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Structure, growth, and power: three rationalist accounts

Review products

GilpinRobert. War and Change in International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
NorthDouglass C.. Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
OlsonMancur. The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Ronald Rogowski
Ronald Rogowski
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles.

Abstract

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Type
Review essay
Information
International Organization , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1983 , pp. 713 - 738
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1983

References

For helpful comments on an earlier draft I want to thank Richard Baum, Peter Gourevitch, Calum MacDonald, Katherine Rogowski, and the referees and editors of International Organization. For broader encouragement and inspiration, including in several cases access to notes or unpublished essays, thanks are due to Marvin Hoffenberg, Peter Katzenstein, Stephen Krasner, and John Ruggie. The errors that remain I have obstinately insisted on retaining.

1. Olson, Mancur Jr, The Logic of Collective Action (New York: Schocken, 1968)Google Scholar.

2. Olson attributes the apothegm in this form to Newton. It seems to have originated with Didacus Stella (as quoted in Lucan, Civil Wars 2.10) in the rather less self-flattering form “pigmei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident” (my emphasis). See Bartlett, John, Familiar Quotations, 14th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 134Google Scholar.

3. A cartel can increase social efficiency only if it acts to curtail the power of some existing cartel, for example, if a coalition of shippers achieves deregulation of trucking.

4. In An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), pp. 55–69Google Scholar.

5. The proviso “multiple” is important. In South Africa, for example, one could argue that whites form an “encompassing” coalition; in India, pretty clearly no caste does.

6. Mueller, , ed., The Political Economy of Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

7. See for example Hobsbawm, Eric J., The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), pp. 212–13Google Scholar, and Ehrmann, Henry W., Politics in France, 4th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), p. 18Google Scholar.

8. Hancock, M. Donald, Sweden: The Politics ofPostindustrial Change (Hinsdale, III.: Dryden Press, 1972), p. 23Google Scholar.

9. Between 1960 and 1980, real GDP grew on average 4.2% annually in Austria, 3.7% annually in West Germany. The difference in growth in per capita GDP was even sharper, 3.9 as against 3.2% per year: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Historical Statistics, 1960–1980 (Paris: OECD, 1982), p. 40Google Scholar.

10. In Mueller, , Political Economy of Growth, chap. 5, at p. 91Google Scholar.

11. On inflation in the Fourth Republic see Cobban, Alfred, A History of Modern France, vol. 3: France of the Republics, 1871–1962 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 210 and 213Google Scholar. In 1974, the year after the first great increase in oil prices, inflation in Japan was 21%, in Italy 19%, in France 11%; on average in the European OECD countries, it was 12% (OECD, Historical Statistics, 1960–1980, p. 72Google Scholar). According to one widely disseminated estimate, the Gini indices of inequality of personal income in 1962 were France, .52; West Germany, .48; Netherlands, .44; U.K. and Sweden, both .40; and the United States, .35. See Deutsch, Karl W., Politics and Government: How People Decide Their Fate, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 138Google Scholar.

12. For example, Palombara, Joseph La, Interest Groups in Italian Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 132–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maier, Charles S., Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 85Google Scholar; and Williams, Philip M., Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966), p. 393Google Scholar.

13. Yanaga, Chitoshi, Big Business in Japanese Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 35–41Google Scholar; Heidenheimer, Arnold J. and Kommers, Donald P., The Governments of Germany, 4th ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), p. 47Google Scholar.

14. Schmitter, Phillippe C., “Interest Intermediation and Regime Governability in Contemporary Western Europe and North America,” in Berger, Suzanne, ed., Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism, and the Transformation of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

15. This pitfall is, fortunately, avoided by most of the contributors to the volume edited by Mueller, Political Economy of Growth. Especially valuable are the comparative essays by Moses Abramovitz (chap. 4) and Pryor (chap. 5).

16. See, for example, Headey, Bruce W., “Trade Unions and National Wages Policies,” Journal of Politics 32 (1970), pp. 407–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Franz Lehner, in Mueller, Political Economy of Growth, chap. 10.

17. North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert Paul, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. North, however, does not really attempt a comparative application of his theory, examining instead secular decline in efficient property rights.

19. Japan's rates of annual growth in real GDP since 1973 (in %) have exceeded the average of the seven major industrial states (including Japan) as follows: in 1974, Japan –1.0 against the average 0.3; 1975, 2.3 and –0.5; 1976, 5.3 and 5.2; 1977, 5.3 and 4.2; 1978, 5.0 and 4.1; 1979, 5.1 and 3.5; and 1980, 4.4 and 1.1 (OECD, Historical Statistics, 1960–1980, p. 40)Google Scholar.

20. For example, by Allum, P. A., Italy-Republic without Government? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973)Google Scholar.

21. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), p. 48Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher, The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 173–76Google Scholar; Morlan, Robert I., Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955)Google Scholar; and Lipset, Seymour Martin, Agrarian Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

22. Lijphart, Arend, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), chap. 2Google Scholar; Eckstein, Harry, Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), esp. chap. 3Google Scholar; cf. Barry, Brian, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 86–87Google Scholar.

23. North, Douglass C., “A Theory of Economic Change” (review of Olson, , Rise and Decline of Nations), Science 219 (14 01 1983), pp. 163–64Google ScholarPubMed.

24. On the guilds see North, and Thomas, , Rise of the Western World, p. 57Google Scholar.

25. Gerschenkron, Alexander, Bread and Democracy in Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), pp. 37–40Google Scholar.

26. Goldman, Guido S., “The German Economic Challenge,” in Markovits, Andrei S., ed., The Political Economy of West Germany: Modell Deutschland (New York: Praeger, 1982), p. 18Google Scholar; Holusha, John, “Japan's Productive Car Unions,” New York Times, 30 03 1983, p. 27Google Scholar.

27. That is, tariffs in trade-dependent countries cannot serve distributional goals. They can of course be used initially by such economies as part of a larger strategy to achieve competitiveness, as the experience of Sweden (see above) and Japan has conclusively demonstrated.

28. Cf. Peter J. Katzenstein, “The Virtues of Necessity: Small States in the International Economy” (tentative title of a forthcoming book).

29. A useful contrast is this: in 1954, trade outside the Commonwealth and Empire was equivalent to 18% of British GDP; by contrast in 1957, the last year before the creation of the European Economic Community, trade amounted to 30% of West Germany's GDP. See, for these and figures in the text, Organization for European Economic Co-operation, Economic Conditions in the U.K. (Paris: OEEC, 1955), pp. 9 and 15Google Scholar; OECD, Historical Statistics of Foreign Trade (Paris: OECD, 1982), pp. 84–85Google Scholar; and OEEC, Economic Conditions in the FRG (Paris: OEEC, 1960), pp. 30–35Google Scholar. More generally on the Empire as a source of British decline see Lapping, Brian, The Labour Government 1964–70 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 36 and 102Google Scholar.

30. Even since 1973, these two countries' increases in productivity, measured as growth in real value-added per person employed, have been among the five highest in the OECD in both the manufacturing and the industrial sectors: OECD, Historical Statistics of Foreign Trade, p. 44Google Scholar.

31. In Madison's day the construction of effective distributional coalitions over large areas doubtless took much longer. Modern means of communication have made organization far easier and more rapid. (I owe this point to my colleague Marvin Hoffenberg.)

32. On internal trade see OECD, Historical Statistics of Foreign Trade, pp. 38–39Google Scholar. A modified version of Olson's second chief proposition may eventually prove to be true, namely that distributional coalitions tend to gain strength at a constant (if secularly increasing) rate in self-sufficient societies.

33. Cameron, David R., “The Expansion of the Public Economy: A Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 72 (12 1978), pp. 1243–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. In fact unions in open economies seem to be more powerful and centralized–a curious finding, if they are as distributional as Olson would imply. See Ingham, Geoffrey K., Strikes and Industrial Conflict (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 40–41 and 47–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and de Gaulle, Charles, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor, trans, by Kilmartin, Terence (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), pp. 147–48 and 308Google Scholar.

36. On Napoleon III's France see for example Asselain, J. C. and Morrisson, Christian in Mueller, , Political Economy of Growth, chap. 8, at p. 167Google Scholar.

37. Feldman, Gerald D., Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Beer, Samuel H., British Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York: Vintage, 1969), pp. 212–16Google Scholar.

38. McNeill, William H., Past and Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

39. See for example Marsh, Frank Burr, A History of the Roman World from 146 to 30 B.C., 3d ed. (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 3–5Google Scholar.

40. Keynes, John Maynard, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), pp. 11–16Google Scholar.

41. OECD, Historical Statistics, 1960–1980, p. 59Google Scholar.

42. For example, White, Lynn Jr, Medieval Technology and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 69–76Google Scholar.

43. Hobsbawm, , Age of Revolution, pp. 63–67Google Scholar; on military innovation see Magnus, Philip, King Edward the Seventh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), chap. 17Google Scholar; on economic innovation see Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western European Economies from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 262–76 and 281–90Google Scholar.

44. Magnus, Philip, Gladstone: A Biography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954), pp. 414–20Google Scholar.

45. Landes, , Unbound Prometheus, pp. 339–58Google Scholar.

46. For an enlightening contrast between the British Empire's relative self-sufficiency and Germany's growing dependence on insecure trade before World War I see Calleo, David, The German Problem Reconsidered: Germany and the World Order, 1870 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 35 and 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Cf. Pryor, in Mueller, , Political Economy of Growth, pp. 96–97Google Scholar

48. Lake, David, “The International Economic Structure and American Foreign Economic Policy, 1887–1934,” World Politics 35 (07 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. Calleo, German Problem Reconsidered, chap. 4.

50. Sunkel, with Paz, , El subdesarrollo latinoamericano y la teória del desarrollo, 4th ed. (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno de España, 1973), pp. 71 and 436ffGoogle Scholar.

51. Abraham, , Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

52. The principal exception is of course the hegemon itself, which for reasons already advanced may be expected to decline under stable hegemony and may actually be stimulated by instability–as was the U.K. after 1931. (I am grateful to Peter Gourevitch and Calum MacDonald for having called this instance to my attention.)

53. Gilpin himself, interestingly, draws back from the implications of his arguments for the present day, claiming that hegemonic war between a declining United States and a rising USSR is unlikely because of a series of fortunate coincidences (pp. 234–40).

54. On British attitudes see Carr, Edward Hallett, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp. 232–33Google Scholar.

55. Barry, Brian, “Review Article: Crisis, Choice, and Change,“ British Journal of Political Science, 7 (1977), pp. 99–113 and 217–53, at p. 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.