Robert Keohane Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Give us an example of what those terms mean when you think about information, uncertainty, and so on. Give us a concrete example in a particular issue area, the kind of matter that people care about which Waltz wasn't addressing.
Let's go back to trade. Trade is a classic case where there's a conflict. Because if we have two states, both of which are under the influence of their manufacturers, and therefore they want to export but they also want to limit imports, this leads to conflict, because everybody can't both export and not import. So, as has been known for almost 200 years, there is a joint gain to be made if they can both liberalize. Overall, they will both benefit, but there will be losers. The weaker manufacturers who are now hiding behind tariff walls in their own countries will lose because they'll lose those markets and they may go out of business.
The problem is, how do you overcome this? If you simply had no institutions, you could make promises to each other, but then what do I do? Do I accept your promise and therefore cut my tariffs and hope that you will, in fact, not only reduce your tariffs, but you'll also not do other things surreptitiously which I can't always observe, to equivalently have a tariff, like a subsidy of these firms? If I can't accept your promise, I can't persuade anybody on my side to lower our tariffs. So nobody lowers tariffs.
How do you reduce that uncertainty? Well, one way you reduce it is to say we'll both commit to a set of rules, and these rules are general across a lot of products, so that if you start breaking the rules on one set of products there's a danger you'll bring the whole system down. Then those industries in your country which are exporters and are worried about that all of a sudden become worried that if you're violating the rules on textiles and shoes, maybe this will cost them access for televisions and jet aircraft. And then they are mobilized on you. But the key to start that process is to institutionalize a set of rules that reduces the uncertainty that you will keep your promise, and therefore increases the credibility of your promise.
And this would be done through an organization such as the World Trade Organization.
Such as the World Trade Organization.
Now, the next problem that then comes up once you put something like that in place is democratic accountability. Who is the WTO responsible to? Now, as a theorist, the lights must turn on in your brain, because it raises a whole new set of problems.
I've been working on accountability recently. Earlier I was working on what are the functions performed by these organizations. And now the question arises, as you say, as they become stronger and WTO has become quite strong, what about democratic accountability, or what about any kind of accountability? The first point to recognize is that there are other kinds of accountability that aren't simply democratic accountability. That is, pluralist accountability. There's the accountability to a set of laws. There's accountability of the states to a judicial system in the World Trade Organization. There is reputational accountability: states may worry about their reputations. I don't think it's possible at the current stage of world politics to expect highly developed democratic accountability. We don't have a world government, we're not going to have a world government for a while; there's not enough consensus and not enough sense of common interest and common values. We're going to have to settle for more fragmented forms of accountability. It's going to be a tradeoff between local control and international cooperation.
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