Etel Solingen

The political economy of nuclear restraint

The author examines the economic component of domestic liberalization in different regional contexts in order to get closer to identifying an important engine of regime creation. In particular, ruling coalitions pursuing economic liberalization seem more likely to embrace regional nuclear regimes than their inward-looking, nationalist, and radical-confessional counterparts. The author suggests an alternate interpretation for why different states choose different portfolios to cope with their respective security concerns. The emphasis is more on explaining a favorable disposition to enter regime-like arrangements in nuclear matters than on listing incentives to procure nuclear weapons. The argument is relevant only to would-be or second-tier nuclear powers.

Mapping Internationalization: Domestic and Regional Impacts

This article introduces a conceptual design for mapping the domestic impact of internationalization. It proposes that internationalization leads to a trimodal domestic coalitional profile and advances a set of expectations about the regional effects of each profile. Aggregate data from ninety-eight coalitions in nineteen states over five regions suggests that between 1948 and 1993 the three coalitional types differed in their international behavior. Internationalizing coalitions deepened trade openness, expanded exports, attracted foreign investments, restrained military-industrial complexes, initiated fewer international crises, eschewed weapons of mass destruction, deferred to international economic and security regimes, and strove for regional cooperative orders that reinforced those objectives. Backlash coalitions restricted or reduced trade openness and reliance on exports, curbed foreign investment, built expansive military complexes, developed weapons of mass destruction, challenged international regimes, exacerbated civic-nationalist, religious, or ethnic differentiation within their region, and were prone to initiate international crises. Hybrids straddled the grand strategies of their purer types, intermittently striving for economic openness, contracting the military complex, initiating international crises, and cooperating regionally and internationally, but neither forcefully nor coherently. These findings have significant implications for international relations theory and our incipient understanding of internationalization. Further extensions of the conceptual framework can help capture international effects that are yet to be fully integrated into the study of the domestic politics of coalition formation.

Sanctions, statecraft, and nuclear proliferation

Some states have violated international commitments not to develop nuclear weapons. Yet the effects of international sanctions or positive inducements on their internal politics remain highly contested. How have trade, aid, investments, diplomacy, financial measures and military threats affected different groups? How, when and why were those effects translated into compliance with non-proliferation rules? Have inducements been sufficiently biting, too harsh, too little, too late or just right for each case? How have different inducements influenced domestic cleavages? What were their unintended and unforeseen effects? Why are self-reliant autocracies more often the subject of sanctions? Leading scholars analyse the anatomy of inducements through novel conceptual perspectives, in-depth case studies, original quantitative data and newly translated documents. The volume distils ten key dilemmas of broad relevance to the study of statecraft, primarily from experiences with Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, bound to spark debate among students and practitioners of international politics.

The Domestic Sources of Regional Regimes: The Evolution of Nuclear Ambiguity in the Middle East

A major task of the literature on international regimes is the attempt to identify the conditions under which regimes are likely to emerge. The article evaluates the contribution of this literature to understanding the absence of a nuclear regime in the Middle East and the likely paths which may lead to one in the future. I identify four possible stylized outcomes: overt deterrence, regional “opaqueness,” controlled proliferation, and a nuclear-weapons-free-zone; only the last two fulfill the definitional requirements of a regime. I explore how the three major theoretical thrusts in regime theory—neorealism, neoliberal institutionalism, and reflectivism—explain why regional opaqueness—rather than overt deterrence or a regime—has been the outcome so far. I then suggest that analyzing the domestic consequences of each regional outcome appears more useful than its conceptual alternatives in explaining why opaqueness was maintained, and why it may be abandoned. The article ends with some lessons from this case for the study of regional and international regimes.

Democracy, Economic Reform and Regional Cooperation

This paper examines the impact of political and economic liberalization on regional conflict and cooperation. It concludes that: (1) even if democracy may be expected to have a positive effect on cooperation, it may be neither necessary nor sufficient; (2) instead, the grand political-economic strategies of domestic ruling coalitions may provide a more powerful predictor of regional outcomes. Coalitions strongly committed to economic liberalization are expected to be more likely to undertake regional cooperative postures, particularly when facing similarly committed regional partners. Coalitions aggregating inward-looking and big-state interests - often allied with confessional movements - are expected to endorse less cooperative positions vis-a-vis regional partners. I discuss the genesis of alternative coalitions, the impact of their political strength and interactive dynamics on regional outcomes and end with the implications of this coalitional framework for extant theories and for future research. The conceptual advantages of focusing on coalitions include providing a unifying framework for comparing different regions, transcending old level-of-analysis categories, explaining intra- as well as inter-state competition, and eschewing exceptionalist theories of Third World behavior.

Crafting Cooperation: Designed to fail or failure of design? The origins and legacy of the Arab League

In its nearly sixty years of existence the Arab League has achieved a relatively low level of cooperation. Although the League has had a measure of influence in socializing some Arab elites, it has fallen short in changing state preferences, in forcing significant adjustment of prior policies, or in achieving a pan-Arab blueprint to guide their collective behavior. At the same time, to the extent the League was designed to enhance state sovereignty, it has certainly succeeded in doing so. Prima facie , this relatively limited cooperation is something of a surprise for several reasons. First, the League of Arab States was the first regional organization established after 1945. Second, its members share a common language, identity, and culture. Third, there is an arguable shared threat in Israel and continuing suspicions of the West. Fourth, there have been expectations of joint gains from trade and commerce, although similar production patterns detracted from benefits achievable through complementarity. Such shared identities and interests would surely place the Arab states system high on most predictors of regional institutionalization. Yet, the most that can be said is that a shared Arab identity keeps Arab states oriented toward one another, but obstacles toward meaningful institutionalization and cooperation of any depth have never been surmounted. Why such disappointing results? We reject several conventional explanations for sub-Pareto outcomes and failure to cooperate.

Domestic coalitions, internationalization, and war: Then and now

Recent commentary on the centenary of World War I evokes similarities between Germany then and China now, and between globalization then and now. The nature of dominant coalitions in both countries provides a conceptual anchor for understanding the links between internal and external politics in 1914 and 2014. Coalitional dynamics draw greater attention to agency in debates that all too often emphasize structure, impersonal forces, and inevitability. Two core claims rest on this basic analytical building block. First, despite apparent similarities in domestic coalitional arrangements of putative revisionist challengers—Germany and China—important differences defy facile analogies. China now is not Germany then. Second, the regional coalitional cluster and the global political economy—and hence the links between domestic and external politics—differ across the two periods. The “world-time” against which coalitions operate today is significantly different as well. Thus ahistorical analogies between then and now may not only be imperfect; they can infuse actors with misguided and perilous protocols for international behavior. There is plenty that may recall World War I today but even more that does not, and all must make sure that gap never narrows.

Middle East denuclearization? Lessons from Latin America's Southern Cone

International Relations theory has recently turned its attention to the study of comparative regionalism in economics and security. As part of this new research agenda, this article explores what we might learn from the Southern Cones experience with denuclearization that might be applicable to the Middle East. The two regions differ with respect to security dilemmas, military capabilities and doctrines, and the prior availability of a cooperative regional institutional infrastructure. Yet two aspects of the Southern Cone process seem potentially relevant to other regions. The first relates to improving our understanding of the appropriate domestic political conditions that underpin denuclearization. In particular, the nature of domestic coalitions and of their respective approaches to the global economy and political institutions deserve far more serious consideration than they have gained thus far. The second relates to the nature of the regional denuclearization regime initially fashioned in the Southern Cone, which set an international precedent. A regionally-based system of mutual inspections could help remove some of the most intractable barriers to a future Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

Domestic Coalitional Analysis and the Democratic Peace

Democratic do not wage wars against one another has developed into a thriving research programme in international relations. The programme includes both supporters and detractors who apply statistically oriented, formal-modelling, and case-study methods.1 The last has particular affinity with historical analysis. Spencer R. Weart, in testing the theory against evidence running from antiquity to the twentieth century, finds unqualified support for it.2 This article scrutinizes the democratic peace from the perspective of the relationship between domestic political processes and international behaviour. It explores an alternative, and in some cases complementary, explanation for war and peace that derives from a domestic coalitional approach to politics. The framework pays special attention to the effects of internationalization, in its economic and political dimensions.

International Security: Nuclear Proliferation

Since the advent of the nuclear age, scholars have sought to provide rationales behind decisions to pursue, forgo, or relinquish nuclear weapons programs. Security, status, cost, technical capabilities, and domestic considerations have played central roles in explaining those choices. Classical neorealism was once the conventional wisdom, advancing that relative power and the logic of self-help in an anarchic world drove states to nuclear weapons. Yet, the analysis of nuclear proliferation has evolved in accordance with broader debates in international relations theory in recent decades, including the incorporation of neoliberal institutionalist, constructivist, and domestic political perspectives. The end of the Cold War and the upheaval of international order in particular marked a watershed for the literature, with scholars challenging the dominant paradigm by examining the effects of institutions, norms, and identities. Those approaches, however, under-theorized—if not omitted altogether—the role of domestic political drivers in choices to acquire or abstain from acquiring from nuclear weapons. Such drivers provide filters that can be invaluable in explaining whether, when, and how state actors are susceptible to considerations of relative power, international institutions, and norms. More recently, scholars have deployed more sophisticated theoretical frameworks and diverse methodologies. The road ahead requires greater analytical flexibility, harnessing the utility of classical perspectives while adding enough nuance to increase explanatory power, greater attentiveness to the complex interaction among variables, and improved specification and operationalization amenable to rigorous testing, all with an eye toward enhancing both historical accuracy and predictive capabilities.