Robert Keohane Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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How did you apply these theories in international relations that were not being explained by the state-centric model? What specific subject areas did you look at, and what conclusions did you reach? What made cooperation work -- the very same factors that were described in these theories?
I was looking at postwar patterns of cooperation in political economy between the United States and Western Europe, especially; also, later, Japan. I was looking at trade, at oil, at monetary relationships, at the political economy of the period from 1945 until 1980 or so. That was the domain for the analysis. I was trying to understand why there was so much cooperation, and also why it wasn't totally general, why there was variation in cooperation.
I want to say two more things about this. One is to go back to your earlier
question about determination and courage. I don't know if it's that, but
you've got to be willing to be very dissatisfied for a substantial period
of time if you want to attack big theory problems. 
I went to Stanford until
1981, and I published this book in 1984, and I really figured it out by about
'82, most of it, or at least the essence of it. But I remember for a couple
of years, probably 1979 to '81, I didn't want to go to a cocktail party.
I didn't want someone to ask me, "What are you working on?" I couldn't
say three coherent sentences about it. I was so confused about it.
It's important to recognize that confusion is a necessary condition for doing significant work -- I won't say major, but making some step forward. Because if the problem isn't confusing, it's not that difficult a problem, and you can figure it out right away. So you have to allow yourself to be confused, and it's a very difficult situation to be in. It makes you unhappy to be confused all the time, and to [wonder], "Why can't I figure this out properly?" After I went to Brandeis in 1982, I was having lunch with my mentor, Judith Shklar, and talking to her very tentatively about this book on cooperation I wanted to write, and she said, "Oh, will it be a small book with large type and large margins?" That is, "There's nothing to say about international [cooperation]." My admired, powerful mentor said this. "So what are you doing it for?" in effect.
Well, that's a real challenge, right? But maybe it is courage, maybe you have to say, "Okay, I'm going to do it anyway, even though this person I admire more than anybody else in the world, intellectually, thinks it's an impossible, foolish task. I know that if I could do it, then it couldn't be belittled. It would have to be an accomplishment if she thinks it's impossible."
Now, the second thing I want to say is that a lot of academics benefit tremendously from giving talks on work in progress. You may think you're doing somebody a favor to go and give a talk for them -- you don't get paid for it, you just go -- but you learn a tremendous amount from it. One of the puzzles of this was broken in a talk I gave in Washington at Fred Bergsten's institute. Fred Bergsten is an economist, probably the most important policy-oriented person in the last twenty years working on issues of political economy, but he's not a theorist. I gave this talk about cooperation, and Fred said right away, "What's the difference between cooperation and harmony?" And I realized that that was the key to the puzzle. That is, I wasn't going to argue that there was harmony. There's not harmony; there's conflict in international politics. It's decentralized realm, it's anarchy in a certain sense.
So cooperation has to be something different, and it comes out of conflict. It's mutual adjustment to conflict. Once you see cooperation that way -- not as harmony, which made it so seem odd, how would you ever get cooperation to fit in international politics if it's harmony? -- once you see that it's actually a form of discord which generates cooperation, mutual adjustment instead of conflict, then you can get a handle on it, because it becomes very similar to the problem of conflict. It's the obverse side of conflict. But that wouldn't have come to me, perhaps, if Fred hadn't just said it at that talk, and I wouldn't have heard that if I hadn't been giving that talk.
Help us understand by talking about one of the topics that you focused on, one of these issue areas. Try to recall a creative moment where you saw something in one of these issue areas that helped you gather momentum on this journey.
You asked earlier what it's like to be a theorist. The answer is, it goes the other way. That is, the creative moments I remember especially are reading Samuelson, reading Akerlof, hearing Bergsten ask about cooperation and harmony. They're conceptual moments when you conceptualize the problem differently. I already had a description in my mind; I knew what had happened in trade policy. I knew that there had been an expansion of cooperation. Take trade. In 1930, the U.S. passed a very high tariff, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which basically had a 50-plus percent tariff across most American products. By 1975, when I was working on this, the tariff was down to about 7 or 8 percent. Now it's below 5 percent -- a dramatic fall in tariffs, which had not been forecast. So here's a huge fall in tariff which results from cooperation, results from a set of rules, the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, which are gradually instituted and gradually made more binding, even though they weren't very strong, legally.
So the question is, how did that happen? What was contributed there? Well, what was happening there, it appeared to me, was that when you observed it you saw a pattern of reciprocity. Nobody was being altruistic. Nobody was giving anything away. Nobody was [responding to] what the economists would say: "Lower your tariffs; it's for your own good." They weren't doing that. They were saying, "I'll lower my tariff on sheep's blood if you'll lower your tariffs on cow dung," that kind of thing. In real terms: "I'll lower my tariff on pasta if you'll lower your tariff on wine and textile machinery." So there was a pattern of reciprocity. But then how did they make that stick? They made it stick by making a set of deals and institutionalizing them in rules, which they then had an obligation to maintain. A pattern of domestic politics was then generated which supported those rules, because export industries became stronger over time, and import-competing industries became weaker over time.
So there was a complex pattern that you observed, which was institutionalized cooperation driven by a desire to cooperate because actors saw they could gain from it, not altruistically; then leading to lower tariffs, then leading to a different composition of the domestic political economy with more export firms who supported even lower tariffs -- the import competing firms that were losers were weakened because the tariffs were lower and they were driven out of business, and you had this spiral.
I understood the spiral, but the question is, what contribution is being made by the international institution? And [the answer] is the reduction of uncertainty, the creation of a situation where the costs of making deals are lower because you have regular trade rounds, and the increased credibility of promises because the cost of breaking rules is higher than the cost of breaking one promise. So if the promises were institutionalized in a set of rules, and you either on the whole kept the promises or you threatened the whole institution which was benefiting yourself, the tendency was -- in the long run, not always right away -- to grudgingly keep your promises, as the U.S. did two months ago on steel tariffs.
Another element in the evolution of ideas in the field was a journal like International Organization, which you edited. Help us understand how that contributes to the process of building this base of ideas.
This journal, like many journals, is double-blind refereed. Academics send
in their manuscripts; two or sometimes three referees read them, and the
referees don't know who wrote the paper, and the paper writer never knows
who the referees were. 
It's as objective a process as you can get. Of course,
people's ideas are not totally objective. I took over International Organization as
editor in 1974 when I was 32, because the editor had left his university
suddenly. I was on the board of the journal, and I was prevailed upon to
take it over temporarily, and then I enjoyed doing it and thought it was
fun, and did it for six years.
A major journal like International Organization is a focal point for people's attention to the field. If there's something changing in the field, something going on, it's a way to transmit this information quickly to people, and to make it common knowledge. Everybody will have read the recent issues of International Organization and will be able to talk about them.
Joe Nye and I had put out our first work on so-called transnational relations (the role of non-state actors like multinational corporations in world politics), in a special issue of IO before I was editor. Right after I became editor there was a special issue which Fred Bergsten was involved in, and also Joe Nye and Lawrence Krause, on political economy, which put political economy on the agenda. So here was a major statement -- half the articles by economists, half by political scientists, some of them jointly by political scientists and economists -- on the major issues of political economy today: multinational investment, trade, international monetary system, and the institutional and political factors that are affecting them. You can do that with a journal, and everybody can see it. It was also published as a book, but the journal part was probably more significant.
The advantage of being a journal editor is that you're at the center of this process. You see it and you can shape it, to some extent. In my first issue I wrote an editor's essay called "International Organization and the Crisis of Interdependence," where I made a claim (and this was in 1974 or 1975, right after the oil crisis) that there was a crisis going on of interdependence, that growth had slowed down or stopped in the West. There was a general sense that we had to restructure the system after Bretton Woods collapsed, and so it was a moment when it was clear that people needed to think politically about the world economy, because it wasn't automatically taking care of itself. I was in the right place in the right time.
You said when we were talking about your background that your parents had focused you on what was going on in the world. Was this an outlet for that sensitivity? A lot was going on in the world as you were doing this work that made you wonder about where this interdependence, and later globalization, would be going.
I got two senses from my parents there. One was a very strong sense of moral commitment. I've always been a student of international politics because I cared about the outcomes, not just for curiosity. I thought (maybe with hubris) that one could make some difference in how people behave in the world if they think differently about it. If they have the notion that if they have to conflict, they can generate policies (such as those of the second Bush administration) which generate more conflict; and if they have the idea that if they redesign their policies or institutions there could be more mutually beneficial collaboration without giving up one's own interests, the world would be a better place. That was, in a sense, one of the driving forces that comes from my mother's strong sense of social democracy -- the missionary child who has left orthodox religion but who retains the secular mission to make the world better. That was definitely transmitted to me.
The other side of it is the interest in the world. Well, there are really three sides -- the second side is interest in the world. What was changing in the world was always the topic of our conversation in our households. I was always well aware this was a fascinating world where things happened; you didn't know what was going to happen.
And the third element, which I think came from my dad, was much more the theorist element. My mother was more practical and more oriented toward action, and my father was more oriented toward reading and reflection, though they both did some of both. The theoretical side probably comes from him, the willingness to sit back and to study for a couple of years and try to think about a problem, as opposed to going out and serving as an undersecretary of something.
How was what you were doing affected by what I would call the "clash of schools" -- not of civilizations, but the clash of schools? From your work and the work of others, a subfield emerged in international relations theory: political economy, international institutions, and so on. But the Realist theory, the state-centric model, was still there, and in some ways still on the attack. How was your work furthered by that dialogue within the discipline from people who weren't part of this community that you were building?
I'm greatly in debt to Kenneth Waltz, whom you've interviewed, and who was
involved in a seminar that you and I were both involved in during the seventies
at Berkeley. We met maybe five times a term, a seminar on international movements
and national control. 
Ken, the most distinguished Realist thinker of his
generation, was in the process of systematizing a Realist view that had been
brilliantly developed by Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, and George Kennan
and others, but never really systematized in a way that was rigorously logical.
Waltz did that in a book published in 1979, but most of this had been published
in an article in 1975. So in the period of the mid-seventies when I was at
Stanford and he was at Berkeley, he was doing this.
That was clearly a powerful intellectual construction. First, it meant that the Realist view was a lot clearer than it had been, so you could see what it was and what its integrity was. And, secondly, therefore, it seemed to me that it made it clearer what it was missing. It was missing any attention to information -- to the variation in how much information people have, and how much uncertainty there is. That was ignored in the theory. The very clarity of the theory, and the very explicitness and intellectual power of it, as Waltz expressed it in a book of less than 200 pages, showed you where the weak points were. It was as if he was showing you a blueprint, and here there was the weak point. No concern with uncertainty of information, and therefore the role of institutions was omitted.
Once I realized that institutions serve principally to reduce uncertainty and provide information and credibility, then it was clear how the institutions fit into the missing part of Waltz's theory. A rebel against orthodoxy is always greatly in the debt of the people who can express what is the dominant view with utter clarity and logic.
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See also the Conversations with History interview with Ken Waltz (2003)