Davis B. Bobrow

Maintaining System Stability

This article examines the ways and degrees to which nation-states participate in and financially support United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs). The authors contend that UN PKOs are impure public goods whose provision conforms to expectations from public goods theory that deals with the provision of impure public goods and club goods, and much less to the hegemonic stability variant of the public goods approach. Conceptual arguments are followed by an examination of general patterns of UN PKOs, personnel and financial contributions to them, and the U.S. role in them. The authors conclude that the post-cold war period has seen a notable increase in the volume of provision of peacekeeping and in the quantity and diversity of contributors and beneficiaries. They recognize the difficulties posed by recent U.S. nonpayments and suggest the possibility of adjustments that will reestablish the financial basis that continuing substantial provision will require.

Japan in the World Opinion from Defeat to Success

Japanese public opinion on foreign and defense policy warrants longitudinal analysis as an extreme case of change and lack of interest in international diplomatic and military activism. Data for the post-Occupation period through 1984 are examined for the effects of age, generation, and situation; more recent aggregate poll data are used to check for recent changes. Little support appears for strong, ongoing shifts from international passivism to activism, alignment to equidistance, dependence to autonomy, military minimization to effort, or lack of guiding principles. Generational effects are very modest after the early 1970s; age-group differences have more continuing importance. Majority opinion is sceptical about the merits of departures from the status quo, buttressed by countervailing minorities that support opposed directions of change.

U.S. Policy toward Foreign Direct Investment

Foreign investment policy is an increasingly important part of overall foreign policy. The authors investigate the substance of U.S. outgoing foreign direct investment (OFDI) and incoming foreign direct investment (IFDI) policy in terms of a small set of policy values and process factors. The policy values are domestic prosperity, national autonomy, and national security. The process factors are ideological consonance, impact transparency, the diffusion and concentration of perceived costs and benefits, and the political capacity of groups and institutions. These considerations illuminate the relative stability in both areas of policy since World War II, and help to explain the changes that did take place. The paper concludes with a forecast that, despite the oft-heard prediction that economic nationalism is on the increase, U.S. policies toward foreign investment will remain much the same during the eighties as they have been Since World War II.

Theory, Policy, and Resource Cartels

Our choice of theoretical perspectives to apply to resource cartels seriously affects the questions we ask, the predictions we make, and the policy suggestions we draw. In this paper we examine the implications (and the limitations) of five perspectives for the analysis of resource cartels in general and the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) in particular: the theory of cartels; the theory of depletable resources; coalition theory; internal politics approaches; and the theory of collective action. Three classes of actors are considered-exporting producers, importing consumers, and multinational resource exploitation firms. We gain in realism by proceeding from simple to more complicated situations by including political concerns, bureaucratic divisions, and the prospect of military coercion. Yet, we do so at the price of rigorous deductive frameworks with clear and coherent predictions.

Understanding How Others Treat CrisesA Multimethod Approach

In this paper, we apply an ensemble of research methods to study the crisis perceptions and behavior of the Peoples Republic of China. The results suggest two important desiderata with regard to analysis for improving crisis forecasting and management. First, we should not automatically assume that decision-makers in different countries share homogeneous views about the origin and development of crises and about appropriate measures for resolving them. Thus, effective crisis forecasting and management requires a sound understanding of ones potential allies and adversaries. Second, a multimethod research strategy is more likely to generate rich and reliable policy-relevant findings. This is especially true in the analysis of national decision systems with restricted information access, as in the case of China.

How Middle Powers Can Manage Resource Weakness: Japan and Energy

The post-World War II world has seen the transformation of the international system from a configuration with several rival great powers into one with two superpowers and a set of lesser but still substantial powerssecond-tier states with democratic politics and mixed economies. One of the recurrent concerns of the latter has been to secure supplies of natural resources. We argue that postwar conditions point to eight elements of prudent resource policy for middle-level powers. Such states should: (i) avoid military means; (2) choose trade partners whose political interests overlap with their own and who enjoy political stability; (3) seek to create in supplier and transit countries a structure of economic interests that will make supply agreements self-enforcing; (4) diversify with respect to commodity dependence, supplier share, and transit bottlenecks; (5) tailor stockpiles to the urgency of demand; (6) exploit technology to reduce dependence and enhance bargaining advantages; (7) encourage the private sector and public enterprises to become intermediaries in the international resource trade; and (8) pursue strategic interdependence among consumer nations by creating multilateral stakes in the maintenance of normal commerce in resources. In this paper we develop a set of general prescriptions for the behavior of mid-level powers with small endowments of natural resources. We hold that states which follow these prescriptions will avoid endangering their economic performance. Indeed, they may outperform others that apparently hold an advantage in terms of greater resource endowments and military power. We use the case of Japanese energy policy to develop our prescriptions and to demonstrate their feasibility. The case has special interest because of the importance of energy resources in the world economy, Japans extreme dependence on and thus policy efforts related to-imported energy, and the vigor of the Japanese economy.

Energy R&D: in tepid pursuit of collective goods

Continued dependence on expensive imported liquid fuels puts stress on the relations among and the domestic performance of the members of OECD. Coordinated energy R&D could in principle lessen those stresses and also benefit other liquid fuel consumers. A political economy approach can help explain the tepid pursuit of this possibility in two ways. First, it can clarify the reasons for the weak collective action energy R&D record of the members of the OECD both before and after the oil events of 1973. Second, it can demonstrate and identify the nature of the undersupply of the public good of energy knowledge. The history of this area illustrates several general obstacles to the provision of public goods in realistically complex political situations. These include the uncertain and distant nature of commitments to actually deliver collective goods in the absense of self-enforcing agreements, unwillingness to jeopardize possible future private advantages, and the tendencies to link provision of particular public goods to cooperation by other parties with the provider on a host of other matters. In effect, the attempts of particular statesmen to tie energy R&D cooperation to other issues reinforce tendencies to view the choices not as ones about the level of provision of public goods, but rather as ones about national shares of private goods—economic, military, and political.

Complex Insecurity: Implications of a Sobering Metaphor: 1996 Presidential Address

Insecurity in international affairs is inherently complex and diverse. As a result debates about its content and conception tend to be familiar, recurrent, and inconclusive as they attempt to exclude some possibilities as a general matter in favor of others. Consequences now and in the past have included incompleteness, partial irrelevance, and underspecification of policy recommendations. That has and does occur with respect to military versus nonmilitary content, expectations about feasible futures, objective versus subjective factors, and the characteristics of relevant entities. There then is a need for an orienting metaphor appropriate to unavoidable complexity and diversity. That of disease, illness, and decline provides useful emphases with respect to threats, strategies for their prevention and treatment, and the conduct and mutual relevance of insecurity specializations.

The Impact of Foreign Assistance on National Development and International Conflict

This is an interim report on a long-term project to study: (1) the effects of external assistance to developing countries on their domestic performance, and (2) the effects of assistance and domestic performance on foreign conflict behavior. We wish to understand better: (1) the effects that external assistance has on various aspects of development in the new nations and the length of time before such effects become manifest, (2) the interdependencies among the elements involved in national development which may be affected by foreign assistance, (3) the extent to which foreign conflict behavior is linked directly to domestic national priorities and indirectly to external assistance to developing nations, and (4) the forms of foreign assistance most likely to achieve development goals and foreign cooperation under varying conditions. To meet these objectives we hope to model the development process, to develop techniques for forecasting future stages of development and conflict and their sensitivity to foreign inputs, and to construct a set of policy indicators useful for both our technical and substantive concerns. We present below some early conceptual work and an application of it. The application deals with the impact of assistance from five “great powers” on the economic development and domestic and foreign conflict participation of 15 Asian nations.

Non-Military Determinants of Military Budgets: The Japanese Case

A theory of military budgets should include the non-military purposes they may serve, and it should distinguish between the roles played by policy rules reflecting those purposes and rules reflecting norms for the budgetary process per se. For advanced industrialized countries whose international relations center on the U.S., the non-military purposes of particular relevance are those which emphasize macroeconomic performance, a security conception in which military matters play only a part, management of military and economic relations with the superpower, and dealings with parochial, private, and public-sector interests. The budgetary process norms include inertial incrementalism and balance in terms of stable shares of a larger budgetary pie. Japan provides an especially appropriate case to explore the relative explanatory contribution of these non-military purposes and process norms. Data on Japans total defense budget and its components are explored through regression analysis for the period from the re-establishment of the defense forces until the explicit departure from the one-percent of GNP rule. The results indicate that different aspects of the budget are used to pursue all of the policy purposes and conform selectively to both process norms. Such complexity fits with Japans intention to pursue national autonomy within acceptable levels of military dependence and budgetary restraint.