Editor’s Note: this is an abbreviated version of a post that originally appeared on my personal blog.
How can international institutions foster cooperation given that they lack enforcement capability? One view, quite simply, is that they can’t. This view is shared by realists and many outside the academy. 
Many would argue this critique is unfair. It is too easy to jump from “can’t control rogue states” to “completely worthless” or “false promise” or what have you. Even states that view one another as friends sometimes fail to reap all the possible benefits of international cooperation due to coordination problems, collaboration problems, etc, and institutions may help such states leave a little less money lying on the ground. There’s also pretty strong evidence that UN peacekeeping works, particularly when it has the consent of all the parties involved. Sure, that’s an important caveat, but we shouldn’t trivialize the large number of lives that have likely been saved as a result of the UN’s efforts.
But let’s set those things aside. Is the best we can say about the UN that it helps those who want to be helped but is of no real consequence to the behavior of “rogue” states? I would argue that the answer is “sort of, but only if we adopt a fairly extreme definition of ‘rogue’.” But if we don’t define “rogue” states as those that do misbehave, but those who would like to, then the answer is almost certainly no, the UN does not just allow the good guys to do a little bit better on the margins. It actually changes the intentions of those we might otherwise see as bad guys.
The argument I develop formally in the full version of the post is relatively straightforward, though I think the details are easier to see once you work through the math. (At least, they were for me. YMMV.) Angry letters don’t themselves deter anyone. But they can serve as alarm bells. That is, international institutions do not need enforcement capability so long as they affect the likelihood of individual states taking punitive actions. Below, I analyze a model where they do so by providing new information. But another channel through which institutions like the UN can increase the likelihood of individual states like the US engaging in punitive action is through shoring up public support for such efforts.
How much does this matter? Clearly, some states are still willing to misbehave. North Korea and Iran have active nuclear programs, many states sponsor terrorist organizations, etc. What we don’t know is how many states would do those things in the absence of the UN. In the model I analyze over at my blog, some subset of states would pursue objectionable policies in a world without institutions like the UN but would not do so in a world with them. Sure, some states would never misbehave, and some will misbehave no matter what, but institutions in this model do more than simply allow states with good intentions to move closer to the Pareto frontier. They cause some states who would not otherwise do so to behave like model citizens of the international community.
Thanks for the post! I have question about a component of it. Is the assumption that I is always credible (that 1 will never engage after receiving a signal from I) a realistic one? I like the model but I wonder how its implications would change if we were to relax this assumption, if we were to allow for the possibility that I signals and is ignored. Right now the likelihood of I signalling plays a large part in red 2’s decision to pursue P or not; if I signals and is ignored, then an assessment of its credibility comes into question and its constraining effect might be smaller. That is, red P’s decision isn’t based on the payoffs and the risk of I sending a signal, but the payoffs, the risk of I sending a signal, and the quality of that signal if it is sent. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. After all, I think realistically the question for a lot of rogue states isn’t “will i be caught out if I pursue this policy” but also “if I pursue this policy and am caught out, will anyone care?”
Good question. I don’t think that assumption is realistic, no. But the basic thrust of the argument wouldn’t change if we relaxed it. You are right that the constraining effect would be smaller. But the conclusion would still be that some states who are currently behaving themselves would not be if not for the institutions we have.
I think you’re probably right that many states doubt that they’d get punished even if caught. That’s in part for reasons you suggest, but probably for others as well. In the model, 1 always wants to punish if 1 knows 2 is pursuing the policy. In the real world, it’s not always clear that 1 would want to do so even then. I could have accounted for this by allowing the payoff for engaging 2 when 2 is pursuing the policy to vary, instead of normalizing it to 1. But again, that would make the analysis more complicated without altering the fundamental conclusion that institutions might shrink the set of “rogue” states even if they lack enforcement mechanisms. And that’s all I was ultimately trying to prove.
Interesting post. It reminds me a lot of the more general cold war era arms control discussions where the logic behind arms control is that monitoring is more important than enforcement because states can reciprocate defection reasonably easily. In this case, the institution solves the monitoring problem, among a few other twists.
Gilligan, M. J. (2006). Is enforcement necessary for effectiveness? has a fun paper approaching a similar problem, which is why the ICC can be effective even though it has no enforcement powers. The general problem in part is the same because it tackles how to get agents to comply who are the least likely to do so (e.g., dictators).
Thanks, Eric. The logic is pretty much the same as that of the arms control arguments to which you refer.
I’ve been meaning to read the Gilligan piece. High time I do so.
It is telling that you cite Mearsheimer for the frankly bizarre assertion that international institutions can’t foster cooperation. Nobody thinks this. Stop pretending that this is a viable starting position. There is so much work on collective action (theory and practice), in IR, political science, and other disciplines, that demonstrates that institutions facilitate cooperation, even with high proportions of “rogues”, and the conditions under which it is more likely. A political scientist, Elinor Ostrom, even won the pseudo-Nobel for Economics for precisely this sort of work. Citing Mearsheimer is not an excuse for ignoring the reams of scholarship on this sort of topic.