Cédric Dupont

European Union Meets South Korea: Bureaucratic Interests, Exporter Discrimination and the Negotiations of Trade Agreements

Who in the European Union drives the process of pursuing bilateral trade negotiations? In contrast to societal explanations, this article develops a novel argument as to how the European Commission manages the process and uses its position in strategic ways to pursue its interests. Rooted in principal–agent theory, the article discusses agent preferences and theorizes the conditions under which the agent sets specific focal points and interacts strategically with principals and third parties. The argument is discussed with case study evidence drawn from the first trade agreement concluded and ratified since the EU Commission announced its new strategy in 2006: the EU–South Korea trade agreement.

Goods, Games, and Institutions

International institutions can help to overcome the problem of supplying goods that are difficult to restrict in terms of consumption. Yet the links between the characteristics of goods, the nature of strategic interaction between actors, and the effectiveness or need for international institutions have not been systematically treated. This article tries to remedy this gap by providing a systematic analysis of the problem of the provision of two types of goods—public goods and common pool resources (CPRs). It starts by examining the characteristics of these goods, and then derives some simple game structures that correspond to different assumptions about the costs and benefits of these goods and variations in actors’ capabilities. It then discusses the links between games and institutional solutions. In doing this, the authors are able to encompass previous analytical work and open up new avenues for empirical studies of collective action.

Switzerland and the European integration process: Engagement without marriage

The rapid expansion of the process of integration within the European Community since the mid-1980s has put the issue of economic and political relationships between Switzerland and the EC at the top of the Swiss political agenda. In particular, there has been much public discussion on the form and nature of the links to be developed with the EC. In this context, the government — Federal Council — has redefined its policy line and has tried to implement new strategies and tactics. These efforts have met considerable resistance, however, not only domestically but also on the external front, and have not brought the country as large and secure an access to the Single Market as is the case for all other Western European countries. How can one explain this course of events? A widespread interpretation focuses on the characteristics of the Swiss political system that grants strong assenting power to Eurosceptic citizens and the cantons. From this perspective, the government has little steering power and is constantly facing the threat of popular rejection of any new approach to the process of European integration, especially any approach that comes close to accession. A major case in point was the rejection of the treaty on the creation of a European Economic Area (EEA) in 1992, which has increased Switzerlands isolation in Western Europe. According to this view, major domestic institutional reforms are necessary before Switzerland can participate fully in the process of European integration. Without such reforms, especially in the area of direct democracy, the Swiss will not go beyond economic engagement with the EC. The following account aims to provide a more nuanced analysis of the sources of variation in foreign policy-making, one that carefully examines the influence of perceptions on the design of policy lines. Switzerlands stance towards the process of European integration, from the late 1950s to the late 1990s, can be seen as the result of trade-offs between perceived

International Relations Theory and Game Theory: Baroque Modeling Choices and Empirical Robustness

The increasing popularity of game modeling in international relations theory has fostered a tendency toward theoretical elegance to the detriment of empirical concerns. In this article attention is focused on the empirical implications of a series of choices that users of game theory must make when they model social interactions. In particular, possible trade-offs between theoretical complexity and empirical robustness are evaluated. This is done both abstractly and with specific references to recent modeling efforts in the fields of security and international political economy.

Catching the EC Train:: Austria and Switzerland in Comparative Perspective

The adoption of the Single Market programme in the mid-1980s represented a genuine challenge for the small EFTA countries. This common challenge did not lead to similar responses, however. Our contribution aims at highlighting this diversity through a comparative analysis of Austria and Switzerland. We focus on how decision-makers in the two countries amended central policy courses in response to these changes. Based on the analytical concept of coherence that takes into account internal as well as external aspects of foreign policy-making we examine whether these policy amendments were consistent with domestic and international constraints. We show that Austria is a case of good strategic mastery by the government. Coherence with both the domestic and the external context resulted in a determined course of action that pushed Austria smoothly into the Community. In contrast, fellow EFTA member, Switzerland, suffered major policy setbacks with regard to European integration. Most noticeably, the Swiss government showed a very poor strategic understanding of the external context and believed that the European Economic Area would provide Switzerland with both market access and political rights. The end result is that Switzerland finds itself being the former EFTA country with the smallest access to the Single Market.

A Leader in Institutional Design? Europe and the Governance of Trade and Monetary Relations

In many respects, Europe has been an innovator in the design of international institutions. In trade, Britain led with nineteenth-century unilateral trade liberalization, followed by the Cobden-Chevallier network of bilateral treaties, a customs union in central Europe, and then inward-looking arrangements with colonies.’ In the post-Second World War period, Europe has been moving toward regional political and economic integration since the 1950s. The European Community (EC) has also been a leader in the move toward transregional arrangements linking developing countries (Lome Agreement) and Eastern European countries to the EC as well as inter-regionalism that brings it together with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Mercosur, and other regional blocs.2 In finance, Europeans were the primary architects of the gold standard in the nineteenth century, and adapted this system at the turn of the twentieth century. European states played crucial roles in the failed effort to revive the global economy through the innovation of monetary arrangements and the more successful efforts in creating the Bretton Woods system. In the post-Second World War period, following a bewildering array of monetary arrangements, most EC countries have relinquished their national currencies, leading to an unprecedented form of monetary union based on a single currency.

Negotiation and Bargaining: Organizational Aspects

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 15, pp. 10473–10477,

Comment on `Common Goods, Matrix Games and Institutional Response', by Katharina Holzinger in EJIR 9(2) pp. 173-212

We are pleased that our article ‘Goods, Games and Institutions’ (Aggarwal and Dupont, 1999) has generated considerable interest (Wallner, 2002; Aggarwal and Dupont, 2002). Our basic objective was to develop a unified theoretical framework linking types of goods with bargaining games, with the goal of better understanding the bases of international cooperation and the role of institutions. Katharina Holzinger’s article ‘Common Goods, Matrix Games and Institutional Responses’ in EJIR 9(2) develops several very interesting themes. Holzinger provides a somewhat different cut into the relationship of goods, games and institutions that we initially developed, and provides a carefully developed treatment of the implications of this type of modeling work for environmental regulation. We continue to believe that this avenue of theoretical and empirical work will prove highly productive, and commend Holzinger for her useful extensions and empirical application of our modeling approach. In an effort to provide the reader with an overview of advances in research in this area, we focus on three issues — (1) the conceptual nature of public goods and common pool resources (CPRs); (2) the modeling of the provision problem; and (3) the value of institutions in the provision of goods.