While many herald globalization—the increasing interconnectedness of national economies—to be associated with rising standards of living across the globe, others fear its effects on sustainability. Antiglobalization forces and environmentalists view these developments as a threat to the welfare of future generations because of profligate and excessive current consumption. This study is the first to estimate the effects of dependence on trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and an index of economic freedom on the World Bank's measure of sustainability (the genuine savings rate), which measures the rate at which investment in the total stock of manufactured, human, and natural capital exceeds its depreciation. Contrary to pessimists' fears, our indicators of economic openness show positive effects on sustainability, results that are robust to sample size, testing procedure, and several alternative specifications. The results support those who suggest that distorted economies tend to be both inefficient and damaging to future generations. If increasing trade, FDI, and economic freedom are hallmarks of globalization, then worries about its effects on future well-being are misplaced.Equal authorship. We are grateful to Erich Weede, Rick Auty, Simon Dietz, Paul Hensel, Jonathan Moses, Ragnar Torvik, Jostein Vik, Paivi Lujala, two reviewers, and the editor for comments and suggestions. The anonymous reviewers were extraordinarily constructive. Any remaining errors are entirely our fault. The data are available at 〈http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/default.htm〉.

An analysis of the economic adjustment policies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan during the 1970s and 1980s shows that these East Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs), which faced common problems in sustaining their recent industrial growth, responded to the challenge with industrial adjustment strategies that differed in their degree of intensity of state involvement and emphasis on national control. To explain this divergence in adjustment strategies, the article explores the variations in the national political structures of the four NICs and focuses particularly on three aspects of state structure: the organization of the economic bureaucracy, the institutional links between the state and private sector, and the larger state-society relations. The article demonstrates the usefulness of moving beyond the generalizations of the “developmental state” view by carefully disaggregating these aspects of state structure and by exploring the ordering logic that gives coherence to them.

This paper examines the experience of developing countries in the three major regional financial institutions, the Inter-American, Asian, and African Development Banks. In the Inter-American Development Bank, members from developing countries have secured both influence and resources; in the Asian Development Bank they have secured resources but little influence; in the African Development Bank they have influence but limited resources. This variation can be explained by the different issue area power structures within which the banks function. The Inter-American Development Bank has functioned within a hegemonic structure. The dominant power, the United States, pursued long-term political objectives and accepted considerable autonomy for developing countries within the Bank. The Asian Development Bank has functioned within a bipolar structure with Japan playing an increasingly important role. As a normal power, Japan has pursued tangible economic interests and has constrained the behavior of the Asian Development Bank. Until the late 1970s the African Development Bank functioned in a multipolar structure that largely excluded nonregional countries. This exclusion made it impossible to generate substantial resources. Experience in the regional development banks suggests that a hegemonic structure can offer weaker states both resources and influence provided that the milieu goals of the dominant power are not violated.

A modified interest-group model links movements in tariffs to changes in the level of economic activity within nations. This model is introduced and tested for tariff behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries in three nations: the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Empirical analysis lends strong support to the model's central thesis, that tariffs are sensitive to movements within a business cycle. Tariff changes occurring in the three nations, with the exception of British tariff increases, generally conform to the expectations of the model. Furthermore, business-cycle sensitivity provides an explanation of the behavior of tariffs superior to two prominent alternatives, those based on ideology and on hegemonic stability.

Four political models (the international system, rational domestic economic policy, intragovemmental politics, and interest group influence) may explain the cross-national structure of average nominal levels of tariffs on manufactures. Using available data measuring or approximating the explanatory variables for the time periods 1902 and 1971, selected hypotheses were tested in regression equations. The 1971 tariff levels are best predicted by rational economic policy variables while for 1902, international power variables provide the best predictions of the tariff. In general, the causal forces influencing the cross-national pattern of tariff levels appear to have shifted in the 20th century from those indicating international power to those measuring domestic politico-economic development. These results provide evidence relevant to some of the general propositions about size and development suggested by the contemporary political economy literature. They also lend support to those who argue that a rising level of international interdependence has resulted in long-term changes in the pattern of influences on national public policies.

Nationalization of the Zairian and Zambian copper industries failed to deliver the hoped for benefits and pushed some still further beyond reach. It did so because nationalization entailed the loss of insulation, that is, the wide range of unperceived risk management and custodial functions fulfilled by the multinational mining corporations. Without this insulation these two governments, their copper industries, and their citizens' welfare all suffered. Looking beyond Zaire and Zambia, it appears that the loss of insulation has negative effects in all cases of mining industry nationalization. The size of the costs are mitigated by the strength of the nationalizer's political system.

The international monetary system—the rules and conventions that govern financial relations between countries—is an important component of international relations. When monetary relations go well, other relations have a better chance of going well; when they go badly, other areas are likely to suffer too. Monetary relations have a pervasive influence on both domestic and international economic developments, and history is strewn with examples of monetary failure leading subsequently to economic and political upheaval. Recent years have seen considerable turmoil in international monetary relations, and a marked deterioration in relations between Europe, Japan, and America. Ideally, monetary relations should be inconspicuous, part of the background in a well-functioning system, taken for granted. Once they become visible and uncertain, something is wrong.

This article evaluates different theories of hierarchy in international relations through a case study of the treaty system that the British constructed in the early nineteenth century in an effort to abolish the slave trade. The treaty system was extraordinarily wide-ranging: it embraced European maritime powers, new republics in the Americas, Muslim rulers in northern and eastern Africa, and “Native Chiefs” on the western coast of Africa. It therefore allows for a comparative analysis of the various types of treaty that the British made, depending on the identity of their contracting partners. The article argues that a broadly constructivist approach provides the best explanation of why these variations emerged. Although British treaty-making was influenced by the relative strength or weakness of the states with which they were dealing, the decisive factor that shaped the treaty system was a new legal doctrine that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, which combined a positivist theory of the importance of treaties as a source of international law with a distinction between the “family of civilized nations” and “barbarous peoples.”Some of the arguments in this article were presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago, and I am grateful to members of the Political Science Department there for several valuable constructive criticisms. I would also like to thank Duncan Bell, Molly Cochran, Steve Hopgood, Andy Hurrell, Katja Weber, and the journal's two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article.

Compared with Japan, no other industrialized country has so adamantly denied foreign investors direct access to its domestic markets. Japan continued to deny such market access until domestic constituencies finally championed foreign demands and successfully pressured a reluctant state for concessions. The initiative for these concessions came neither from Japan's principal government negotiators in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) nor from public policymakers in America. Rather, it came from American and other multinational corporations (MNCs) seeking to exploit imperfect markets for the technology and related assets which they alone controlled and which a few Japanese oligopolists demanded. These local oligopolists served as manipulative intermediaries between MNCs and the nationstate and in that position determined both the timing and the substance of their country's long march toward capital liberalization. Between the legislation of capital controls in 1950 and the de jure elimination of those controls in 1980, what began as an extension of limited concessions to individual MNCs, eventually aided by small regulatory loopholes, gradually encompassed all foreigners supplying broad product groups. During the intervening thirty years, the MNCs examined in this article— including Coca-Cola, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the “big three” U.S. automakers —finally gained limited access to the Japanese market. For them, the formal liberalizations of the late 1960s and early 1970s proved significant, but not always decisive, as Japanese oligopolists moved both to replace public regulations with private restrictions and to mesh their ongoing political influence domestically with their emerging economic power internationally. Thus, de facto liberalization proceeded slowly and unevenly, at least through 1980, and foreign direct investment in Japan continued to languish. What capital liberalization did occur had little to do with the pressures exerted on MITI and the Japanese state by the U.S. government and the international organizations that America then controlled. Rather, American diplomacy proved successful in forcing concessions from Japan only when it was backed up both by the economic power of American MNCs and by the active support of Japanese business.

Do international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) lessen the need for states to provide their own services? In the case of health, many assume that INGOs limit health spending by governments. Against the conventional wisdom, we argue that these organizations create increased demand for governmental health spending through three mechanisms: (1) indirectly affecting the policy-making climate (“climatic conditioning”), (2) aiding domestic NGO and health activists in their efforts, and (3) directly pressuring governments for increased health spending themselves. Given these mechanisms, health INGOs, although typically supplying health services of their own within a country, should augment pressure for public service provision by the state and, it follows, lead to increased state health spending. We test our argument using a new data set on health INGOs, together with a well-established model of health spending, and find ample support for our arguments. Increases in health INGOs' activities do lead to increased governmental health spending, mainly by indirectly affecting the policy-making climate and, most especially, advancing the effective efforts of domestic activists.

Existing accounts posit that defensively oriented counterterrorist policies create negative externalities and result in regulatory competition that induces governments to increasingly tighten their policies. We argue that rather than causing an unconditional global “race to the top,” spatial dependence in counterterrorist policies is limited to within groups of countries exposed to a similar level of threat from international terrorism. Countries strongly differ in their propensity to become the target of an international terror attack. Governments can safely ignore counterterrorist policies enacted by countries outside their “peer group,” but they must pay attention to measures undertaken by their peers. We test several predictions derived from our theory in an empirical analysis of counterterrorist regulations in twenty Western developed-country democracies over the period 2001 to 2008.

This article argues that immigration policy formation in the United States after 1950 can only be understood in the context of the increasing integration of world markets. Increasing trade openness has exposed firms that rely on immigrant labor to foreign competition and increased the likelihood that these firms fail. Increasing openness by other states to foreign direct investment (FDI) allowed these same firms to move production overseas. Firms' choices to close their doors or to move overseas decrease their need for labor at home, leading them to spend their political capital on issues other than immigration. Their lack of support for open immigration, in turn, allows policymakers to restrict immigration. An examination of voting behavior on immigration in the US Senate shows that the integration of world capital and goods markets has had an important effect on the politics of immigration in the United States and shows little support for existing theories of immigration policy formation. In addition to increasing one's understanding of immigration policy, this article sheds light on how trade openness and firms' choice of production location can affect their preference for other foreign economic policies as well as domestic policies such as labor, welfare, and environmental policies.

Events since January 1963 have confronted participant and observer alike with a number of fundamental political questions about the European Community. How can we reconcile repeated newspaper stories about its imminent collapse because of one crisis or another with its persistence and seemingly ever more impressive accomplishments? Can the Community continue to develop in the face of major policy differences among its members? Does the existence of the Community change the ground rules and operating conditions of the relations between its members, or does it only place naïve European idealists at the mercy of more cynical, wily, and “realistic” politicians by introducing merely gentler ways of coercing or cajoling the less powerful members? Does it have any enduring impact on the political process or on political attitudes within the member states, or are such changes as occur insignificant or easily reversible?

The inauguration of ECOWAS in Lagos on 28 May 1975 has been hailed as a breakthrough in the long series of efforts to institute some form of economic cooperation and integration embracing the entire West African subregion. While Nigeria's role as leader in the process of forming ECOWAS is generally acknowledged, no systematic analysis exists of the nature of Nigeria's role nor of its impact on and probable consequences for the organization.

Truth-subversion practices, which populist leaders utilize for political domination, are a significant source of current pressure on the Liberal International Order (LIO). Truth-subversion practices include false speak (flagrant lying to subvert the concept of facts), double speak (intentional internal contradictions in speech to erode reason), and flooding (the emission of many messages into the public domain to create confusion). Aiming to destroy liberal truth ideals and practices, truth subversion weakens epistemological security; that is, the experience of orderliness and safety that results from people's and institutions’ shared understandings of their common-sense reality. It privileges baseless claims over fact-based opinions, thus creating communities of the like-minded between which communication becomes impossible. Truth subversion challenges the LIO's three key institutions: democracy, markets, and multilateralism. If truth-subversion practices prevail, societal polarization, inaccurate information, and emotional inflaming strain democracy and human rights protections. Markets that depend for their functioning on accurate information can falter, and multilateralism that relies on communication and reasoned consensus can decay. International relations (IR) scholarship has recognized knowledge production practices as a key feature underlying the LIO, but has not yet identified challenges to those practices as a threat for the LIO. We discuss what the discipline can do to alleviate its blind spots.

Recent scholarship finds that new democracies are more likely than established democracies to make binding commitments to international human rights institutions. Are new democracies also better at following through on these commitments? Stated differently, does their greater willingness to join international institutions reflect a genuine commitment to human rights reform or is it just “cheap talk?” We analyze this question using a new data set of more than 1,000 leading European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) cases. Since new democracies face judgments that are more difficult to implement than established democracies, we employ a genetic matching algorithm to balance the data set. After controlling for bureaucratic and judicial capacity, we find that new democracies do implement similar ECtHR judgments initially more quickly than established democracies, but this effect reverses the longer a judgment remains pending. Although new democracies have incentives to implement judgments quickly, they sometimes lack checks and balances that help ensure implementation should an executive resist.

International relations scholarship has made great progress on the study of compliance with international agreements. While persuasive, most of this work has focused on states’ de jure compliance decisions, largely excluding the de facto behavior of nonstate actors whose actions the agreement hopes to constrain. Of particular interest has been whether the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC) might reduce the propensity of multinational corporations (MNCs) to bribe officials in host countries through its mechanisms of extraterritoriality and extensive peer review. Unfortunately, research is hampered by reporting bias. Since the convention raises the probability of investors’ punishment for bribery in their home countries, it reduces both the incentives for bribery and willingness to admit to the activity. This generates uncertainty over which of these incentives drives any correlation between signing the convention and reductions in reported bribery. We address this problem by employing a specialized survey experiment that shields respondents and reduces reporting bias. We find that after the onset of Phase 3 in 2010, when the risk of noncompliance increased for firms subject to the OECD-ABC, those MNCs reduced their actual bribery relative to their nonsignatory competitors.

For more than a decade, the United States military has conceptualized and discussed the Internet and related systems as “cyberspace,” understood as a “domain” of conflict like land, sea, air, and outer space. How and why did this concept become entrenched in US doctrine? What are its effects? Focusing on the emergence and consolidation of this terminology, I make three arguments about the role of language in cybersecurity policy. First, I propose a new, politically consequential category of metaphor: foundational metaphors, implied by using particular labels rather than stated outright. These metaphors support specific ways to understand complex issues, provide discursive resources to some arguments over others, and shape policy contestation and outcomes. Second, I present a detailed empirical study of US military strategy and doctrine that traces the emergence and consolidation of terminology built on the “cyberspace domain.” This concept supported implicit metaphorical correspondences between the Internet and physical space, yielding specific analogies and arguments for understanding the Internet and its effects. Third, I focus on the rhetorical effects of this terminology to reveal two important institutional consequences: this language has been essential to expanding the military's role in cybersecurity, and specific interests within the Department of Defense have used this framework to support the creation of US Cyber Command. These linguistic effects in the United States also have implications for how other states approach cybersecurity, for how international law is applied to cyber operations, and for how International Relations understands language and technological change.

For Latin American governments, mediating between their national societies and the international economy, the contemporary debt issue poses some excruciating dilemmas. On the one side, these governments are under intense pressure to arrive at satisfactory formulas for settling their debts–satisfactory, that is, to the banks and creditor agencies that control access to international financial markets. Loss of such access would threaten vital capital and trade flows, and for this reason virtually every Latin American government has so far placed a high priority on meeting its external obligations. But governmental elites, if they are to remain in power, must also answer to (or repress) their own populations. And the price to be paid for external help with “liquidity problems” has typically involved politically dangerous stabilization measures (devaluations, wage and credit restrictions, and fiscal deficit reductions)–measures that often arouse the strong opposition of major social forces.

The international community, in its efforts to overcome the security dilemmas that inhibit conflict resolution, need not always offer forceful security guarantees to combatants in civil wars. We argue that noncoercive, liberal international intervention can end civil wars. As suggested by a constructivist perspective and the insights of the democratic peace, the promotion of liberal democracy can successfully resolve civil wars by transforming the identities and institutions of the combatants. We develop this argument by examining the resolution of civil wars in Central America during the 1990s. Of the Central American cases, Nicaragua, the country subject to the strongest security guarantees, has been the least stable of the three. El Salvador and Guatemala, in contrast, have experienced more successful conflict resolution despite the lack of any forceful security guarantees by the international community. The termination of these civil wars can be best explained by the adherence of local actors to liberal democratic norms and institutions in response to a variety of international pressures and opportunities.