Robert Keohane is a professor emeritus of international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Administration and International Affairs. He is the author of numerous books, including “After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy.” Professor Keohane is credited by many for having helped transform the study of international relations with his theory of neoliberal institutionalism among others.
Harvard Political Review: For years, the doctrine of political realism, which relates to the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes among others, was used to explain international politics. Discord between states was explained by self-interest and the struggle for power: conflict was to be expected. You present an alternative story. Could you outline your thesis?
Robert Keohane: The notion of political realism as associated with Machiavelli and Hobbes is a notion which emphasizes the nature of politics as being particularly concerned with the use of force and with not being able to trust people in a political situation. It’s certainly a correct analysis of Italy in the 16th century and England in the Civil War, as well as world politics in 1914 and in 1942. But you have to realize that any political analysis is contextual. There is no political analysis that is generally a true fact about the world or of human nature. We’re talking about human societies, and they vary a lot.
My argument is not that one view of politics is eternally true. The question is: under what conditions? Although self-interest is the guiding principle and power is crucially important, my own view is that under certain conditions, which pertained to the years between 1946 and 2016, the sources of power were not these things in most kinds of activities, and were not militarily enforced. The ability to act in concert was important and required some sort of organization or international institution which could provide information and facilitate cooperation in order to achieve objectives. It’s not a denial of self-interest, which has been a part of all of my work. We’re not talking about the degree of reasonable trust in reciprocity.
HPR: In your book “After Hegemony,” you describe the decline of U.S. hegemony in international decision-making since the 1970s. What were the reasons for this? Can we expect the trend to continue?
RK: The two parts of that book that stand up best are the discussion of oil, trade, and money in the 1970s and 1980s, and the basic theory that tries to explain why we have international institutions. If I was to rewrite the book, I would retitle it. It certainly was not the case that U.S. hegemony declined continuously from the time that book was written. It revived partly because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and partly because of the unexpected dynamism of the American economy. I don’t think that was the main theme of the book, and I think it was a mistake to make that as part of the title. I would change it if I were to do it again.
HPR: The United States was an advocate of international organizations following World War II. But increasingly, the U.S. is unwilling to support the international institutions it helped create. Recently, President Trump suspended U.S. funding to the World Health Organization. Is this the politics of one presidential administration or something more profound?
RK: A general principle is that support and political influence in an organization will be correlated. If a country has lots of influence within an organization, they will support it. If they don’t have much influence, they’re likely to be quite critical of it. As you said, the U.S. generated almost all the multilateral institutions that appeared after World War II. Yet, it has become less committed to international institutions largely because it has less control over them.
This shift can be explained in at least three phases before we come to President Trump. In the first phase, the U.S. and Europe dominated the system. The U.S. did so in its own interest – it supported international institutions because it was the dominant actor and because those institutions behaved according to the American principles of liberal, open capitalism, which was the case pretty continuously until the mid-1970s. In the second phase there was a bifurcation, and because the U.N. was dominated by developing countries with the one-state-one-vote system, the U.S. became less enthusiastic. In the mid-1970s, even Daniel P. Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador under Nixon and a liberal Democrat, was bitterly critical of the domination of the developing countries. The U.S. was already leery about organizations like UNESCO from the Carter administration, while it supported organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund because it had a large share in them. The third phase is from Reagan’s time on, but especially in the 1990s when the Europeans were willing to set up international organizations on their own, such as the International Criminal Court, which the U.S. never joined. The Europeans went ahead with proposals that they knew the U.S. wouldn’t accept, which culminated in the Kyoto debacle, when the Clinton administration agreed to an arrangement at Kyoto that they should have known the U.S. Congress would never ratify. All of a sudden, the Europeans were willing to set up an international organization or agreement themselves even if the U.S. wouldn’t agree.
HPR: The European Union managed to outlast the financial meltdown of 2008 and the refugee crisis, but The Guardian has suggested that “Coronavirus could be the final straw.” What are your thoughts on the durability of the EU?
RK: Yogi Berra once said, “Never make predictions, especially about the future. They’re usually wrong.” What we can say, however, is that the EU has been a remarkable success. There is no international organization in world history that has been as strong and as impactful as the EU, even when very few political scientists in 1948 thought it was going to happen. The EU operated best in easy times when Europe was growing especially fast and when it was small.
But there were two big changes. The EU expanded to much poorer countries – many of them had much less of a history of democracy and were more prone to authoritarian rulers taking over, especially Hungary and Poland. Then Europe hit the stress of the financial crisis, which they handled very badly. This accentuated the big stress in the EU between the richer and the poorer countries. To maintain a strong EU in a severe economic crisis, you need a kind of solidarity. Money needs to be transferred from the wealthy parts of the Union to the poorer parts. The U.S. has a national legislature and a national tax system that does that automatically. It transfers money every year from wealthy areas like California to poorer areas like Alabama. In Europe, a decision needs to be made by Germany to send money to Italy, while the German electorate might not want to send its money elsewhere – it doesn’t feel that solidarity. The structural problem is that the EU doesn’t have a physical union. Of course, that’s what the stronger advocates of a stronger Europe want, like Macron, and they’re right. If they don’t have a physical union, countries will always have these pressures to pull away. Poorer countries will demand more capital, and richer countries will refuse to pay.
HPR: In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to improve trade and bolster economic growth by connecting Asia with Africa and Europe along land and maritime corridors. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that China is engaged in a process of global expansion. In your work, you mention Henry Luce’s “American Century.” Might the 21st century be remembered more by the dominance of another, more powerful nation than the U.S., like China?
RK: China is becoming increasingly important in world politics; that’s a structural fact. When you have the largest population in the world and your average GDP growth rate is 10% per year for 30 years, you become more powerful. What the Chinese do with this power is another question. They can use their power to have more influence: to secure a naval base or a trade concession for example. But if they overuse their power, they’re in danger of generating a backlash because they still exist in a world of sovereign states. So far, the Chinese have overplayed their hand. They have acted in a way that appears threatening, not just to the U.S., but to neighbors like Vietnam and India, and they’re in danger of generating a coalition against themselves.
It takes a certain amount of subtlety to be a great power successfully. You have to generate influence in a way that maintains or forges alliances with elites and other countries who find that their interests are fostered by supporting your interests. The U.S. was very good at this in the years after World War II, and the Soviets were terrible at it. The Chinese are doing very well at the structural component, but they’re not doing well with what my colleague, Professor Joseph Nye, would call “soft power.”
HPR: The influence of multinational corporations on our daily lives grows each day. Unlike other political scientists, you have considered multinational corporations as a factor in your study of international relations. Do you think that the structure of international organizations will have to shift to include these new powers?
RK: I wouldn’t assume that the multinational corporation is still on the rise. Twenty years ago, multinational corporations were running high, and they were accommodated by international organizations and public and private partnerships.
I think the big question concerns what’s going to happen to globalization in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis: whether the crisis and increasing populism and nationalism is going to lead countries to shrink their supply chains to give more preference to goods made at home in order to make sure they’re not dependent on other countries. Globalization means that you’re more dependent on factors outside of your control. Countries are willing to commit to globalization if they’re pretty confident that they’re not going to be at war and that they can trust other states to operate fairly. That’s been the secret of globalization in Western Europe, Japan, East Asia – not including China – and North America over the past 70 years. If a state doesn’t have assurance that force won’t be used, then it will act in a realist way. The U.S. was pretty confident until five or six years ago and became less confident even before President Trump came to power.
HPR: In “After Hegemony,” you state: “The pursuit of flexibility can be self-defeating: like Ulysses, it may be better, on occasion, to have oneself tied to the mast.” What do you mean by this?
RK: The point about tying yourself to the mast is that if you want other states to cooperate with you and to commit to your policies, you better commit in some ways to those states or to the institutional structures that they can trust. An example of this is NATO, which President Trump doesn’t like. NATO was a success for many years because the U.S. tied itself to the mast – it was committed to European defense and, in response, the Europeans behaved in a way that was favorable to the U.S.
HPR: The institutional design of the United Nations Security Council gives its five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. – the power to veto decisions, which often leads to inaction on really important issues, and sometimes costs lives. Is this a flaw in the Security Council’s institutional design?
RK: The Security Council is an example of the fact that institutions that don’t have flexibility in their structure tend to become obsolete. The Security Council is unique because it was established in 1945, and for political reasons, those five countries have the veto. There were various attempts at reform, but they never had a chance because there was no provision for changing who the permanent members were. In one sense, it’s an obstinate institution. It doesn’t have large countries like India, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, and it has wavered in importance depending on the extent to which it has aligned with the power structures of the world. It was most effective in the 1990s when the U.S. dominated – when Russia was a quasi-U.S. supporter – and China was too weak to make any objection. But before that, it wasn’t very effective because the Soviets and the West vetoed each other’s resolutions. Now that there’s a much greater divide between Security Council members, it will be less effective.
HPR: What do you see as the biggest developments in international relations that my generation will have to contend with?
RK: One issue is climate change. You have to face the existential problem of climate change, and if it’s not solved, your generation is going to have a very difficult time, even when those of us who are older have created the problem and won’t bear the cost. The second, in my view, is that the internal structures of inequality in many countries and especially in the U.S. are unsustainable. If you have an unsustainable domestic structure of inequality, you wind up with the inability to act internationally because a country is so divided. That was true of France in the 1930s – a major reason why it fell apart when the Germans attacked – and it is becoming true of the U.S. now. And third, you may have to deal with other ills of globalization, like the pandemic. You have to deal with the trade-off between greater mobility on one hand and the consequences of globalization that are bad for the immobile part of the population on the other. Climate change, inequality, and the stresses of globalization – you’re going to have to deal with all three of those.
This piece initially ran under the title “Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy: Interview with Professor Robert Keohane.”
Image Credit: Sameer Khan/FotoBuddy
