to create incentives for trustworthiness (Koehane; Axelrod) by:
• Lengthening time horizons
• Putting a premium on reputations
• Creating issue linkages
• States only cede sovereignty to the extent that your interests converge with the interests of others.
• Short of that, states lack trust and seek to retain veto power (Koromenos and Snidal)
• The social psychological approach refutes this
• Oestlener (sp?) suggests that act in manner that reflects “generalized trust”, i.e. the belief that others are generally honest and trustworthy
• Thus, institutions are built on the basis of generalized trust instead of hard information
• Social psychologists have found, mostly in lab experiments, that individuals frequently overcome social dilemmas in which short-term incentives contradict long-term interests, through forging this sort of generalized trust
• International Security Organizations
• A great case for the generalized trust story
• States use generalized trust to overcome the social dilemma in favor of institution-building in order to overcome fears of institutional entrapment
• Thus, generalized trust in international security settings is an instance of “anarchical social capital”
• Types of cooperators
• Social psychology experiments point to two types of cooperators:
• Generalized trusters
• Non-Generalized trusters
• Generalized trusters are:
• Not naïve.  They eventually defect but will wait longer before doing so than non-generalized trusters
• Better judges of intentions
• Do better in these games
• What criteria should be expected to predict trust types in IR?
• The left is more trusting than the right in its assumptions of human nature
• Issues of civil liberties, for example.  Left is more pro-liberties, right is more pro-law-and-order
• In foreign policy, the solution to fear or mistrust is increased military spending, and I’ve done survey work to indicate that this is part of a broader ideological division between right and left
• Expectations:
• The left should be less mistrusting of entrapment in international security
• The left should care more about reassurance of other states than the right is
• The left should therefore be more multilateralist in terms of dispositional preference
• The right should be more inclined to require direct reciprocity instead of diffuse reciprocity
• I use party as a proxy for ideology
• If we can find differences between political parties over preferences for institutional design, then we have explained something that others have not been able to do
• I’m not making a normative judgment.  Claiming somebody is trusting or fearful is not inherently a complement or an insult.  Both can be naïve.  Both can be wise.  It depends on context.
• The empirics
• I. League of Nations case
• 3 factions:
• Wilson Camp
• Idealist liberal internationalists led by President Wilson
• Showed generalized trust through commitment to open-ended commitment to collective security
• Lodge Camp
• Led by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
• Sought a continuation of wartime cooperation among sovereign nations
• Feared entrapment and wanted a veto
• Borah Camp
• Isolationists led by Republican Senator William Borah
• Thought Europe would actively attempt to entangle the United States
• Sought an absolute veto
• Debates among the 3 camps involved divergent perspectives not just on the specific political context but also on the fundamental features of human nature
• United Nations Case
• Great power veto
• Again a hot-button issue
• However, justification of the veto as an attempt to constraint the USSR came later
• The veto demand actually originated out of this original concern about entrapment by Europe
• Same sort of pattern repeats itself in terms of Republican and Democratic preferences about the alliance and beliefs about human nature
• Republicans led by Senator Vandenberg at the UN conference itself at Dumbarton Oaks
• North Atlantic Treaty Case
• Two perspectives
• David Lake argues that NATO emerged out of a bipartisan desire for joint gains in security cooperation
• I disagree, however
• The veto/binding issue again
• The Truman Administration saw the purpose of NATO not just to deter the Soviets but also to facilitate European cooperation through a reassurance game via a collective security guarantee for the continent
• This is a matter of generalized trust
• An alternative was offered by the Republican Senator Robert Taft
• Wanted to construct a set of deals for strategic nuclear bases around the world in order to get to the Soviet Union and then a doctrine telling USSR that Europe was off-limits
• Required no generalized trust because it was not binding
• Feared that a more binding agreement would
• Rationalist explanation’s shortcomings
• I don’t think Lake can explain these variations in preferences for institutional construction
• Lake writes him off as a minority, but it misses that the Vandenberg, internationalist wing of the Republican Party had these same concerns and expressed them all the time.
• The difference is that the Democrats brought this moderate Vandenberg wing into the negotiations before the deal was completed in a way that compromised the deal in a number of ways to moderately diminish the requirements for generalized trust
• Pre-treaty negotiations within the U.S.
• Agreement gutted before the Truman-Dewey election
• Agrees only to assist, not undertake, security activity for Europe’s defense
• Agreement strengthened after the election
• After winning, Democrats don’t need to make as many concessions to Republicans
• The deal thus comes to look more European, even though the Europeans didn’t get stronger, the Democrats did
• All the non-starters such as the collective security guarantee become much stronger
• Agreement scaled back a bit once more in order to secure the minimum winning level of Republican support necessary to secure ratification in the Senate
• Had Eisenhower or Dewey been president, I don’t think you would have gotten the North Atlantic Treaty, or at least not in its current form
• I think the North Atlantic Treaty is the historically contingent outcome of a particular partisan alignment in the United States at this point in time

Thank you very much.  I think this is the first time I’ve presented this book project to a public audience in its complete form.

Rapporteur: David. A. Weinberg

back to Wednesday Seminar Series, Spring 2009