International Relations as Negotiation

Brian R Urlacher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317257424
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Negotiations are central to the operation of the international system, found at the heart of every conflict and every act of cooperation. Negotiation is the primary vehicle that states use to manage conflict and build prosperity in a complicated and dangerous international system. International Relations as Negotiation provides an overview of world politics that is both approachable and detailed. It explores the factors that help or undermine efforts to negotiate solutions to international problems. Key topics including international conflict and security, the global economy, international law and governance, and environmental sustainability are explored in turn. The history of the international system is traced through major treaty agreements and peace conferences, and the future of the international system is projected. The result is a survey of world politics that provides a seamless narrative about conflict and cooperation in the international system.

CHAPTER 1

NEGOTIATION AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

INTRODUCTION

The very concept of international relations implies interconnections and interactions. These relationships tie us all together in a common global system. Scientific and artistic advances as well as economic and political developments can move through the international system and, in doing so, touch the lives of millions if not billions of people. We are interconnected, but interconnection does not mean harmony—quite the opposite! As humans we have goals and aspirations, ideas and ambitions. Disagreements are common and perhaps even healthy. As Robert Axelrod and Robert Keohane (1985, 226) point out, “Cooperation is not equivalent to harmony … cooperation can only take place in situations that contain a mixture of conflicting and complementary interests.”

To understand how people work out their differences (or fail to do so), this book draws on a wide body of practical and academic work on negotiation and organizes it around some of the central issues of international politics: international security, the global economy, and global governance. This book is about global problems that involve conflicting and complementary interests, but more importantly, it is about how we solve global problems through negotiation. Negotiation, at its heart, is problem solving. It is getting people with different interests and goals to find a mutual solution to a problem that all involved can accept. Negotiation is a part of everyday life. We negotiate with friends and spouses, roommates and coworkers, clerks and car sales staff. Yet, problem solving in the international system operates under a different set of rules than we typically encounter in our daily lives.

THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

International negotiations, unlike negotiations in other contexts, take place in an anarchic system. In other words, there is no world government with the authority to create law or the power to enforce international agreements. When negotiations break down in a domestic setting, a higher authority has a stake in seeing conflict resolved amicably. In most domestic settings, court systems function, and rules are enforced by a government.

By contrast, the international system contains many autonomous actors who must work out for themselves whatever rules will exist and find ways to enforce those rules. The treaties and conventions that govern nuclear technology, human rights, trade policy, and the management of the global environment all have been negotiated by states. When these agreements fail, states, acting alone, in unison, or through international organizations, attempt to enforce compliance or renegotiate the terms of the agreements. When these efforts fail, the consequences can range from a grumbling continuation of the status quo to the start of world war.

A great deal of effort goes into negotiating and renegotiating the international system. As you will see in Chapter 2, the alliances, treaties, and organizations negotiated by states set the tone for the international system, but no deal is permanent. Alliances can fail, international laws can wither, and international organizations can die. Anarchy inherent in the international system means a bizarre balance of chaos and order. In international politics, negotiation is a way of life, and failure to negotiate well can mean death.

Anarchy also increases people’s vulnerability to social traps. A social trap is a situation in which individuals act in a way that they perceive to be good for themselves, but these individual actions have great negative collective consequences. One example of this is fishing in international waters. An individual fishing vessel may wish to take as many fish as it possibly can from the world’s oceans. More fish means greater prosperity. But if everyone seeks to take as many fish as possible, the result is overfishing and the destruction of fish populations, leaving everyone worse off in the long run. For example, a surge in demand for bluefin tuna in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the near extinction of bluefin tuna in the South Pacific Ocean.

The solution to many social traps requires individuals to work cooperatively, even though cooperation may run against their immediate self-interest. Collective action is easy when there is a central authority that can impose a solution, mobilize resources, and enforce cooperation. In an anarchic environment, however, people must find ways to achieve collective action on their own. Sometimes, people are able to come together to change behavior and solve a problem. In the case of the southern bluefin tuna, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia came together to impose limits on their fishing industries. This has helped the recovery of the fish, but voluntary cooperation is no guarantee. For example, in the early years of the bluefin tuna agreement, Japan’s fishing industry repeatedly took more than the agreed amount. To save the collective effort, New Zealand and Australia had to pressure Japan diplomatically and through international organizations to follow the agreed-upon rules for managing the tuna population (see Southern Bluefin Tuna 2000).

One of the challenges of collective action in the international system is the wide variety of actors. Different types of actors have different resources that can be brought to bear on a problem and different goals that they would like to achieve. Different types of actors are also able to participate in different arenas. States, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), multinational corporations (MNCs), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) all have a role to play. In addition to the wide variety of actors that participate in the international system, the number of actors has grown greatly over the last hundred years. The end result is that problem solving in the international system is a patchwork of actors and relationships built up around various problems.

In international efforts to solve collective problems, states are in a somewhat unique position. States have the ability to field armies, control territory, and extract taxes, which give them unrivaled influence in the system. States have long dominated the international system, and their numbers have grown steadily over the past several hundred years. When the United States gained independence from Great Britain in the late eighteenth century, there were approximately twenty other states in the international system. Many areas of the world were under colonial rule or were not organized around the hierarchical and professional bureaucracies that characterize modern states. In the wake of the First World War, the number of states had grown to fifty. In 1950, the international system contained approximately seventy-five states. Today, the United Nations has 193 member states. As the number of states has risen, states have increasingly linked themselves together through IGOs such as the United Nations, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Arab League. The connections states have created through IGOs now outnumber states in the international system. The more than three hundred IGOs created in the last hundred years have become central to cooperation and problem solving between states.

The twentieth century has also witnessed a surge of nonstate actors, from international nonprofits and NGOs to MNCs to transnational networks of people. Some of these networks are formalized, such as professional and scholarly associations, but many are informal associations made possible by the Internet and social media. Nonstate actors are the most numerous actors in the system, and their numbers are rapidly expanding. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2003, xvi) records 64,000 MNCs with more than 870,000 subsidiaries. Estimates of registered international NGOs run as high as 13,000 (Anheier et al. 2001), while the number of less formalized entities that have not applied for formal NGO status with the states in which they operate is uncountable.

These various types of actors often have different purposes, goals, and resources, but each has the potential to shape the international system, for better or for worse. Many of these nonstate actors are tolerated or even embraced by states and IGOs. Antipoverty and development programs paid for by states are often carried out in conjunction with NGOs. By contrast, some nonstate actors such as transnational criminal gangs, terrorist groups, soccer hooligans, drug cartels, and hacker groups are targeted by states as malicious entities that need to be controlled or destroyed. In 2010, the antisecrecy group known as Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. documents. The response from the United States was a biting condemnation of Wikileaks. In the days that followed the documents’ release, the Wikileaks website was pushed underground, the organization’s funding was strangled, and the movement of the group’s leadership was restricted. Yet, the retaliation leveled against Wikileaks pales in comparison to the decade-long global effort to stomp out the terrorist group al Qaeda and its affiliates.

THE NEGOTIATION FRAMEWORK

Negotiation in international politics clearly takes place in a context that is different than our everyday experiences with negotiations. Consequently, many problems that can be easily solved by a central government within a state (the provision of security, management of the environment, disaster relief, and infrastructure development) are more complicated internationally. Chapter 3 presents some of the scholarly work relevant to understanding international negotiations, but the core logic of negotiations as problem solving is the same for international negotiations and for negotiations in our daily lives.

Much of international politics centers on efforts to resolve problems through discussion, debate, and mutual agreement rather than through the direct use of force. Getting a deal often involves a back-and-forth process: sharing information, proposing solutions, offering concessions, searching for new ideas. As negotiations play out, the parties attempt to find common ground, but they also seek to gain advantage. Nobel Prize recipient Thomas Schelling (1960) describes negotiations as mixed-motive situations. In negotiations the different parties are both adversaries and friends. Each is trying to defeat the other but also needs the other to achieve shared goals.

The mixed-motive nature of negotiation can be seen in the 2005 peace process between the government of Sudan and separatist rebels in southern Sudan. Sudan had been torn by decades of civil war, which left the government isolated and the vast oil wealth in the south of the country underdeveloped. The peace deal that emerged from negotiations between the government of Sudan and rebels was a finely balanced set of compromises over the political fate of different areas of southern Sudan. These compromises were hard fought. In a very literal sense, the negotiations were war by other means, but the negotiations were also business. A peace deal meant that violence, death, and destruction would decline. A peace deal also meant that oil fields impossible to develop in the middle of a war could then be mined. The prospect of oil development was central to the negotiations, and the final peace agreement included a revenue sharing plan for the country’s oil wealth. The shared interest in developing the oil wealth in southern Sudan helped make a peace deal possible between the government and rebels. The peace agreement that ended Sudan’s long and brutal civil war demonstrates that, even in some of the most hostile circumstances, people must manage both overlapping and competing interests. Problems of security, economics, and global governance all can be approached from the same mixed-motive perspective. All states seek to improve their situations, but oftentimes, the only viable path forward is to work with an adversary or even an enemy.

When the various parties in a dispute sit down to discuss an issue, they will each have an idea of how they would like to see the conflict resolved. The preferred outcome of a conflict participant is described in negotiation theory as a party’s ideal point. In life, we rarely get exactly what we want, and international negotiations are no different. Conflict participants almost certainly will have to compromise, to move away from their ideal points to find a solution. Compromise may not be bad. Finding a solution to a problem may be desirable, even if the solution is not exactly what each party had in mind. Still, there will be a point at which parties in a negotiation process have compromised so much that an agreement would not be better than continuing with the status quo. For example, years of World Trade Organization negotiations broke down in 2008 over the details of trade policies and agriculture subsidies that would protect farmers from global competition. All the parties had made numerous concessions over the years, marching the talks forward, but changes to agricultural policy seemed to be too much for several of the key countries involved in the negotiations. The point where conflict participants no longer see a settlement as desirable is known as the reservation point. Given the willingness of parties to make concessions, a deal may or may not be possible. Figure 1.1 illustrates a hypothetical problem in which all possible solutions to the problem are arranged on a single continuum. The parties are willing to accept solutions on the continuum up to their reservation points. There is an area on the continuum that overlaps for both parties. This overlapping area is known as the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA), and any point in the ZOPA is a workable solution to the problem for both parties.

In the zone of possible agreement, any deal would be acceptable, but each party would prefer to have a deal closer to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Negotiation and International Politics
• Chapter 2 International History as Negotiation
• Chapter 3 Negotiation Theory
• Chapter 4 Security and Conflict
• Chapter 5 Security and Cooperation
• Chapter 6 International Political Economy
• Chapter 7 Global Governance
• Chapter 8 Environmental Management
• Chapter 9 Negotiation in Practice
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author