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The State and Strategies of International Adjustment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

G. John Ikenberry
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Abstract

All states are continuously in the process of adjusting to change in the political economy of international and national systems. Problems inherent in this adjustment process are a basic source of national behavior and international conflict. The heuristic model presented in this paper provides systematic explanations for the strategic choices that states make in the adjustment process. Through the specification of the range of strategic options and of the formal interests of states, new insights are gained concerning the articulation between national and international political economy. Empirical cases are drawn from the politics of energy adjustment in the 1970s.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , October 1986 , pp. 53 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1986

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References

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4 That is what Otto Hintze had in mind in his argument that state elites gain their institutional position and legitimacy from the permanent insecurity of sovereign nations in an international system. See Hintze, , “The State in Historical Perspective,” in Bendix, Reinhard, ed., State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

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21 Not all offensive international strategies seek to place national economics in a more efficient relationship with the international system. The New International Economic Order (N.I.E.O.), for example, seeks to place developing nations in a more stable and competitive relationship with the international system. In general, however, the programmatic ideas of the N.I.E.O. are antithetical to market and efficiency measures of that relationship.

22 The political costs of domestic defensive and offensive policies are not equal, of course. A defensive strategy is likely to have fewer immediate governance costs than an offensive one. But similar domestic offensive initiatives will have different costs in different countries. Because of national differences in the organization of industrial production and the political institutions that surround the state and the economy, domestic restructuring can proceed more smoothly and with less resistance in some countries than in others. These factors themselves have been explained in terms of long-term historic differences in the necessity of domestic change. See Katzenstein, Peter J., Small States in World Markets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. These variations in the flexibility and adaptability of domestic institutions do not allow for a strict specification of strategic preferences. A state with little domestic adapt-ability may seek an international adjustment strategy with more persistence and vigor, or it may move more quickly to accept a domestic defensive response. At this point the model reaches its heuristic limits, and a more historical case-by-case analysis becomes appropriate.

23 The notion that there is a “national preference frontier” for adjustment outcomes is less controversial than the attendant argument that the four strategies are fixed in relation to each other on that frontier, and that all states share that fixed preference function. In an alternative argument, the point would be that the four strategies may not embody uniform and fixed summations of efficiency and governance costs. Although the optimal strategy may still be offensive international adjustment, the other three strategies may vary in their relationships to each other along an indifference curve. Thus, even if structural constraints allowed the state to pursue any one of the remaining three strategies, it might not necessarily seek a defensive international strategy over the other two, or it might favor the offensive domestic strategy over the defensive domestic strategy. More contingent relations between the three strategies would make the model more complex by raising the differential costs of the various options to greater importance. Structure remains important at a more basic level. In this refined model, there may be no a priori way of ascertaining which of the three strategies would be preferred over the others without knowing more precisely the costs of governance that are unique to each country. The variables that move one strategy or another off the indifference curve are proximate national circumstances, such as the stability of governing coalitions, the strength of the bureaucracy, and so forth. In a sense, this alternative puts more refined and contingent variables into the rational constraints on states; my more simple model moves those variables to the level of structural constraints.

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26 Without a prior and independent specification of structures, the framework remains a model and not a theory. This type of heuristic model can effectively guide empirical investigation and generate substantial hypotheses. This is the approach used by North (fn. 7), chap. 3. The model cannot directly predict outcomes, however, and consequently falls short of a theory. On models and theories, see Snidal, Duncan, “The Game Theory of International Politics,” World Politics 38 (October 1985), 25–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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49 The variety of state initiatives suggests a further possibility. Because I have invoked a conception of the state as an actor making choices that maximize particular economic values and minimize political costs, it is possible to argue that states will pursue more than one strategy, embracing each in turn until the marginal costs of the policy equals the marginal returns. Thus, states will attempt to change domestic and international structures until the costs equal the benefits. They will also attempt to hold on to existing domestic and international structures until the costs equal the benefits.