Keohane 1990 Multilateralism An Agenda For Research

Multilateralism: An Agenda for Research
Author(s): Robert O. Keohane

Source: International Journal, Vol. 45, No. 4, Multilateralism: Old & New (Autumn, 1990), pp.
731-764
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ROBERT O. KEOHANE
Multilateralism:
an
agenda for research
def of Multilateralism
Multilateralismcan be defined as the practice of co-ordinating
national policies in groups of three or more states, through ad
hoc arrangements or by means of institutions. Since the end of
World War II, multilateralismhas become increasinglyimport-
ant in world politics, as manifested in the proliferationof multi- signs of the rise of
national conferences on a bewildering variety of themes and multilateralism
modern days
in
an increase in the number of multilateral intergovernmental

organizationsfrom fewer than 100 in 1945 to about 200 by i960
and over 600 by 1980.1 Bilateralismhas been revived on some
issues in the 1980s, particularlywith regard to trade, yet the term: bilateralism
number and variety of multilateral arrangements continue to
increase.
In the international relations literature, multilateralismhas
served as a label for a varietyof activitiesmore than as a concept
defining a research programme. When a scholarrefers to multi-
lateralism,it is not immediatelyclear what phenomena are to be
described and explained. Before we can understand multilater-
alism, we need to think about how we should conceive of it and
Stanfield Professor of International Peace and Chair of the Department of Gov-

ernment, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma; author of After Hegemony:Coop-
eration and Discordin the WorldPolitical Economy(1984) and InternationalInstitutions
and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory( 1989).
I appreciate the comments of Jeffrey Frieden, Stanley Hoffmann, Nannerl O.
Keohane, Lisa Martin, Joseph S. Nye, John Gerard Ruggie, and Mark Zacher
on an earlier draft.
1 Harold K. Jacobson, Networksof Interdependence:International Organizationsand

the Global Political System(2nd ed; New York: Knopf 1984), 37-50 and appendix a.
InternationalJournal xlv autumn 1990
732 INTERNATIONALJOURNAL
purpose of the
account for variations in its extent or form. My purpose in this essay:
- dimensions of
essay is to specify some dimensions of multilateralism and to multilateralism
method: make some suggestions about possible lines of explanation of - suggested
- review the variations thus identified. My method is to review some of lines of
explanation of
research related
- identify what the major clusters of research that have dealt with aspects of multilateralism
explained in multilateralism, seeking to identify what scholars were endeav- variations
research
programme ouring to explain in each research programme, and then to
- review theories review the theories that they sought to devise to achieve such
to explain
explanation.2
As noted in the definition, I limit multilateralism to arrange- term: states
ments involving states. Transnational relations are important,
and issues involving transnational business alliances are fascinat-
ing; but the scope of multilateralism is so broad, even when
targeted đối limited to states, that I deliberately restrict the term to intergov- scope of limit of
tượng của ernmental arrangements. My principal interest, furthermore, is states
multilateralism
trong bài: in multilateral institutions. Institutions can be defined as persis- def of "
arrangements tent and connected sets of rules, formal and informal, that pre- institutions"
involving states -
intergov. scribe behavioural roles, constrain activity, and shape expecta-
arrangements tions. When we ask whether an observed pattern of behaviour
interests: (inter) constitutes or reflects an international institution, we ask
institutions
whether we can identify persistent sets of rules that affect the how to identify
'an international
behaviour of the actors, which in most important cases are, but institution'
need not necessarily be, states.
Multilateral institutions, then, are multilateral arrangements
with persistent sets of rules; they can be distinguished from other
=> def of multilateral institutions
2 In working papers prepared for a research project on multilateralism, John

Ruggie distinguishes what he calls 'the architectural notion of multilateralism'
from multilateral institutions as conventionally defined. This architectural notion
of multilateralism requires that units are indivisibly linked, that they interact
on the basis of generalized principles of conduct, and that these interactions rely
on expectations of diffuse rather than specific reciprocity. As Ruggie notes, this
'institution of multilateralism' is 'an extremely demanding organizational form,'
requiring more self-abnegation than typically found in international regimes.
I suggest that Ruggie's concept be labelled 'supralateralism,' to distinguish it
more clearly from multilateralism as conventionally conceived. See 'Multilater-
alism: the anatomy of an institution,' a proposal by John Gerard Ruggie and
collaborators, University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Coopera-
tion, San Diego, July 1990.
multilateralism: an agenda for research 733
how to differentiate multilateral institutions from other forms of multilateralism
forms of multilateralism, such as ad hoc meetings and short- : international
multila- term arrangements to solve particular problems. These institu- regimes -
explicit, agreed
institutions tions may take the form of international regimes - institutions upon rules
with explicit rules, agreed upon by governments, that pertain
to particular sets of issues in international relations - or bureau-
cratic organizations, which assign specific professional roles to
their employees. In fact, however, regimes are usually accompa-
(multilateral
nied by organizations: an international organization is estab- institutions,
lished to monitor and manage a set of rules governing state regimes,
behaviour in a particular issue-area. References in this essay to organizations)??
? phân biệt??
multilateralism will refer to multilateral institutions.
This review will suggest that multilateralism serves as a label
multilateralism -
label for for a cluster of fascinating issues for research. Furthermore,
fascinating these issues may be connected in ways that have not been fully
issues for
research recognized in the literature.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

a presumption
of the essay (if My focus on multilateral institutions presumes that institutions
not important, are significant in contemporary world politics. Yet the most
why should influential book on international politics published during the
study and why
states should past fifteen years essentially ignores international institutions, a research
learn about and its theoretical framework denies that they are fundamentally denying impo of
and carry out institutions <-
it it?) important. Kenneth Waltz's articulation of a systemic theory of deductive
=> why international relations, self-consciously deductive and rigorous rigorous world
institutions w realism ->
yet consistent with the core propositions of realism, challenged inter institutions
important? -> institutionalists by playing down the role of international institu- impossible
states know
what to tions within 'self-help systems,' just as it annoyed students of
expect from foreign policy by stressing the primacy of international struc-
others, more
manageable ture, without by any means denying the need for a theory of
world, foreign policy.3 Waltz's argument, which has come to be referred
constrain to as 'neorealism,' separates unit-level from structural elements
others'
(threatening) in international politics and emphasizes the merits of structural
activities (chắc là vì theory of foreign policy cho mình 1 frame cơ bản về đối ngoại, trong khi lại nhấn mạnh cấu trúc anarchy
của thế giới?)
3 The locus classicus is Kenneth N. Waltz, Theoryof International Politics (Reading
ma: Addison- Wesley 1979). For a clear statement by Waltz on both controver-
sies, see his 'A response to my critics,' in Robert O. Keohane, ed, Neorealismand
Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press 1986), 322-45.
what's neorealism???
analysis. Neorealism emphasizes the weakness of international

institutions and the fragility of co-operation, stressing that 'in a neorealism deals with
inter institutions
condition of anarchy ... relative gain is more important than terms of neorealism:
absolute gain,' or at least that states consistently seek to minimize relative gains
gaps in gains favouring their partners.4
If neorealism is defined in this way, rather than vaguely in
terms of neopositivist methodology or reliance on self-interested
state behaviour, it becomes possible to delineate a contrasting
view that does not deny the importance of states or denigrate
efforts to specify and test causal propositions.5 What I have called
neoliberal institutionalism shares neorealism's emphasis on the
significance of self-interested state action6 and the importance
of structural analysis at the systemic level. However, it argues
that state behaviour can only be understood in the context of
international institutions, which both constrain states and make
their actions intelligible to others, and it denies that states consis-
tently search for relative gains.7 Its most fundamental claims are
that international relations would be unintelligible without some
degree of institutionalization, because they would lack shared
expectations and understandings, and that variation in the com-
monality, specificity, and autonomy of institutions will affect the
constraints and incentives facing states and will therefore exert
impacts on state behaviour in world politics.
4 The quotation is from Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York:
Columbia University Press 1959), 198. The most systematic expositor of the
view that relative gains are of crucial importance in world politics is Joseph
Grieco. See his Cooperationamong Nations: Europe. Americaand Non-Tariff Barriers
to Trade (Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press 1990).
5 Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony:Cooperationand Discord in the WorldPolitical
Economy(Princeton nj: Princeton University Press 1984), and International
Institutionsand State Power: Essays in InternationalRelations Theory(Boulder co:
Westview 1989), especially chaps 1 and 7.
6 Although we are more likely to stress other motivations as well: see Keohane,
After Hegemony, chap 7.
7 Neoliberal institutionalists explicitly agree that under some conditionsstates seek
relative gains, but they emphasize that behaviour seeking relative gains is
'conditional on the nature of prevailing rules and expectations' rather than an
essential or defining characteristic of world politics. See Keohane, 'Neoliberal
institutionalism: a perspective on world politics,' in Keohane, ed, International
Institutionsand State Power, 1 1; also After Hegemony,chap 7.
The most thorough neorealist treatment of co-operation, by

Joseph Grieco, accepts the neoliberal view of the significance of
international institutions: 'realist theory would agree - perhaps
to the surprise of some neoliberals - that international institu-
tions do matter for states as they attempt to cooperate/8 In this
respect, Grieco returns to the classical realist tradition of E.H.
Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau, both of whom devoted consider-
able attention to international law and organization, while
emphasizing the utopianism of visions of universal harmony and
the limitations of judicial or legislative processes in resolving
serious international disputes. Carr emphasized 'the bargaining
process,' in which power was crucial, but he did not seek to
deny the significance of the institutional context within which
bargaining took place. Morgenthau devoted much of Politics
among Nations to the roles of international institutions, and he
even wrote an article on a 'functional theory of international
law.'9 A number of realists therefore agree with institutionalists
both that international institutions are significant and that they
operate within a bargaining system in which power plays a para-
mount role.
To argue that international institutions are significant, how-
ever, is only to claim that it is worthwhile to study them, not to
specify how strong they are or what it is about them that should
be studied. In seeking to identify clearly what needs to be
explained, neither the neorealist nor the neoliberal institutional-
ist formulation is very helpful. Waltz's formulation of neorealist
theory, although commendably precise in a number of respects,
is vague on its own dependent variable. Waltz's balance of power
theory, which he regards as the 'distinctively political theory of
international politics,'10only predicts that balances of power will
8 Grieco, Cooperationamong Nations, 233-4.

9 E.H. Carr, The TwentyYears'Crisis, 1919-1939 (2nd ed; London: St Martin's Press
1946); Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Strugglefor Power and
Peace (New York: Knopf, various editions from 1948 onwards), and 'Positivism,
functionalism, and international law,' AmericanJournal of International Law
34(1940), 260-84.
10 Waltz, Theoryof International Politics, 117.
periodically recur. Likewise, my own formulation of institution-

alist theory has been stronger at offering general arguments
about why international institutions exist than at specifying vari-
ations in their forms or patterns of state behaviour within them.
Both neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism have empha-
sized contextual and causal arguments at the expense of careful
identification of sources of variation in state behaviour which
need to be explained.1 ' In this essay I seek to redress the balance
by identifying four key puzzles of multilateralism and only sug-
gesting possible explanations. My puzzles are:
puzzles to be 1 Under what conditions do institutions matter?
addressed in
essay 2 What accounts for the rise of multilateral institutions?
3 What explains variations in membership, strength, and
scope?
4 What accounts for variations in property rights and rules?
Following closely from the discussion about the significance
of international institutions, I will begin with the issue of impact.
How much difference do international institutions make for
state policy, and what explains variation in impact?
UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS DO INSTITUTIONS MATTER? what made institutions

imp/necessary?
Oran Young has recently observed that much less attention has
been paid to the impact of international institutions than to their little attention to
origins or their patterns of development over time: 'The ultimate impact of inter
justification for devoting substantial time and energy to the institutions
study of regimes must be the proposition that we can account even until 2020
multilateralism
1 1 David Laitin made this point to me long ago about my own work, although I hasnt not been
have only recently taken it to heart. Stephan Haggard and Beth A. Simmons a popular thing
it's only become
emphasize the importance of accounting for variation in 'Theories of interna-
tional regimes/ International Organization41 (summer 1987), 491-517. Some a trend very
recent books have sought to be clearer on such sources of variation than the recently
previous literature. Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca ny: Cornell
University Press 1987), tries to distinguish between balancing and bandwagoning
and to test alternative explanations of such behaviour. In Cooperationamong
Nations, Grieco has sought to specify variation in co-operation in the Tokyo
Round codes. Although I disagree with both his formulation of neoliberal
theory and his selection of critical cases - and therefore with his theoretical
conclusions - his attempt to specify variation to be explained is laudable.
impact of
institutional
arranges -
multilateralism: an agenda for research (explain)->
737 variance in
collective
for a good deal of the variance in collective outcomes at the outcomes at
inter level
international level in terms of the impact of institutional arrange-
ments. For the most part, however, this proposition is relegated
deemed an
to the realm of assumptions rather than brought to the forefront assumption
as a focus for analytical and empirical investigation.'12 Young's terms: capabilities,
statement needs to be qualified, however. Scholars have shown interests (of states)
that international regimes can affect both the capabilitiesand the
1st factor that interestsof states. International regimes can affect capabilities by
makes
institutions serving as a source of influence for states whose policies are +one's conditions:
policies
matter consistent with regime rules or which are advantaged by the consistent with
regime's decision-making procedures. In Power and Indepen- regime rules
or benefit from
dence,Joseph S. Nye and I referred to these influence resources regime
as 'organizationally dependent capabilities.'13 Regimes may decision-making
also alter the underlying power capabilities of states, whether tạo môi trường để
by reinforcing the dominance of rich, powerful states (as tạo capabilities by
means of trao
dependency theory argues) or by dissipating the hegemon's quyền influence
resources (as claimed by some versions of hegemonic stability
làm người mạnh giàu thêm cường tráng, hoặc làm suy yếu nguồn tài nguyên của bá quyền
theory).14 VD????
International institutions may alter calculations of interest by
2nd factor assigning property rights, providing information, and altering
that makes
institutions patterns of transaction costs. Short-run self-interest is affected short-run self-interest:
policy choices restrained
matter by constraints imposed on policy choices by agreed-upon rules; by explicit rules
long-run self-interests:
long-run conceptions of self-interest may be reshaped as a result, -> affect interests result <- long time practice
= property, info allocation,
in part, of practices engaged in over a period of time. We are transaction costs altered
familiar with how international trade regimes have tended to
reinforce the awareness, among the governments of the industri-
alized countries, of the benefits of non-discriminatory trade; but
it is also increasingly clear, as Nye argued several years ago, that
the rules and institutions of Soviet-American security regimes
what are such institutions?
12 Oran R. Young, International Cooperation:Building Regimesfor Natural Resources

and the Environment(Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press 1989), 206-7.
13 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Power and Interdependence:World
Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown 1977), 56.
14 For a useful summary of the possible effects of regimes on interests and capabili-
ties, see Stephen D. Krasner, 'Regimes and the limits of realism: regimes as
autonomous variables/ in Krasner, ed, InternationalRegimes (Ithaca ny: Cornell
University Press 1983), esp 361-4.
have helped to reshape the conceptions of their interests held

by the American and Soviet governments.15
Nevertheless, as Young points out, these hypothetical propo-
not yet sitions about interests and capabilities have not been subjected
subjected to to systematic empirical assessments. Consider the issue of capa-
systematic
empirical bilities. Arguments continue to rage about whether United States
assessments
power has really declined significantly since the end of the
1960s.16 It could be that United States power has declined and
that such practices as liberal trade, promoted by general rules
(which others may violate or evade more effectively), have accel-
erated that decline. But those who are sceptical about the 'declin-
ist' thesis emphasize the ability of the United States to exercise the US is declining
<- >< its power in
influence in international institutions and the consistency of inter institutions
many of its practices with institutional norms as counterweights
to erosions in its relative financial and technological capabilities.
And even if the decline of the United States could be empirically
established, further investigation might show that American
influence in international institutions has retarded rather than
accelerated the erosion of American power. american influence in inter instutions helped
hinder its declination
The fundamental difficulty in assessing the impact of interna-
cant experiment
tional institutions is that causal inference is difficult where exper-
-> cant be clear imental or statistical research designs are infeasible. We do not
about (causal
relationships) have a hypothetical institution-free baseline from which to mea-
impacts of inter sure the impact of actual institutions on state capabilities. We
insti on state
capabilities might be tempted to attribute co-operation among states in
15 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, 'Nuclear learning and U.S.-Soviet security regimes/ Interna-
tional Organization41 (summer 1987), 371-402. On interests, see Robert O.
Keohane, 'The demand for international regimes,' in International Organization
36(spring 1982), 325-55. For some recent evidence on East-West regimes, see
Volker Rittberger, ed, InternationalRegimes in East-WestPolitics (London: Pinter
i99o)-
16 The most comprehensive statements of the case for decline are made by Robert
Gilpin, War and Change in WorldPolitics (New York: Cambridge University Press
198 1), and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the GreatPowers (New York: Random
House 1987). Two sophisticated arguments against the 'declinist' view are
Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of AmericanPower (New York:
Basic Books 1990), and Henry Nau, The Myth of America'sDecline (New York:
Oxford University Press 1990).
mượn
'cooperation in
accordance with international rules to constraints on short- accordance to
inter rules'
range self-interest, or to changes in long-range self-interest,
resulting from those rules. But both the co-operation and the
institutions could in principle be reflections of some third set of but có thể bị ảnh
hưởng bởi bên
forces, such as patterns of complementary interests and underly- thứ 3 (vd
underlying power
ing distributions of power, without institutions having any effect distribution,
at all. If it were possible to use an experimental design, we would complementary
issues) -> ko đo
control for other explanatory factors, such as distributions of lường đc impacts
power and interest, and vary institutional characteristics. Unfor- of inter institu
tunately, we cannot actually perform such an experiment.
Yet this inability to use strict experimental methods does not
prevent us from investigating the impact of institutions. Some
important work along these lines has already been done,17 but
more would be useful. To investigate the impact of institutions
1 way to measure
impacts of inter on interests, one possible approach is to identify situations in
institu on interests which institutional rules are 'inconvenient': that
is, in which
trong trường hợp
they conflict with governments' perceptions of what their self- institutional rules
interests would be if there were no such institutions. In these làm vướng chân
instances of inconvenient commitments, we should expect that chính phủ
if institutions were unimportant, the rules would be violated,
hmmmmmm
but that insofar as the rules are obeyed, we can infer that institu-
still kinda matter
tions had an impact. In my own empirical research I am seeking
how the author a better understanding of the conditions for
institutional impact
conducts an by examining major cases of inconvenient commitments in the
empirical
research on history of American foreign policy since 1789. My purpose is to
factors that make determine under which conditions institutional commitments
inter institu
matter are more or less likely to be kept. At the current stage in my
work, only a few points seem clear: there is substantial variation
findings of
author's in the extent to which commitments seem to matter, both across
need mulling over
empirical issues and over time; enforcement of commitments against the
research
United States has been quite rare; and unenforceable commit-
17 See Oran R. Young, Complianceand Public Authority(Baltimore md: Johns Hop-

kins University Press 1979); Peter M. Haas, 'Do regimes matter? Epistemic
communities and Mediterranean pollution control,' International Organization
43(summer 1989), 377-405. Haas emphasizes the impact of transnational net-
works of scientists, or 'epistemic communities,' on patterns of compliance.
74° INTERNATIONALJOURNAL
ments are nevertheless sometimes honoured, although no single

motivation, whether based in reciprocity, concern about reputa-
tion, or moral principle, seems reliably to ensure compliance.
WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE RISE

OF MULTILATERAL INSTITUTIONS?
The rise of multilateral institutions has not been linear: in-
creased bilateralism appeared in the 1980s on issues such as
trade in textiles under the Multi- Fibre Arrangement and trade
in products such as automobiles and consumer electronics which
are covered by voluntary export restraints. Despite these coun-
tervailing tendencies, for the postwar period as a whole states
have relied increasingly on multilateral arrangements, and the
most important of those arrangements have become institution-
alized. How should we account for this trend?
Much work on multilateralism has focussed on co-operation
as a variable: the extent to which governments' policies are
effectively co-ordinated in such a way as to become consistent
with one another. Unfortunately, co-operation is easier to
define, or to specify in an experimental situation, than to opera-
tionalize. Because both conflicting interests and power are
always involved in bargaining processes leading to co-operation,
the extent of the role coercion played in the formation of institu-
tions or in the co-ordination of policy becomes a matter of judg-
ment. It may be difficult to distinguish what Young refers to as
'negotiated' and 'imposed' orders from one another: one state's
co-operation is another's imposition.18 Furthermore, states' poli-
cies are not, unlike game-theoretic choices, dichotomously co-
operative or conflictual: multilateral co-operation is a systems-
level resultof policy choices by a number of states rather than an
attribute of any given actor or its policies.19
18 Oran R. Young, 'Regime dynamics: the rise and fall of international regimes,' in
Krasner, ed, International Regimes, esp 101-4.
19 In her dissertation, on monetary co-operation and discord in the interwar period,
Beth A. Simmons has taken a significant step forward by operationalizing not
co-operation - the joint product of action by at least two states - but the specific
behaviour required of deficit and surplus states if monetary co-operation is to
Nevertheless, it is possible to trace the evolution of co-opera-

tion in an issue-area over time, or to compare the extent of co-
operation in different issue-areas at a given moment in time.
There has been more co-operation on trade issues among the
advanced capitalist countries since World War II than in the
interwar period; there is more co-operation on trade in manu-
factured goods than there has been in agricultural trade; and
co-operation has been based on more liberal principles in trade
than in services. It may be easier to devise reliable operational
indicators of changes in institutional multilateralism than in
changes in co-operation per se. The number, budgets, member-
ships, and scope of activity of international organizations pro-
vide plausible measures of institutional multilateralism, to which
there is nothing directly comparable in the co-operation liter-
ature.
The institutionalist literature written in the 1980s took its
cue from micro-economics, seeking to explain institutionalized
co-operation by using the metaphor of supply and demand. In
this view, institutions are supplied by states acting as 'political
entrepreneurs who see a potential profit in organizing collabora-
tion.'20 Hegemonic states may have incentives to serve as entre-
preneurs, but relatively small groups of states can also overcome
collective action problems to do so.21 The key variable here is
concentration of capability, as in Waltz's theory. Because capabil-
ities became somewhat less concentrated among the advanced
industrialized democracies after the 1950s, supply explanations
do not account for increasing multilateralism.22
At any rate, favourable conditions on the supply side - not
necessarily hegemony - could only be necessary conditions for
occur. The relevant standards of behaviour are different for deficit countries
than for surplus ones; but in each case they can be specified and the actions of
the countries evaluated against them.
20 Keohane, 'The demand for international regimes,' 339.
2 1 Duncan Snidal, 'The limits of hegemonic stability theory,' International Organiza-
tion 39(autumn 1985), 579-614.
22 Game-theoretical formulations such as Snidal's, with their emphasis on strategic
interaction and the role of k-groups, did, however, help to explain why expecta-
tions of discord drawn from naive hegemonic stability theory were incorrect.
multilateralism. To obtain a fuller account, one must look at

demand as well as supply. The most obvious source of changing
demands lies in the changing interests, or preferences, of states.
Preferences may be altered by changes in domestic political
institutions or coalitions. For instance, Nazi Germany was less
willing to enter into multilateral arrangements in the 1930s than
was its Weimar predecessor; after World War II, the Federal
Republic of the 1950s was positively anxious to be included in
arrangements that would have been anathema to the Nazis. The
post-New Deal, post-World War II United States was much
more willing to engage in international co-operation than the
protectionist, insulated United States of most of the interwar
period. Preferences can also change in two different ways as a
result of increasing levels of interdependence. First, even if states
were unitary decision-makers, under conditions of interdepen-
dence their ability to attain their objectives would be increasingly
affected by the actions of others. As interdependence rises, there-
fore, the opportunity costs of not co-ordinating policy increase,
compared with the costs of sacrificing autonomy as a conse-
quence of making binding agreements. The result can be
expected to be increased demand for multilateral agreements.
Second, increased interdependence is likely to affect domestic
political institutions and coalitions, as Peter Katzenstein and
Peter Gourevitch have shown.23
Recent work by Ronald Rogowski suggests a possible exten-
sion of the Gourevitch-Katzenstein line of argument to account
for increasing co-operation among the advanced industrial
democracies. Rogowski's theory builds on the Stolper-Samuel-
23 On the effects of interdependence on political institutions in small European

states, see Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in WorldMarkets(Ithaca ny: Cornell
University Press 1985). Peter Gourevitch's discussion of the effects of interdepen-
dence on political coalitions appears in his Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca ny:
Cornell University Press 1985). On the relationship between selected interna-
tional organizations and United States foreign policy, with explicit attention to
the issue of the influence of intergovernmental organizations on United States
domestic politics, see Margaret P. Karns and Karen A. Mingst, eds, The United
States and Multilateral Institutions:Patterns of Changing Instrumentalityand Influence
(Boston: Unwin Hyman 1990), esp chap 1 1 by the editors.
son theorem from the economics of international trade, which

predicts that locally abundant factors of production will benefit
from trade liberalization and that only locally scarce factors can
benefit by protection.24
Rogowski extends the Stolper-Samuelson theorem to politics,
arguing that increasing exposure to trade will result in political
conflict between owners of scarce and abundant factors of produc-
tion, respectively. Furthermore, he infers that owners of abundant
factors will be strengthened politically by openness. It follows that
the liberalization of the postwar international political economy,
led by the United States, should have strengthened owners of
abundant factors of production, including capital, in all major
industrial countries. These actors will favour further openness and
will increasingly have the capabilities to obtain it. Thus the domestic
political structures of other industrialized countries should, by
this theory, have become more conducive to policies of economic
openness during the postwar period, even as the United States
became less dominant. On this interpretation, recent patterns of
co-operation could reflect shifts in interests, in favour of openness,
as a result of the interaction between economic interdependence
and domestic politics.25
Another source of change in the demand for institutions, in
addition to rising levels of interdependence and changes in
24 Ronald Rogowski, Commerceand Coalitions:How TradeAffects DomesticPolitical

Alignments(Princeton nj: Princeton University Press 1989), 3. The full statement
of the theory by Rogowski includes producers who use scarce factors intensively
as beneficiaries of protection, and producers who use locally abundant factors
intensively as beneficiaries of economic openness.
25 Ibid, esp 170- 1. A weakness in Rogowski's theory is the assumption that capital
and labour can be treated as homogeneous, mobile factors of production: in
modern economies, capital and labour may be quite specific to sectors. In indus-
tries such as textiles and autos, on the one hand, and aircraft and computers,
on the other, foreign trade interests seem to follow sectoral lines more than those
of capital versus labour. In the short run, Rogowski's assumption that economic
sectors that are advantaged by changes in openness will become stronger politi-
cally is also questionable, because deprivation of traditional benefits may be a
stronger mobilizing force than opportunities for new gains. Other interest-based
theories may be more plausible; but the general point remains: changes in
interests could account for increased reliance on multilateral institutions.
domestic politics, lies in what Jeffrey Frieden refers to as the

'contractual environment.'26 In the absence of appropriate insti-
tutions, the abilities of states to make agreements may be
thwarted by externalities, uncertainty, informational asymme-
tries, and fears that partners will behave opportunistically. Even
strong converging interests arising from a combination of com-
plementary domestic structures and international interdepen-
dence are not sufficient to explain the emergence of multilateral
institutions, because if no contractual problems existed, no insti-
tutions would be needed, and if contractual problems were
utterly severe, no institutions would be possible. For interna-
tional institutions to be devised, contractual problems must be
significant but not overwhelming.
To account for the rise of international institutions, advocates
of a contractual approach make two principal arguments:
1 Institutions perform the functions of reducing uncertainty
and the costs of carrying out transactions for their members;
but institutions are themselves costly to create and maintain.
As the number and importance of related issues within a
given policy domain increase, the costs of creating new insti-
tutions will fall relative to the costs of inventing new rules
and procedures for each issue that arises. In other words,
increases in issue density will lead to a demandfor the creation
of multilateralinstitutions.
2 International institutions that succeed in establishing rela-
tively clear rules, which provide standards for judgment of
behaviour, and in stabilizing expectations, thus reducing
uncertainty, will become valued and will therefore tend to
create a demandfor the maintenanceof multilateralinstitutions*1
According to this line of argument, we should expect that a
26 Jeffrey Frieden, personal communication.

27 These arguments are made in Keohane, 'The demand for international regimes,'
and in After Hegemony,chaps 5-6. It is interesting to note that Morgenthau's
argument for the conditions under which alliances will occur is similar: it is cast
in functional terms and stresses the role of alliances in reducing uncertainty
'when the common interests [of potential allies] are inchoate in terms of policy
and action' and therefore need to be made 'explicit and operative.' Politics
among Nations, 4th ed, 177.
combination of increasing interdependence (leading to high levels

of issue density) and the success of existing institutions will tend to
lead both to an expansion of institutional tasks and an increase in
the number of functioning international institutions. If collective
action dilemmas are serious, increases in the number of players,
and especially in the diffusion of capabilities among them, will raise
the costs of co-operation. However, multilateral institutions may
not suffer as a result; indeed, rules such as those in the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt) limiting unconditional
most-favoured-nation treatment to members can be interpreted
as institutional responses to collective action problems.
Although under conditions of increasing interdependence
and a record of institutional success we can expect the tasks
assumed by international institutions to expand, this increase in
activity will not be uniform across issue-areas, because specific
features of the environment will be important. As explored later
in this essay, different situations vary in the requirements for
institutions to monitor rule compliance or even to help states
enforce common standards: in some cases rules may be self-
enforcing; in others they may be enforceable with appropriate
institutions; in still others no conceivable international arrange-
ments will ensure compliance with inconvenient rules.
The contractual line of argument has many ramifications for
different aspects of multilateralism, as sketched in the sections
below. However, it has only begun to be tested, and the results
from case-studies are mixed. International regimes often seem
to reduce uncertainty and transactions costs, in response
to rising interdependence.28 However, several case-studies of
regime change find contractual arguments insufficient to ac-
28 See, particularly, Keohane, After Hegemony,chaps 8-10, and the chapters in
Krasner, ed, InternationalRegimes, and in Kenneth A. Oye, ed, Cooperationunder
Anarchy (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press 1986). See also Mark W.
Zacher, 'International commodity trade regimes/ International Organization
41 (spring 1987), 173-202, and Ethan B. Kapstein, 'International coordination
of banking regulations,' International Organization43(spring 1989), 334. In their
review of United States relations with multilateral institutions, Karns and Mingst
conclude that rule-creation activities by multilateral institutions are important
to the United States, but that information gathering and surveillance are less so.
See The United States and Multilateral Institutions,esp 291-6.
count for observed behaviour,arguing that the effects of institu-

tions to which they point were insignificant,29that ideological
hegemony was important,30or that changes in states' concep-
tions of their preferences,as affectedby transnationalnetworks,
were more important than contractual theories assume.31It is
difficultat this point to generalize about the relativeimportance
of these contractualfactors, compared with the effects of shifts
in the distributionof capabilitiesand changes in the interests or
preferences of states, as shaped by changes in interdependence,
interactingwith domestic politics.There seems to be some merit
in the contractual arguments, but effects predicted by these
arguments are neither uniform nor overwhelmingly strong.
It is important to emphasize in this connection that sensible
adherents of the contractualapproach would propose it not as a
substitute for the analysisof power, interests,or interdependence,
but rather as a useful supplementto those traditional modes of
political analysis. It is emphasized below not as a theoretical
panacea but as a relativelynovel way of throwing light on some
puzzles of multilateralism.It is particularlyimportant that my
discussionof contractualismshould not be interpreted as imply-
ing that international institutional arrangements are 'optimal'
in any sense of that word. Any clear separation between func-
tional and power arguments is misleading.32
An interpretation of institutional change that focusses on
capabilities,interests,interdependence, domestic politicalstruc-
29 Andrew M. Moravcsik, 'Disciplining trade finance: the oecd export credit
arrangement,' International Organization43(winter 1989), 173-205, esp 198.
30 Jack Donnelly, 'International human rights: a regime analysis/ International
Organization4o(summer 1986), 637.
31 Roger K. Smith, 'Explaining the non-proliferation regime: anomalies for contem-
porary international relations theory,' International Organization4 1(spring
1987), 253-82; Peter M. Haas, Saving the Mediterranean:the Politics of International
EnvironmentalCooperation(New York: Columbia University Press 1990), esp
183-9. Haas ( 187) finds that 'all the factors that the cooperation under anarchy
school identifies as contributing to cooperation were present to some extent in
the Med Plan,' but that 'they do not account for the full extent of the Med Plan.'
32 The classic statement remains that of Ernst B. Haas, in Beyondthe Nation-State:
Functionalismand InternationalOrganization(Stanford ca: Stanford University Press
1964), chap 2, 'Functionalism refined,' 26-50.
ture, and the contractual environment emphasizes the role of

constraints within which choices are made. Such an approach
does not deny that the thought processes of and the actions
taken by decision-makers in international organizations are
often significant: particular initiatives and policies, which may
benefit or harm millions of people, may depend upon the imagi-
nation, courage, and capacity for learning of leaders of interna-
tional organizations. They may also depend on the accumulation
of scientific knowledge, on the basis of which better decisions
can be made.33
Nevertheless, the argument I am making sees organizational
decision-making as dependent on politically compelling de-
mands for multilateral institutions and on the political power
and interests required to create and support such institutions.
Scientific knowledge is certainly significant in modern politics:
indeed, it may play a role in the process by which states deter-
mine their own preferences, and it certainly affects beliefs about
international interdependence and the potential benefits of
international institutions. Yet its impact on decision-makers in
international organizations themselves can only materialize if
prior conditions make possible the creation, maintenance, and
expansion of multilateral institutions.
How, then, should we account for the rise of multilateralism
in the postwar world? We need not only to judge the relative
importance of power, interdependence, domestic politics, and
the contractual environment but also to see how these forces
interact. Understanding these interactions will require close
study of political and economic processes within issue-areas as
33 For a thorough exploration of learning and adaptation in international organiza-
tions, and a defence of the importance of organizational decision-makers, see
Ernst B. Haas, When Knowledgeis Power: ThreeModels of Change in International
Organizations(Berkeley ca: University of California Press 1990), particularly
7-15. Haas describes three patterns of organizational change - incremental
growth, turbulent non-growth, and managed interdependence - and very
cleverly distinguishes learning from adaptation. His account of variation in life
histories among international organizations is persuasive, even if his work does
not provide a convincing basis for abandoning what he calls a 'structuralist'
account of the rise of multilateralism in general.
well as systematic comparative analysis of patterns across issue-

areas. Both types of study will seek to connect those shifts with
changes in distributions of capabilities, patterns of interdepen-
dence, domestic political coalitions, and multilateral institutional
activity.
The contractual theorist should expect to find an incremen-
tal pattern of change, promoted by officials of international
organizations as well as by those of central governments: we
should observe responses of institutions to problems involving
externalities, uncertainty, and high costs of transactions. Expla-
nations stressing interdependence would expect central govern-
mental officials, facing trade-offs between objectives, to take the
lead. Theories relying on changes in domestic politics should
expect to observe shifting political coalitions in major countries,
with policy change instituted by new political leadership or
prompted by pressure from below. Our ultimate objective
should be to understand under which conditions each of these
explanations, or their combination, coupled with structural
power theories, accounts for the rise in multilateralism.
WHAT EXPLAINS VARIATIONS IN

INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP, STRENGTH, AND SCOPE?
Interest-based and contractual explanations of the rise of multi-
lateralism since 1945 could also be employed to investigate varia-
tion in the incidence of multilateralism, as opposed to unco-
ordinated policy or bilateralism across issue-areas, and in the
degree of institutionalization of multilateral arrangements.
Much such variation needs to be explained. In the world political
economy, issues of trade have been more institutionalized than
those of money and much more so, at least on a global basis,
than those involving oil; but some trade issues have been subject
to bilateral arrangements whereas others are regulated in a
genuinely multilateral way. Some commodities, such as coffee,
have been subject to elaborate international regimes; others
have not. With respect to the physical environment, interna-
tional regimes governing tanker discharges, fisheries in many
areas of the open sea, and Antarctica have preceded comparable

attempts to regulate deep-sea mining, transboundary flows of
pollutants including nuclear fallout, or actions that adversely
affect the atmospheric ozone layer. Even among those areas in
which international regulation takes place, differences exist
in patterns of representation, secretariat autonomy, the status
of experts, revenue base, voting, budgeting, the monitoring of
compliance, and a variety of other organizational character-
istics.34
As in explanations for the rise of multilateralism, accounts of
variation across issue-areas could focus on the distribution of
power, on interdependence or domestic politics as determinants
of states' preferences, or on the contractual environment. Even
for the same states, domestic politics differs across issue-areas;
and the states that are involved in different issue-areas are not
the same. Thus, complementary interests in one area may con-
trast with conflicting interests in another as a result of differences
in domestic politics. The distribution of capabilities and the
intensity of interdependence are also different across issue-
areas. Contractual environments also vary: externalities, un-
certainty, and transaction costs differ from one issue-area to
another.
To explain variation across issue-areas, theories of organiza-
tional learning also have to be taken into account, because varia-
tions in learning may differentiate issue-areas from one another
over time. In When Knowledgeis Power, Ernst Haas shows that
both concentration of power in states with similar preferences
and agreement on objectives rooted in scientific knowledge were
necessary conditions for successful organizational learning.
Haas has explored issues of learning in such depth that I have
nothing to add; in this essay, therefore, I will focus on other
dimensions of institutional variations: patterns of institutional
membership, the strength of multilateral regulation, and the
scope of multilateral institutions. I will also avoid probing varia-
34 For a list of these and other factors, see ibid, 64, table 1.
75° INTERNATIONALJOURNAL
tions in detailed organizational arrangements or patterns of

influence.35 Yet my general point - that students of multilateral-
ism should be seeking to account for variation across institutions
and issue-areas - applies to these organizational issues as well
as to the questions addressed below.
Institutional membership
Different international institutions apply different criteria for
membership. Two questions differentiate the major situations.
( 1) Is membership in principle open to all states within a certain
geographical area that accept certain general principles and
rules, or is it explicitly limited on the basis of domestic political
arrangements or as a function of selection by present members?
(2) If the former, how rigorously do members employ the criteria
embedded in the rules?
Restrictedinstitutions- for example, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (nato), the Organization of the Petroleum-
Exporting Countries (opec), the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (oecd), the European Com-
munity - deliberately limit membership to a relatively small
number of states that have some set of interests in common or
that have specified domestic political arrangements. The ratio-
nale for these institutions, as currently constituted, would disap-
pear were their memberships to become universal. Conditionally
openinstitutions- for example, the International Monetary Fund
(imf), gatt, the gatt codes - are open in principle to states
that are willing to accept a set of prescribed commitments, which
not all states may be able (much less willing) to do. Conditionally
open institutions adopt measures to exclude non-providers from
benefits secured by co-operation. For instance, during the
35 Robert W. Cox and Harold K. Jacobson et al, The Anatomyof Influence: Decision
Making in InternationalOrganization (New Haven c r: Yale University Press
i973)» is a classic study of variations in patterns of influence in eight international
organizations over twenty years. Its research design represents an exemplary
use of the comparative method, although it lacks a larger theoretical framework
within which its relatively narrow focus - determinants of influence in the
organizations - could be located.
Tokyo Round of the 1970s, major gatt membersperceived that

they could benefit from agreements on a number of specific
issues, such as government procurement and subsidies,but that
many gatt members would not make commitmentsto provide
benefits (for example, open markets for foreign suppliers and
transparencyand limitation of export-promoting subsidies) on
these issues. They therefore agreed to codes open to all gatt
members, but they sought to limit their benefits to those coun-
tries that adhered to the obligationsof the codes. Openinstitutions
such as the United Nations system can be joined by all sovereign
states, with the exception perhaps of pariah states, with mini-
mal further requirements for membership. Some institutions
that were originally conceived as conditionally open, requir-
ing commitments and a certain form of government, such as
the United Nations (which initially excluded defeated enemies
and certain states considered fascist such as Franco's Spain),
have become open institutions; others that began as open
ones, such as certain fisheries regimes, have become only con-
ditionally open.36
Multilateralinstitutions of all three types are doubtless con-
structed to help powerful states achieve their interests. I would
suggest, consistentwith a contractualperspective,that the differ-
ences in form among them are closelyconnected with differences
in function. Restricted institutions either seek to achieve gains
vis-a-visoutsiders (a function for which there must be outsiders
to exploit) or to build strong bonds of community (requiring
similarpoliticalsystems).They arise for the former reason when
states perceive unexploited opportunities in their relationships
with potential adversaries, whether in security or economic
affairs. In 1948 the future nato states discerned unexploited
opportunities in their relationshipwith the Soviet Union. Opec
perceived comparable opportunities at its formation in i960
and especially during the 1970s: greater cohesion, it was
36 For a distinction between open-to-entry common-property regimes and

restricted common-property regimes, see Young, International Cooperation,51.
thought, could produce higher oil prices or maintain the high

prices already attained. The European Community uses its
enhanced bargaining power to exploit opportunities with its
trading partners and also seeks to build community among
its own membership. Whatever else they do, restricted institu-
tions engage in cartelization.
Conditionallyopen institutions are designed largely to cope
with the dilemma of insufficient contributions, or Tree riding,'
associatedwith problemsof collectiveaction. In a word, they are
designed to foster collaboration*1 If no price were imposed for
membership in such institutions, co-operation would be highly
sub-optimal,because the contributorswould not receive recipro-
cal benefits from the free riders and would therefore reduce
their own contributions. To achieve either specific reciprocity
(tit for tat) or diffuse reciprocity in which a benefit does not
depend on a specificquid pro quo, some conditions for member-
ship are essential. The original conception of the United
Nations, in which opposition to fascism was a condition for
membership, reflects this conception of conditional openness.
To understand the value of charging 'a price for admission,'
consider what would happen to gatt if states were asked to
abide by rules of non-discriminationwithout the assurancethat
their trading partners would do so!
Open institutionsserve as forums for the exchange of opin-
ions, but the benefits that members are willing to confer on each
other are limited due to the difficulty of enforcing rules or
ensuring reciprocity in concessions. Open institutions arise
when none of the three principal reasons for limitation - the
desire to exploit unexploited opportunities vis-a-visadversaries,
the search for community, and the need to control free-rider
problems - is compelling. Open institutions may be useful in
pure co-ordination games but are unlikely to be very effective
37 This is to say that 'supralateral' institutions - in which diffuse reciprocity prevails

(see supra note 2) - must necessarily either have restricted membership or
membership that is conditional on adherence to fairly demanding rules. I am
indebted to John Ruggie for making this connection.
in situations requiring collaboration or suasion.38 In general,

open institutions are likely to be limited principally to symbolic
issues and to operations involving relatively small quantities of
resources. In this connection, the contrast is instructive between
gatt, limited to states accepting its obligations, and the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development (unctad),
which is open to all United Nations members and serves chiefly
as a forum for symbolic activity.39Insofar as significant resources
are allocated by open institutions, informal means of controlling
them will be used to circumvent the organization's nominal
decision-making practices.40 Open institutions controlled by the
entire membership are normally limited to the function of consul-
tation.41
38 In co-ordination games, players may prefer different outcomes but have no

incentives to diverge from equilibria that have been reached: co-ordination
games therefore do not require arrangements to ensure enforcement. Collabora-
tion games, by contrast, contain strong incentives to defect from established
equilibria. Finally, in suasion games, states have such asymmetrical interests that
equilibrium outcomes leave at least one player dissatisfied. It typically seeks to
link other issues to the issue in question, through promises or threats. For these
distinctions, see Lisa L. Martin, 'Strategic interaction, multilateralism and insti-
tutions/ unpublished paper, April 1990. Martin builds on an article by Arthur
A. Stein, 'Coordination and collaboration: regimes in an anarchic world,' in
Krasner, ed, InternationalRegimes, 1 15-40.
39 See Joseph S. Nye, Jr, 'Unctad: poor nations' pressure group,' in Cox and
lacobson, Anatomyof Influence, 334-70.
40 Cox and Jacobson, Anatomyof Influence (426), find that organizations controlled
-
by their 'participant subsystems' that is, by their members in accordance with
formal rules - were 'those whose work has little salience for states, especially
powerful states.' Organizations with high salience were controlled by powerful
members, irrespective of nominal decision-making procedures. Cox and Jacob-
son do not explore whether their finding could be accounted for in part by the
different susceptibility of the organizations they studied to collective action prob-
lems as well as to measures taken by powerful states to maintain their control.
It should also be noted that although Cox and Jacobson imply that salience
explains patterns of influence, it is quite conceivable that the relationship is
reciprocal: control of an international organization by a majority composed of
small states may lead powerful countries to withhold resources from it, thereby
reducing its political salience. Likewise, with respect to the argument made in
the text, it is plausible that the form of a multilateral institution will affect its
functions as well as vice versa.
41 In distinguishing cartelization, collaboration, and consultation, I have adapted
a very useful suggestion from Jeffrey Frieden.
The strengthof multilateralregulation

In a pioneering paper, Brent Sutton and Mark Zacher ask a
question that has not been given sufficient attention: 'What is
regulated internationally and what is not regulated internation-
ally in the world, and why?' They use theories of market failure,
uncertainty, and transaction costs to account for variations in
the degree of regulation of specific issues within the general
domain of international shipping. Across areas such as interna-
tional shipping services, financial transactions, market access,
liability for damages, and crime, there is substantial variation in
the extent to which regulation occurs.42
Vinod Aggarwal focusses on a similar variable, which he
calls the 'strength' of an international regime, referring to 'the
stringency with which rules regulate the behavior of countries.'
Extreme 'weakness' of a regime denotes lack of regulation in the
Sutton-Zacher sense. Aggarwal seeks to specify changes in the
strength of international textile regimes between 1950 and the
early 1980s and to account, chiefly on the basis of international
and domestic structures, for variations in the strength of these
regimes, particularly what he sees as the precipitous decline of
the Multi-Fibre Arrangement after 1977.43
The most extensive and sophisticated efforts to explain what
issues are regulated through multilateral institutions were
undertaken by students of regional political integration in the
1960s and early 1970s. They developed a highly differentiated
42 Brent A. Sutton and Mark W. Zacher, 'Mutual advantage, imposition, and regime
formation: evolution of international shipping regulations/ paper delivered to
the 14th World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Wash-
ington, dc, 28 August- 1 September 1988. Sutton and Zacher are currently
working on a larger project comparing the evolution of regimes for shipping,
air transport, telecommunications, and postal services, relying to a considerable
degree on what I am referring to as a contractual analytical framework. For a
published presentation of this theoretical argument, see Mark W. Zacher,
Toward a theory of international regimes: explorations into the bases of mutual
interests,' Journal of InternationalAffairs 44(no 1, 1990), 1-19.
43 Vinod K. Aggarwal, Liberal Protectionism:The International Politics of Organized
Textile Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), 20-1, 181-2. See
also Haggard and Simmons, 'Theories of international regimes/ 496.
and sophisticatedconception of integration, which is related to

the 'strength' of regimes but which is explicitly multidimen-
sional. These scholars not only sought to assess the descriptive
argument that European politics was becoming more central-
ized and less subjectto veto by individual states but also tried to
account for inter-regionalvariation in the success of integrative
efforts. Seeking to compare regional organizations, Nye began
with a conception of integration as 'forming parts into a whole,'
but he found it necessary to disaggregate political integration
into a number of components, of which the most relevant for
multilateralinstitutionsin general are institutionalintegrationand
policy integration. Institutional integration is reflected in the
bureaucraticgrowth and expansion of jurisdiction by the multi-
lateral institutions themselves, acting either bureaucraticallyor
with a system of less than unanimous voting by members. Policy
integration is indexed by the scope of institutional action, the
salience of fields in which multilateralinstitutions have author-
ity, and the locus of decision- whether in the multilateralinstitu-
tion as a whole or in individual member-states.44
The choice of political integration as a dependent variable
followed from the concerns of students of regional organizations
44 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Peace in Parts: Integrationand Conflictin Regional Organization

(Boston: Little, Brown 1971; reprinted by University Press of America 1987),
26, 49. For a discussion of the 'locus' and 'scope' of decision-making in Europe
between 1950 and 1970, see Leon N. Lindberg and Stuart A. Scheingold,
Europe's Would-BePolity: Patterns of Change in the European Community(Englewood
Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall 1970). In a brilliant essay published in 1975, John
Gerard Ruggie constructed a dimension, which he described as 'the instrumental-
ities of regimes,' which paralleled the concerns of integration theory. He distin-
guished among a common framework for national behaviour, a joint facility co-
ordinating national behaviour, a common policy integrating national behav-
iour, and a common policy substituted for independent national behaviour. In
that paper, Ruggie also argued that international behaviour is institutionalized;
distinguished types of interdependence; introduced the concept of international
regime into the international relations literature, defining it essentially as it is
still commonly defined; and even inaugurated the concept of 'epistemic commu-
nities.' In other words, Ruggie in this short paper foreshadowed much of the
conceptual work of the next decade. See John Gerard Ruggie, 'International
responses to technology: concepts and trends,' International Organization
29(summer 1975), 557-84.
in the 1960s and early 1970s: they took co-operation through

multilateral institutions as given, as least in Europe, and sought
to understand whether it was leading to political community,
federalism, or some new form of institutional, functionally
driven collaboration. They also sought to explore how general
this 'integration process' might become. However, the failure of
regional integration outside Europe, and the stalling of the
European integration process for almost twenty years after 1966,
soon led scholars to shift their focus away from integration theo-
ry's emphasis on unification towards more decentralized modes
of encouraging co-operation among states that remained legally
and politically sovereign.
The reinvigoration of the European Community with the
Single European Act and current discussions of a loosely defined
'political union' have begun to prompt renewed attention to
processes of political integration. Much of this work has played
down the European Community's institutions by focussing on
intergovernmental bargains, which seem to constitute the most
important dimension of European politics.45However, there has
also been renewed interest in Ernst Haas's concept of 'suprana-
tionality,' referring not to an end-point of unity but to 'a cumula-
tive pattern of accommodation in which the participants refrain
from unconditionally vetoing proposals and instead seek to
attain agreement by means of compromises upgrading common
interests.'46The European Community is becoming an example
of the 'pooling and sharing of sovereignty,' described well nei-
ther by the metaphor of 'cooperation under anarchy' - because
the elaborate networks of rules, obligations, and organizations
45 For two good recent examples, see Wayne Sandholtz and John Zysman, '1992:
recasting the European bargain,' WorldPolitics 42(October 1989), 1-30, and
Andrew Moravcsik, 'Negotiating the Single European Act: national interests and
conventional statecraft in the European Community,' Working Paper 2 1, Cen-
ter for European Studies, Harvard University, January 1990. Stanley Hoffmann
and I also stress intergovernmental bargains in 'European Community politics
and institutional change,' chapter 16 in William Wallace, ed, Dynamicsof European
Integration (London: Pinter forthcoming), 276-300.
46 Ernst B. Haas, 'Technocracy, pluralism and the New Europe,' in Stephen R.
Graubard, ed, A New Europe? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1964), 66.
are far from anarchic - nor by the image of centralization implicit

in the concept of political integration.47 Yet as a multilateral
institution it is sui generis, and studying it alone is unlikely to
improve our systematic understanding of sources of variation in
multilateralism.
The concepts of institutional and policy integration may,
however, be helpful in studying such variation. The end of the
Cold War in Europe is likely to unleash a series of changes in
world politics which will surely have institutional ramifications.
We can expect that the institutional innovations that result will
vary considerably along the dimension of institutional integra-
tion. To account for this variation, scholars could profit not
only by recalling the sophisticated discussions of the concept of
integration in the regional integration literature but also by
reflecting on that literature's imaginative consideration of rele-
vant explanatory variables - which Nye referred to as 'process
mechanisms,' 'structural conditions,' and 'perceptual condi-
tions.'48 Many of the hypotheses used to explain variations in
regional integration could help to account for variations in the
institutional strength or policy scope of contemporary multilat-
eralism.
From the standpoint of research design, a major obstacle to
empirical testing of regional integration theory is that there was
-
only one case of substantial success the European Community.
A research programme with fourteen sets of variables and essen-
tially two outcomes (success in Europe, failure elsewhere) is
underspecified and therefore not testable. However, there is
considerable variation in institutional integration among the
scores of important multilateral institutions in existence today;
and we are likely to observe more variation in the future. With
sufficiently parsimonious paring of integration theory to essen-
tials, and an assiduous search for sufficiently similar cases of
47 Keohane and Hoffmann, 'European Community politics and institutional

change,' 279-82.
48 Nye, Peace in Parts, 64-87.
multilateralism, progress in explaining variations in institutional

integration seems possible in the 1990s.
The scope of multilateralinstitutions

The political integration literature is also valuable insofar as it
directs our attention to variation in the policy scope of multilat-
eral institutions. We observe substantial variation in the scope
of international regimes, ranging from narrowly regional to
global. Such variation is apparent on such diverse issues as
trade, currency areas, shipping, and regulation of the physical
environment. Consider, for example, the natural resource
regimes studied by Oran R. Young. Multilateral institutionalized
regimes are often quite narrowly regional: Young mentions the
North Pacific halibut regime, the Fraser River salmon regime,
and the North Pacific fur seal regime. Yet global regimes have
also been instituted, as in the case of whaling.
Young suggests from a normative standpoint that the opti-
mal size of a regional authority for natural resources should
reflect costs and benefits. Relatively small regional organizations
avoid serious collective action problems and can tailor their rules
to the specific conditions of the area; at some point in their
expansion, transaction costs will tend to rise more rapidly than
justified by the gains of increased size, such as economies of scale
and the internalization of externalities within a regime.49 Young
is using what I have called a contractual approach to make a
normative point, but the point is also relevant to explanation: if
we assume calculating rationality by actors, we can expect that
actual arrangements will roughlycorrespond to this cost-benefit
logic.50 One worthwhile way to evaluate the validity of contrac-
tual arguments would be to see whether they could explain
variations in the scope of institutionalized multilateralism across
issue-areas.
The scope of international regimes depends not simply on
49 Young, International Cooperation, 121-4.

50 Young's argument is of course similar to arguments for optimal currency areas
in economics.
intra-institutionaldecisions but on patterns of competition

among
international institutions. In the United Nations system, for
example, specializedagencies struggle fiercelyfor mandatesand
budgets, often to the detriment of co-ordinated action by the
systemas a whole.51One result of the postwarsettlement of 1990
in Europe will be a struggle by European institutions - nato,
the Community, the Conference on Security and Co-operation
in Europe, the Council of Europe - for mandates from states to
play prominent roles in important policy areas.
WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR VARIATIONS IN

PROPERTY RIGHTS AND RULES?
ErnstHaas has observed that 'allinternationalorganizationsare
deliberatelydesigned by their founders to "solveproblems"that
requirecollaborativeactionfor a solution.'52Problemsare solved
by multilateralinstitutions largely by creating rights and rules:
as Young has argued, 'the core of every international regime is
a cluster of rights and rules [whose] exact content is a matter of
intense interest to these actors.'53People who construct institu-
tions have purposes in doing so, and the rights and rules of
institutions reflect visions of what sorts of behaviour should be
encouraged or proscribed.Multilateralinstitutions vary in their
purposes even withinissue-areas,as the contrastbetween gatt's
espousal of non-discriminatorytrade and unctad's emphasis
on special privileges for developing countries illustrates. The
content of the rights and rules of multilateral institutions
changes over time. Even if we understood why certain areas of
activityare regulated while others are not, and the strength and
scope of multilateral institutions, we would not fully compre-
hend multilateralismunless we had some insights into the pur-
poses that it is meant to serve.
The rights allocated by international regimes can be com-
51 The classic analysis is A Study of the Capacityof the United Nations DevelopmentSystem,
a report by Sir Robert Jackson (New York: United Nations 1969).
52 Haas, WhenKnowledgeis Power, 2.
53 Young, International Cooperation,15.
mon-property rights, permitting free use of areas such as outer

space or the deep seabed, or property rights vested in particular
entities - private actors, states, or international organizations.
On issues of environmental management, the option of com-
mon-property rights remains available, although areas treated
as commons are progressively shrinking as technological
advances facilitate access to them and as crowding effects -
pollution, overexploitation of resources, and the like - become
more evident. Property rights may also be contingent: multilat-
eral insurance arrangements may be designed to provide bene-
fits to countries hurt by lower commodity prices or by environ-
mental catastrophes.54
On issues of international economic exchange, as well as
many resource issues, the principal dividing line is between
advocates of market arrangements and supporters of politically
authoritative allocation. The debate about principles and pur-
poses becomes a debate over markets and authority.
John Ruggie has argued that the postwar international eco-
nomic order reflected a compromise that he has called Embed-
ded liberalism': 'Movement toward greater openness in the
international economy would be coupled with safeguards that
acknowledged and even facilitated the interventionist character
of the modern capitalist state.'55 Henry Nau has criticized Rug-
gie's view, holding that the first twenty years after World War II
were characterized by market-oriented liberalism and successful
economic growth, but that after the mid-1960s increasing state
interventionism and attempts to meet popular demands for
short-term benefits led to inflation and reduced growth rates,
until markets were re-emphasized and supported by the Reagan
54 On insurance regimes, see Keohane, 'The demand for international regimes,'

167-70. However, Peter Haas finds an Interstate Guarantee Fund in the Med
Plan to have been virtually a 'dead letter': Saving the Mediterranean, 186.
55 John Gerard Ruggie, 'Embedded liberalism revisited: progress in international
economic relations,' in Beverly Crawford and Emmanuel Adler, eds, Progress
in InternationalRelations (New York: Columbia University Press 1990), 4. See also
Ruggie, 'International regimes, transactions and change: embedded liberalism
in the postwar economic order,' in Krasner, ed, InternationalRegimes, 195-23 1.
administration.56 Aggarwal has shown that international regimes

in the textile trade have changed their nature - the objects
promoted by the regime - over time, becoming more protection-
ist, particularly after 1977.57 For all three authors, the fun-
damental conceptual point is the same: to emphasize the
importance of social purposes and principles in shaping interna-
tional institutions. Purposes matter, and they may change over
time.58
The purposes of multilateral institutions not only have
changed over time; they vary across issue-areas in the extent to
which they are designed to support, supplement, or supplant a
world market economy. Multilateral arrangements to maintain
currency convertibility, the gatt regime limiting the rights of
states to impose restrictions on trade, and international legal
institutions providing for enforcement of contracts support the
market. Lending by the World Bank or the imf to developing
countries, or arrangements such as the Multi-Fibre Arrange-
ment in textiles, supplement, and may therefore distort, market
arrangements. Proposals for a New International Economic
Order or for an authoritative regime to control extraction of
seabed minerals would have supplanted market mechanisms
with authoritative allocation, involving either political allocation
of resources or limitations on the rights of non-state actors.
Purposes matter, but so does power. The most straightfor-
ward way to account for these variations is to focus on both
purposes and power together. In a major study of efforts by the
Third World to transform international institutions during the
1970s, Stephen D. Krasner has sought to explain the variations
in the success of Third World countries, across issue-areas, in
changing market-oriented principles and norms into authorita-
56 Nau, The Myth of America'sDecline.

57 Aggarwal, LiberalProtectionism,24, figure 3.
58 Haas, When Knowledgeis Power, emphasizes reshaping of purposes internally,
through actions by the leaders of international organizations who learn from
a combination of scientific knowledge and experience. Aggarwal, Nau, and Rug-
gie all stress the purposes of actors external to the international organizations,
particularly leaders and high-level bureaucrats within states.
tive rules controlled by themselves. Krasnerargues that 'Third

World states have been able to change, to some degree, all
regimes to which they had access, or in which their sovereignty
could be used effectively.'But where accesswas denied, as in the
Antarctic Treaty regime, or where the relevance of juridical
sovereignty was low, as in the area of official capital transfers,
the Third World has not been successful.59Even if otherwise
weak statesgain accessto rule-making,their politicaladversaries
may be able to deny legitimacy to the results: for example, the
United Nations has not been able to establishitself as the princi-
pal regulatorof direct foreign investmentbecause the industrial-
ized capitalist countries prefer to endorse voluntary codes of
conduct drawn up by the oecd.
Another possible way to account for these variations would
be to adopt what could be called an 'archaeological' approach
to international institutions. Because institutions tend to per-
sist over time, their rules may reflect, to some extent, the views
of dominant states at the time of their founding. Understand-
ing variation in rules across issue-areas may therefore be facili-
tated by examining the differences in the ideas and ideologies
held by dominant groups not simply contemporaneously, but
at the time when various multilateral arrangements were insti-
tuted.60 Krasner's finding that institutional arrangements
such as access rules affected the Third World's political success
suggests that the characteristics of institutions themselves,
derived from their origins, may affect their susceptibility to
radical alteration.
59 Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict:The Third Worldagainst Global Liberalism

(Berkeley: University of California Press 1985). The quotation appears on 122-4.
Krasner's book is exemplary in that it is one of the few studies of multilateralism
that seeks seriously to explain variations in institutional patterns across issue-
areas.
60 Judith Goldstein has pioneered this form of analysis in her examination of the
institutions of protection in United States trade policy. See Goldstein, 'The
political economy of trade: institutions of protection,' AmericanPolitical Science
Review 8o(March 1986), 161-84.
conclusions
The major argument of this essay is that multilateralismshould
be the subjectof a systematicresearch programme. It meets the
tests for a fruitful area in which to carry out research:
1 Significance.Multilateralinstitutions appear to be becoming
more important in world politics and seem likely to remain
significant in their effects on state policies, as well as on
account of their own activities,during the foreseeablefuture.
2 Unsolvedpuzzles.We do not have very much solid scientific
knowledge about the sources of change in multilateralinsti-
tutions over time or the causes of variationacrossissue-areas.
It is intriguing to ask why multilateralismhas become so
much more prevalent;precisely what the impact of multilat-
eral institutions has been; why their institutional arrange-
ments - including membership, strength, and scope - vary
so much; and what accounts for variationsin the rights and
rules that they establish, and in the principles underlying
those rights and rules.
3 Theavailabilityof diverseexplanatory A good deal
perspectives.
of thinking has already been done about multilateralinsti-
tutions, although we hardly have well-specified theories.
Approaches that could be useful for explaining variations
among issue-areasand multilateralinstitutionsinclude: neo-
realist arguments stressing relative state capabilities; ar-
guments about interdependence and domestic politics,
separately or together; contractual theories emphasizing
responses to externalities,uncertainty,and transactioncosts;
and models of organizationaladaptationand learning. None
of these perspectives has established itself as superior, but
all contain promising elements.
4 Relative tractability.Much work in international relations
is bedevilled by the existence of very small numbers of
instances of any reasonably homogeneous phenomenon.
Many explanatory variablesseem relevant, so the investiga-
tor is caught between the Scylla of indeterminacy (more
explanatory variables than cases) and the Charybdis of trun-

cated, invalid analysis.61The existence of a number of multi-
lateral institutions, with comparable activities, memberships,
and organizational arrangements, would make it possible to
soften this dilemma through systematic comparative analy-
sis. Indeed, such analysis could benefit from using sophisti-
cated quantitative methods more often than it does now. Lisa
Martin, for instance, has shown that such an analysis can tell
us quite a bit about patterns of co-operation with respect to
economic sanctions: for instance, the extent of co-operation
on economic sanctions has been quite modest during the last
several decades, but it increases with the costs of sanctions
and the assistance given to the target; bandwagoning prevails
over balancing; and co-operation takes place more fre-
quently when institutions are available than when they are
absent.62 Systematic quantitative analysis should be seen not
as an alternative to case-studies but as complementary to
such well-established qualitative methods. Cases whose typi-
cality or atypicality are known can more validly be used to
suggest general conclusions than those picked arbitrarily;
furthermore, quantitative analysis can suggest propositions
that can be further evaluated through case-studies.
This issue of InternationalJournal presumably reflects its edi-
tors' convictions that the time has come for systematic study of
multilateral institutions. I share that view and hope that this
essay and its successors will persuade you, our readers, not only
to agree but to reflect on how you might participate in making
this investigation a co-operative, and perhaps even more institu-
tionalized, endeavour.
61 To methodologists, the latter problem is known as 'missing variable bias.' Stanley

Hoffmann states the dilemma succinctly: 'single-cause analysis is invalid, multi-
ple causation is valid but too complex for scientific treatment, since it is not
possible to follow in all their meanderings the interrelations among a large
number of factors.' Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva (Boulder co: Westview 1987),
454-
62 Lisa L. Martin, 'Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanc-
tions,' doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1990.

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Multilateralism: An Agenda for Research

Author(s): Robert O. Keohane

an increase in the number of multilateral intergovernmental

Stanfield Professor of International Peace and Chair of the Department of Gov-

1 Harold K. Jacobson, Networksof Interdependence:International Organizationsand

InternationalJournal xlv autumn 1990

2 In working papers prepared for a research project on multilateralism, John

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

analysis. Neorealism emphasizes the weakness of international

The most thorough neorealist treatment of co-operation, by

8 Grieco, Cooperationamong Nations, 233-4.

periodically recur. Likewise, my own formulation of institution-

UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS DO INSTITUTIONS MATTER? what made institutions

12 Oran R. Young, International Cooperation:Building Regimesfor Natural Resources

have helped to reshape the conceptions of their interests held

17 See Oran R. Young, Complianceand Public Authority(Baltimore md: Johns Hop-

ments are nevertheless sometimes honoured, although no single

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE RISE

Nevertheless, it is possible to trace the evolution of co-opera-

multilateralism. To obtain a fuller account, one must look at

23 On the effects of interdependence on political institutions in small European

son theorem from the economics of international trade, which

24 Ronald Rogowski, Commerceand Coalitions:How TradeAffects DomesticPolitical

domestic politics, lies in what Jeffrey Frieden refers to as the

26 Jeffrey Frieden, personal communication.

combination of increasing interdependence (leading to high levels

count for observed behaviour,arguing that the effects of institu-

ture, and the contractual environment emphasizes the role of

well as systematic comparative analysis of patterns across issue-

WHAT EXPLAINS VARIATIONS IN

areas of the open sea, and Antarctica have preceded comparable

tions in detailed organizational arrangements or patterns of

Tokyo Round of the 1970s, major gatt membersperceived that

36 For a distinction between open-to-entry common-property regimes and

thought, could produce higher oil prices or maintain the high

37 This is to say that 'supralateral' institutions - in which diffuse reciprocity prevails

in situations requiring collaboration or suasion.38 In general,

38 In co-ordination games, players may prefer different outcomes but have no

The strengthof multilateralregulation

and sophisticatedconception of integration, which is related to

44 Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Peace in Parts: Integrationand Conflictin Regional Organization

in the 1960s and early 1970s: they took co-operation through

are far from anarchic - nor by the image of centralization implicit

47 Keohane and Hoffmann, 'European Community politics and institutional

multilateralism, progress in explaining variations in institutional

The scope of multilateralinstitutions

49 Young, International Cooperation, 121-4.

intra-institutionaldecisions but on patterns of competition

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR VARIATIONS IN

mon-property rights, permitting free use of areas such as outer

54 On insurance regimes, see Keohane, 'The demand for international regimes,'

administration.56 Aggarwal has shown that international regimes

56 Nau, The Myth of America'sDecline.

tive rules controlled by themselves. Krasnerargues that 'Third

59 Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict:The Third Worldagainst Global Liberalism

explanatory variables than cases) and the Charybdis of trun-

61 To methodologists, the latter problem is known as 'missing variable bias.' Stanley

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