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Introduction: Explaining North-South Negotiations
I. William Zartman
North-South encounters are full of exhortation. Much of the literature is occupied by one sideâs telling the other, in beguiling or condemning tones, how it should behave for the greater good of humankind, while the other side spends a somewhat smaller portion of the debate telling how it is not so. From the bastions of their interest, the two sides throw bolts of righteousness at each other and are dismayed when the walls do not fall. The situation is one of conflict, unmitigated by any convincingly conveyed perceptions of common interest in a shared fate. The two sides are admonished to negotiate the future, but they currently argue like parties to a negotiation between those in a full lifeboat and those afloat outside. There is therefore not only conflict but disparity of power: those outside keep going under; they have not convinced those inside that there is room for both; and when they have threatened to tip the lifeboat and take the others' place, their failure to do so has discredited the threat. The problem is even worse than the metaphor, however, because it will not even go away. The weak states keep on clamoring outside the boat, fitfully struggling but never sinking, while the strong states throw them bread, discuss philosophy, and consider their fate.
It is no wonder that North-South relations have been at a low point during the 1980s. For half a decade in the 1970s, the countries of the poor, raw-material-producing, underdeveloped Third World of the South brought their case against the affluent, industrial, developed countries of the First World of the West in many different arenas, trying to produce a global wave of change in the international economic order. On the broadest level, emboldened by the appearance of power in the oil price rises and embargoes of 1973â74, the South tried to launch global negotiations for the inauguration of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Beginning with the VI Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, it mobilized UN agencies and forums in an effort to effect sweeping change. At nearly the same time, before the total failure of global negotiations had become evident, it found inspiration in the appearance of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as a commodity cartel to seek both broad and commodity-specific reforms in trade relations around primary exports. In addition to attempting to change the terms of trade on export commodities, the South also asked procedural alterations in the decision-making institutions that governed the established order, seeking a greater participation or total changes in the bodies set up at Bretton Woods, notably the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). For the most part, these assaults on the substance and procedures of the world economic order were turned back by a Northern response that combined delays, token measures, and partial remedies with outright stonewalling. Oil prices, which increased fourfold in constant dollars in the half-decade since 1969 and sixfold in the subsequent half-decade (and much more in current prices), were seen by both sides as a threatening weapon in the middle of the decade but as only a paper tiger by the end. The old order remained essentially unshaken because the Southerners did not have the power to shake it and the North was unshaken by their needs.
Greater progress was registered in other arenas. New international law or regulations were necessitated by technological advances in other subject areas, requiring global conferences on specific subjects such as maritime relations or telecommunications. Other attempts at specialized negotiations were inauguratedâto some extent by the Northâto define trade and aid relations between parts of the two halves of the world such as Europe and Africa, or the United States and Latin America, with varying degrees of success. Finally, negotiations continued throughout the period and beyond on financial relations when Third World debts accumulated faster than repayment possibilities, either on the part of individual countries or categories of them.
Such partial measures may be variously interpreted as the arenas of real success, the fig leaves of real failure, or the signs of a waning wave of pressure for change. No doubt all three are correct, and the period that followed the half-decade of assault was a distinct lull in the conflict. Even the slight eruptions of the issue after 1979 were only symbolic demonstrations to show that the question of North-South relations was still alive. The advent of the world recession and the Reagan administration kept the conflict muted. Selected leaders of North and South met at CancĂșn in 1981 and, in the style of the Reagan administration, agreed to keep in touch. Negotiations on specific issues pattered on, sometimes arriving at renewal agreements that were more favorable to the North than to the South. After the strident United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) at Manila and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Havana in 1979, the next âeventâ of the Group of 77 was the NAM in New Delhi in 1983 that postponed its usual call for global negotiations. There was a two-year lapse before a special conference was scheduled by members of the World Bank and Monetary Fund for April 1985. That too was a non-event and the two halves of the world now await the results of the eighth GATT negotiations opening in late 1986 and probably lasting the decade.
Yet the conflict between North and South remains, and beneath it an ongoing and perhaps worsening problem. The essence of the problem is that the two parts of the world are at different stages of development, so that the South only produces the ingredients for the industry of the North, and it sells them at uncertain and fluctuating rates to buy the more expensive finished products. There is an interdependence that locks the two parties into their unequal roles, and when the South seeks to share in the industrial role of the North it enters an arena where both the conditions of technology and the rules of competition put it at a disadvantage. Thus, there is neither equality of present status nor equality of opportunity for the future, and the inequality of condition is mirrored and magnified by the inequality of capability to change it. Not only have the norms and practices of postcolonial international relations trained the new nations to expect something different from their status of economic inferiority, after having emerged from a status of political subjugation, but the problems of economic inferiority within the international economic order keep coming back to the doorstep of the rich, who must keep their debtors alive enough to continue to service their debt, stable enough to continue to export their raw materials, and even prosperous enough to continue to buy the exports of the rich. But kept alive to that degree, the South calls for more, demanding the equality that humanitarian norms promise to human beings and that the norms of the United Nationsâas part of the current international political orderâpromise to states. Hence, it is a conflict not only of relations but also of perspectives, for it is primarily seen by both sides in zero-sum terms.
What is it, then, other than the obstinate refusal of the problem to go away, that makes it appropriate to address it now, in the second half of the 1980s? The indicators are necessarily many, not predictive assurances but straws in the wind that suggest that it is time to start positioning and preparing for a new approach to the problem. For one, the period of solidarity-making has been played out, preparatory to a period of problem solving. Weak and disparate parties need an initial time of consciousness-raising and solidarity-making before they can turn to more detailed and pragmatic solutions. Aspects such as identity, awareness of interests, and sense of confidence are all aspects of the solidarity phase of activity, and are best built through confrontation. The half-decade of the 1970s was that time of confrontation, but now the stridency has disappeared from the language of the 1980s, the confrontationalist leaders such as Algeriaâs Boumedienne, Pakistanâs Bhutto, Mexicoâs Echeverria, and others have been replaced, and some of the important forums for Third World solidarity such as the Organisation of African Unity, the League of Arab States, and even the NAM have been momentarily split and disabled. Although these may be signs of weakness, they may also give rise to more pragmatic approaches to problems now that the initial solidarity has been established, as the 1986 Priority Program of the OAU has shown.
The crisis dimension also had negative effects in the first half of the 1980s, pushing the parties to the bottom line of âeach one for itself.â The forms of this reaction are many, including protectionism, the lowering of expectations, more realistic stocktaking about domestic efforts, and others. Although it is possible to continue and intensify these efforts, this can be done only separately by each state; together, the efforts would move in the opposite direction, to seek common cooperative measures. The world recession of the late 1970s pushed rich and poor alike to separate measures in the early 1980s, but as the decade moves on, the possibilities of coordination and common attention to North-South relations become more evident. The Reagan proposal for a global economic conference is not the end but possibly the beginning of such a turn.
There is another side of this same effect, the domestic dimension. It is not clear whether parties make greater concessions when they are weak and therefore vulnerable, when they are strong and therefore cushioned, or whether both conditions obtain under the differentiating impact of some yet-unknown intervening variable. Politically, the effect seems to be the third: beleagured parties do not concede if the implications are immediately costly, if the concession is touted as a defeat, if zero-sum perceptions are high, but beleaguered parties do concede if concession raises the siege, if concession can be recast as victory, if positive-sum perceptions can be made dominant. Obviously, much is in the packaging. It might be expected that North and South may have learned something about packaging and presentation in the past decade. Even if they have not on their own, the time is ripe for a discussion of the process of packaging, presentation, and negotiation that builds on the lessons learned from the ups and downs of the past experience.
The Negotiation Process
In a situation of conflict and stalemate, where a problem cannot be gotten rid of even by the stronger side in the conflict, negotiation is an appropriate means of handling the problem. Studies of its potential for usefulness in the North-South conflict are sorely lacking. With exhortation as the main mode of discourse on North-South relations, little attention has been devoted to exploring ways of conflict management, conciliation, and cooperation. The rights and wrongs of the problem have been endlessly debated, with both sides talking primarily to themselves and their home audiences and with little attempt either to persuade the other party through appeal to its own interests in its own terms or to join forces in seeking a mutually satisfactory solution. What is needed is not only a return to the North-South problem but a new focus in terms of the process of problem solving. If inequality is the characteristic of the problem, negotiation is the appropriate means of changing the structure of relations on the margins and of providing new positions that are more satisfactory to both sides.
The lack of attention to process is perplexing. War is studied and taught as a process, as are many other things such as cooking, tennis, and expository writing. Why, then, is it so rare to see discussions of the process of North-South negotiations, learning from past performance rather than getting stuck on substantive positioning and debating? The question is more than only intellectually interesting, for it can bring some insights with its answer. Negotiation is not usually studied because it is caught among three more common deterministic explanationsâeconomic, political, and moral. Much of the discussion on North-South matters is carried on (primarily by the North) in terms of established economic mechanisms with determinate outcomesâcomparative advantage, supply and demand, pricing, and so on. The rest of the discussion in the North is in terms of simple power determinacies, in which the stronger parties decide and the weaker have not even the choice of rejection. On the part of the South, discussion is usually in equally determinate terms of morality, according to which what must happen is what should happen.
Determinacy does not kill debate, as any economist, political scientist, or philosopher knows, but it does deflect attention from process. Outcomes, rather than the business of getting to them, are the subject of debate. Yet, as every baseball player knows, how you play the game has much to do with whether you win or lose. Process dominatesâeven if it does not determineâoutcome. And because the economic, political, and moral determinates of outcomes are less sure than their advocates would have us believe, and are in any case mutually contradictory, it is worthwhile focusing on the process of negotiation, where economic, political, and moral factors all have a rightful but limited place.
There is no single approach to the study of the negotiation process. Instead, a recent surge of scholarship has produced a number of different approaches, all agreeing on roughly the same essence of the process but each focusing on a different aspect for its analysis. Each then produces different insights into the best ways of conducting negotiations and reaching an optimal result, and each produces different explanations of outcomes, i.e. hypotheses and propositions about why particular outcomes are reached. Without giving a full exposition of each school, a concise summary of their basic parameters and implications can be presented so as to identify the elements that may be useful for analysis of North-South negotiations. All of the approaches currently in use to explain outcomes start from a common appreciation of the essential nature of negotiation as a process of joint decision making that combines conflicting positions into a common outcome, a process in which each party is required to give something from its initial positions to attain an outcome that is mutually (although usually unequally) beneficial and is preferable to nonagreement, i.e. to unilateral attempts at a solution. The analytical question remains, How are such outcomes obtained? Its practical corollary is, How can each party deploy its own efforts to obtain an outcome favorable enough to be acceptable but attractive enough to the other party to draw it away from its own attempts at a unilateral solution and win its acceptance of an agreement?
The structural explanation is given in terms of power, either as relative positions of the parties at the outset of negotiations or as the relative ability of the parties to make their options prevail (or to counter the otherâs efforts to make the otherâs options prevail).1 Structural analysis tells us that effective negotiations begin when the parties have a veto over each otherâs ability to solve the problem and/or when the parties can inflict pain on each other. The ability to inflict deprivations, such as threats or warnings, or provide gratifications in the form of promises or predictions, determines the outcome, and the appropriateness of one or another means is related to the power position (structural imbalance) of the parties. Shifts in the power position of the parties toward balance (strengthening of the weaker, weakening of the stronger) create conditions favorable to negotiation. From the structural point of view, North-South negotiations take place in face of an obvious imbalance that needs to await signs of redressment before they can occur fruitfully. Even without greater equality, however, negotiations can occur in those areas where mutual veto exists, and certain tactics (toughness for the weaker, softness for the stronger) are indicated and to be expected if a productive outcome is to be reached.
The strategic explanation is given in terms of the structure of value attached to the various outcomes produced by the actions of both parties.2 Strategic analysis tells us that rational (value-maximizing) parties will (and should) frequently choose a less favorable noncooperative outcome to avoid being tricked in the search for a more favorable outcome through lack of trust. The party for whom concession is less acceptable than stalemate will do less well in negotiation than the party with a reverse value preference, and the relative ability of a party to do without an agreement determines the otherâs ability to obtain a more favorable outcome. From the strategic point of view, then, North-South negotiations suffer from the absence of both trust and balance. Attempts by the South to reverse the Northern preference for stalemate over concession undermine the attractiveness of an otherwise-indicated Northern policy for establishing trust.
The tactical explanation is based on the choice of the right move at the right moment, defined in terms of the evolution of the problem.3 Tactical analysis indicates that a problem is ripe for resolution when the parties are caught in an intolerable stalemate that neither can break and that is marked by a looming or recent catastrophe, and that parties in negotiation come to terms only in the face of a deadline (a time when outcomes become predictably worse in the absence of an agreement). During negotiations, moments of agreement come from proper levels of openers, proper timing of toughness and softness, and proper disarticulation of the issues into exchangeable items on agreed terms of trade. From the tactical point of view, therefore, North-South relations are not ripe for negotiation and even if negotiated do not operate under any terminal time constraint, two points that explain why there have been so few successful outcomes. On lesser intermediate points, however, there may be occasions for agreement if a conscious effort is made to âbuyâ an agreement with equivalent concessions on related issues through the establishment of appropriate terms of trade.
The incremental process explanation uses a critical-risk or cost calculation based either on the benefits of the outcome or on the other partyâs cost ca...
