This article introduces a mode of social action and interaction that has so far been largely overlooked in the U.S.-dominated international relations debate between rational choice and social constructivism that focuses mainly on the differences between instrumental rationality and norm-guided behavior. Drawing on insights from a theoretical debate within the Germanspeaking international relations community, I suggest that actors have a third mode of social action at their disposal: arguing and deliberating about the validity claims inherent in any communicative statement about identities, interests, and the state of the world. Arguing and truth-seeking behavior presuppose that actors no longer hold fixed interests during their communicative interaction but are open to persuasion, challenges, and counterchallenges geared toward reaching a reasoned consensus. The preconditions for argumentative rationality, particularly a “common lifeworld” and the mutual recognition of speakers as equals in a nonhierarchical relationship, are more common in international relations than is usually assumed. Arguing processes are more likely to occur the more actors are uncertain about their interests and even identities, the less they know about the situation in which they find themselves and the underlying “rules of the game,” and the more apparently irreconcilable differences prevent them from reaching an optimal rather than a merely satisfactory solution for a widely perceived problem (“problem solving”). Moreover, arguing is likely to increase the influence of the materially less powerful, be it small states or nonstate actors such as INGOs. I illustrate these claims empirically with two plausibility probes. The first concerns the East–West talks leading to a negotiated settlement of the Cold War in Europe and German unification within NATO. The second case focuses on the implementation of international human rights norms into domestic practices of Third World states.

The puzzle of NATO's persistence is best addressed as part of a larger inquiry into institutional change. Institutions persist because they are costly to create and less costly to maintain, but this institutionalist argument is incomplete. Whether institutions adapt to change depends on whether their norms, rules, and procedures are specific or general assets and on whether the asset mix matches the kinds of security problems faced by their members. Assets specific to coping with external threats will not be useful for coping with problems of instability and mistrust, so alliances with only the former will disappear when threats disappear. Alliances that have specific institutional assets for dealing with instability and mistrust and general institutional assets will be adaptable to environments that lack threats. I assess these hypotheses in a test case of NATO's institutional assets during and after the Cold War.

I apply nominate scaling to analyze a database of Cold War and post–Cold War roll call votes in the United Nations General Assembly. I investigate the dimensionality and stability of global conflict as well as the substantive content of the voting alignments that have replaced the Cold War East-West dimension. I find that post–Cold War conflict in the UN General Assembly is mostly one-dimensional. This single dimension positions countries on a continuum that runs from a group of Western countries at one extreme to a “counterhegemonic” bloc of countries that frequently clashes with the West, and the United States in particular. Levels of democracy and wealth are important independent determinants of the voting behavior of states. The positions of countries along the single dimension are remarkably stable across time, issue area, and issue importance. Except for the Eastern European countries switching sides, they are very similar to the positions on the Cold War East-West dimension. Contrary to expectations, post–Cold War conflict shows little resemblance to Cold War North-South conflict.

A central research question in international political economy concerns the influence of financial markets on government policy outcomes. To what extent does international capital mobility limit government policy choices? I evaluate the relationship between international financial markets and government policy outcomes, with a focus on the government bond market in developed democracies. Evidence includes interviews with financial market participants and a cross-sectional time-series analysis of the determinants of interest rates. This evaluation suggests that governments of developed democracies face strong but narrowly defined financial market pressures. Financial market participants are concerned with a few macroeconomic policy indicators, including inflation rates and government deficit/GDP ratios, but not with micropolicy indicators, such as the distribution of government spending across functional categories. In these areas, governments retain policymaking autonomy. I conclude by exploring the role of financial market influences within domestic politics and offering suggestions for further research.

Mercenary armies went out of style in the nineteenth century; it became common sense that armies should be staffed with citizens. I argue that even though realist explanations focusing on the fighting prowess of citizen armies and sociological explanations focusing on the fit between citizen armies and prevailing ideas can rationalize this change, they cannot explain it. I examine, instead, the politics behind the new reliance on citizen armies and argue that material and ideational turmoil provided important antecedent conditions for change. Beyond this, individual states were more likely to move toward citizen armies when they had been defeated militarily and when the ruling coalition was split or indifferent about the reforms tied to citizen armies. Finally, the apparent success of citizen armies in France and then Prussia made do mestic conditions for reform easier to obtain in other countries, reinforcing the likelihood that the solution would be replicated. I conclude that the interaction between domestic politics and path dependency provides a promising source of hypotheses for explaining the conditions under which new ways of war emerge and spread.

Most formal international human rights regimes establish international committees and courts that hold governments accountable to their own citizens for purely internal activities. Why would governments establish arrangements so invasive of domestic sovereignty? Two views dominate the literature. “Realist” theories assert that the most powerful democracies coerce or entice weaker countries to accept norms; “ideational” theories maintain that transnational processes of diffusion and persuasion socialize less-democratic governments to accept norms. Drawing on theories of rational delegation, I propose and test a third “republican liberal” view: Governments delegate self-interestedly to combat future threats to domestic democratic governance. Thus it is not mature and powerful democracies, but new and less-established democracies that will most strongly favor mandatory and enforceable human rights obligations. I test this proposition in the case of the European Convention on Human Rights—the most successful system of formal international human rights guarantees in the world today. The historical record of its founding—national positions, negotiating tactics, and confidential deliberations—confirms the republican liberal explanation. My claim that governments will sacrifice sovereignty to international regimes in order to dampen domestic political uncertainty and “lock in” more credible policies is then generalized theoretically and applied to other human rights regimes, coordination of conservative reaction, and international trade and monetary policy.

In many issue-areas, the world is witnessing a move to law. As the century turned, governments and individuals faced the following international legal actions. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain's ban on homosexuals in the armed forces violates the right to privacy, contravening Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia indicted Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic during a NATO bombing campaign to force Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo. Milosevic remains in place in Belgrade, but Austrian police, bearing a secret indictment from the International Criminal Tribunal, arrested a Bosnian Serb general who was attending a conference in Vienna. In economic affairs the World Trade Organization (WTO) Appellate Body found in favor of the United States and against the European Union (EU) regarding European discrimination against certain Latin American banana exporters. A U.S. district court upheld the constitutionality of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) against claims that its dispute-resolution provisions violated U. S. sovereignty. In a notable environmental judgment, the new Law of the Sea Tribunal ordered the Japanese to cease all fishing for southern bluefin tuna for the rest of the year.

Scholars and policymakers generally assume that multilateral cooperation is a necessary condition for economic sanctions to be of any use. However, previous statistical tests of this assumption have shown that sanctions are more successful with lower levels of cooperation. This puzzle calls into question established theories of economic statecraft as well as theories of international cooperation. In this article I test possible explanations for the ineffectiveness of multilateral cooperation on sanctions events using James Fearon's (1998) breakdown of cooperation into bargaining and enforcement phases as a framework for discussion The empirical results show that when multilateral economic sanctions fail, their failure is due to enforcement, not bargaining problems Without the support of an international organization, cooperating states backslide from promises of cooperation Backsliding occurs because of domestic political pressures and uncertainty about the intentions of the other sanctioning countries; backsliding causes an initial burst of cooperative behavior to decay over time. Without institutional support, cooperation is worse than useless—it is counterproductive. This result suggests that international cooperation is a more fragile equilibrium than previously thought but undercuts realist arguments that international organizations are unimportant.

One of the most important puzzles of twentieth-century international relations is why the American conception of security vis-à-vis the European Powers shifted from unilateralism to internationalism after World War II but not after World War I. In this article I document that this shift was measurably one of collective ideas and explain the transformation. Scholarship on the sea change in American global thinking has been hampered by the lack of attention to the broader issues of when and why collective ideas change. To address this gap I offer a general framework to account for ideational change: I highlight the interaction between collective ideas and events that allows individuals and societies to overcome barriers to ideational change in some circumstances but not others. This argument clarifies the otherwise puzzling development of American ideas and offers a template for understanding change in other areas.

The relationship between foreign trade and political conflict has been a persistent source of controversy among scholars of international relations. Existing empirical studies of this topic have focused on the effects of trade flows on conflict, but they have largely ignored the institutional context in which trade is conducted. In this article we present some initial quantitative results pertaining to the influence on military disputes of preferential trading arrangements (PTAs), a broad class of commercial institutions that includes free trade areas, common markets, and customs unions. We argue that parties to the same PTA are less prone to disputes than other states and that hostilities between PTA members are less likely to occur as trade flows rise between them. Moreover, we maintain that heightened commerce is more likely to inhibit conflict between states that belong to the same preferential grouping than between states that do not. Our results accord with this argument. Based on an analysis of the period since World War II, we find that trade flows have relatively little effect on the likelihood of disputes between states that do not participate in the same PTA. Within PTAs, however, there is a strong, inverse relationship between commerce and conflict. Parties to such an arrangement are less likely to engage in hostilities than other states, and the likelihood of a military dispute dips markedly as trade increases between them.

We develop an empirically based conception of international legalization to show how law and politics are intertwined across a wide range of institutional forms and to frame the analytic and empirical articles that follow in this volume. International legalization is a form of institutionalization characterized by three dimensions: obligation, precision, and delegation. Obligation means that states are legally bound by rules or commitments and therefore subject to the general rules and procedures of international law. Precision means that the rules are definite, unambiguously defining the conduct they require, authorize, or proscribe. Delegation grants authority to third parties for the implementation of rules, including their interpretation and application, dispute settlement, and (possibly) further rule making. These dimensions are conceptually independent, and each is a matter of degree and gradation. Their various combinations produce a remarkable variety of international legalization. We illustrate a continuum ranging from “hard” legalization (characteristically associated with domestic legal systems) through various forms of “soft” legalization to situations where law is largely absent. Most international legalization lies between the extremes, where actors combine and invoke varying degrees of obligation, precision, and delegation to create subtle blends of politics and law.

Using the infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma game as a modeling platform, we examine how domestic political institutions affect the ability of nations to trust and cooperate with each other. We propose a strategy, the agent-specific grim trigger, in which national leaders direct punishments for past defections at the leader of the nation responsible rather than at the nation itself. Leaders refuse to cooperate with those leaders who have cheated them in the past. However, by being prepared to cooperate with new leaders, cooperation can be restored. The focus of punishment on specific agents of the people (leaders), rather than the nation itself, means that citizens want to remove leaders who defect. Hence, domestically accountable leaders pay audience costs for failing to cooperate. These costs make accountable leaders more trustworthy and foster greater cooperation. In contrast, when replacing leaders is difficult, cooperation is less robust; and once cooperation falters, agent-specific punishment policies often lead to prolonged hostilities and periods of acrimonious relations between states.

Recent models of speculative currency crises contend that market expectations of policy behavior can trigger a speculative attack. We argue that political processes and partisan objectives inform expectations about the government's commitment to the exchange rate. First, market actors anticipate periods when the partisan identity of a government may change through an election or a cabinet collapse. Second, party labels provide information to currency traders about the policy objectives of a potential government. Consequently, we contend that the probability of a speculative attack will be higher when markets expect the cabinet to end and when the cabinet dissolution is likely to produce a leftward shift in policy. A discrete timesurvival model is used to estimate the probability that a cabinet will dissolve in any given month for sixteen parliamentary democracies from 1970 to 1995. The predicted values are then used as a proxy for market expectations in a model of speculative currency crises.

The member states of the European Union (EU) have transferred their sovereignty over trade policymaking to the supranational level. When entering into trade negotiations with third countries, they must first reach a common bargaining position among themselves and later defend that position with a “single voice” at the international table. How do the institutional rules, through which the fifteen different voices are aggregated into a single one, affect international outcomes? Differentiating between a “conservative” and a “reformist” negotiating context, I argue that voting rules and negotiating competence in the EU determine both the probability that the negotiating parties conclude an international agreement and the substantive outcome of the negotiations. The recent EU–U.S. trade negotiations on agriculture, public procurement, and open skies are all evidence that, for a given distribution of preferences, internal EU institutional mechanisms affect the outcomes of international trade agreements.

We examine why international actors—including states, firms, and activists—seek different types of legalized arrangements to solve political and substantive problems. We show how particular forms of legalization provide superior institutional solutions in different circumstances. We begin by examining the baseline advantages of “hard” legalization (that is, precise, legally binding obligations with appropriate third-party delegation). We emphasize, however, that actors often prefer softer forms of legalization (that is, various combinations of reduced precision, less stringent obligation, and weaker delegation). Soft legalization has a number of significant advantages, including that it is easier to achieve, provides strategies for dealing with uncertainty, infringes less on sovereignty, and facilitates compromise among differentiated actors.

Although our approach is largely interest-based, we explicitly incorporate the normative elements that are central in law and in recent international relations theorizing. We also consider the important role of nonstate actors who, along with states, are central participants in contemporary international legalization. We illustrate the advantages of various forms of international legal arrangements with examples drawn from articles in this special issue and elsewhere.

Many scholars have argued that mistrust can prevent cooperation. These arguments often fail to adequately address the possibility that states can take steps to reassure each other, build trust, and thereby avoid conflict. I present a rational choice theory of reassurance focusing on costly signals and identify the conditions under which players can use costly signals to reassure the other side. The central result is that reassurance will be possible between trustworthy players in equilibrium if trustworthy actors are more willing to take risks to attain mutual cooperation than untrustworthy actors. I discuss the implications of the model in the context of the reassurance strategies pursued by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War.

Scholars assert that divided government impedes the liberalization of U.S. trade policy. They claim that presidents favor freer trade and will use the negotiating authority Congress delegates to them to reach agreements lowering trade barriers. Since presidents gain more support from their congressional co-partisans, less liberalization ensues under divided government. This theory rests on the premise that party is unrelated to congressional trade policy preferences beyond legislators' tendencies to support their presidential co-partisans. Yet before 1970 congressional Democrats were relatively free trading regardless of the president's party affiliation. Since then, the same has been true of Republicans. Divided government facilitates the trade policies of presidents from the protectionist party since they win more support from their “opposition” in this area. Divided government does impede the efforts of presidents from the free-trading party to liberalize. I conclude that divided government has no consistent effect on trade policy outcomes.

Dispute settlement mechanisms in international trade vary dramatically from one agreement to another. Some mechanisms are highly legalistic, with standing tribunals that resemble national courts in their powers and procedures. Others are diplomatic, requiring only that the disputing countries make a good-faith effort to resolve their differences through consultations. In this article I seek to account for the tremendous variation in institutional design across a set of more than sixty post-1957 regional trade pacts. In contrast to accounts that emphasize the transaction costs of collective action or the functional requirements of deep integration, I find that the level of legalism in each agreement is strongly related to the level of economic asymmetry, in interaction with the proposed depth of liberalization, among member countries.

We identify two ideal types of international third-party dispute resolution: interstate and transnational. Under interstate dispute resolution, states closely control selection of, access to, and compliance with international courts and tribunals. Under transnational dispute resolution, by contrast, individuals and nongovernmental entities have significant influence over selection, access, and implementation. This distinction helps to explain the politics of international legalization—in particular, the initiation of cases, the tendency of courts to challenge national governments, the extent of compliance with judgments, and the long-term evolution of norms within legalized international regimes. By reducing the transaction costs of setting the process in motion and establishing new constituencies, transnational dispute resolution is more likely than interstate dispute resolution to generate a large number of cases. The types of cases brought under transnational dispute resolution lead more readily to challenges of state actions by international courts. Transnational dispute resolution tends to be associated with greater compliance with international legal judgments, particularly when autonomous domestic institutions such as the judiciary mediate between individuals and the international institutions. Overall, transnational dispute resolution enhances the prospects for long-term deepening and widening of international legalization.