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Trusting relationships in international politics: No need to hedge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2014

Abstract

How can trusting relationships be identified in international politics? The recent wave of scholarship on trust in International Relations answers this question by looking for one or the combination of three indicators – the incidence of cooperation; discourses expressing trust; or the calculated acceptance of vulnerability. These methods are inadequate both theoretically and empirically. Distinguishing between the concepts of trust and confidence, we instead propose an approach that focuses on the actors' hedging strategies. We argue that actors either declining to adopt or removing hedging strategies is a better indicator of a trusting relationship than the alternatives. We demonstrate the strength of our approach by showing how the existing approaches would suggest the US-Soviet relationship to be trusting when it was not so. In contrast, the US-Japanese alliance relationship allows us to show how we can identify a developing trusting relationship.

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Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

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References

1 Helena Smith and Chris McGreal, ‘Russian Spy Ring’, The Guardian (1 July 2010).

2 Larson, Deborah Welch, Anatomy of Mistrust: U.S.-Soviet Relations During the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Hoffman, Aaron M., ‘A Conceptualization of Trust in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 55:1 (2002)Google Scholar; Kydd, Andrew H., Trust and Mistrust in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Booth, Ken and Wheeler, Nicholas J., The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation, and Trust in World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar; Ruzicka, Jan and Wheeler, Nicholas J., ‘The Puzzle of Trusting Relationships in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’, International Affairs, 86:1 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rathbun, Brian C., ‘Before Hegemony: Generalized Trust and the Creation and Design of International Security Organizations’, International Organization, 65:2 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Our article takes states as the dominant units of analysis. This allows us to engage directly with the scepticism about the possibility of achieving trusting relationships under the conditions of international anarchy. Importantly, the analytical choice of the state level also enables us to study long-term processes, which would not be possible if the relevant units of analysis were individual leaders.

4 For instance, these questions have arisen in security community literature, see Adler, Emanuel and Barnett, Michael, ‘A Framework for the Study of Security Communities’, in Adler, Emanuel and Barnett, Michael (eds), Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 45–6Google Scholar.

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6 We are not the first to differentiate between trust and confidence. Niklas Luhmann similarity differentiated between confidence and trust, adding a third category that he called familiarity, although he proceeds to differentiate the three concepts in a way dissimilar to us. See Luhmann, Niklas, ‘Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives’, Gambetta, Diego (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 97100Google Scholar.

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10 For an empirical example of how trust might function to stabilise an international agreement, see Ruzicka and Wheeler, The Puzzle of Trusting Relationships. This argument is also supported by the research of Aaron Hoffman and Brian Rathbun, see Hoffman, Aaron M., Building Trust: Overcoming Suspicion in International Conflict (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Rathbun, Trust in International Cooperation.

11 For instance, Hoffman has shown that ‘actors prefer trusting relationships to nontrusting forms of cooperation because the latter require more-extensive and, therefore, more-expensive monitoring devices’. Hoffman, Building Trust, p. 289.

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19 Thus, for example, Booth and Wheeler write: ‘Gorbachev later commented: “We had reached a new level of trust in our relations”. This growth in confidence was mutual.’ Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma, p. 152, emphasis added. The interchangeability between trust and confidence also occurs in some non-International Relations scholarship, see Morgan, Robert M. and Hunt, Shelby D., ‘The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing’, The Journal of Marketing, 58:3 (1994), p. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levi and Stoker, Political Trust, p. 482.

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22 Ibid., p. 4.

23 Ibid.

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42 This follows directly from our definition of trust as the ideational structure, which cognitively reduces risk. Security communities are an empirical demonstration of this claim. The probability of an armed conflict between the United States and Canada might be miniscule but the severity would be fatal, thus creating an obvious risk that Canadian decision-makers must be at least aware of. But precisely because the two countries are in a trusting relationship, this risk is not only discounted but also thought of as non-existent.

43 This proposition does not depend on an assertion of a causal relationship leading from hedging to a trusting relationship, which might be considered tautological.

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49 This claim is also made by Hoffman, who uses it to demonstrate how trust-as-confidence ‘admits an example it should not’. Hoffman, A Conceptualization of Trust, p. 381.

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