Robert Keohane Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Your work in this subfield of political economy can help us understand globalization in a way that the state-centric model does not. Talk a little about that. This work positioned the field to be able to think about those problems, [which] came to the forefront in the nineties.
We talked in the 1970s about interdependence, which was the notion of strong relationships between societies which made them dependent on each other. It might be symmetrical, as in the case of Germany and France; it might be asymmetrical, as in the case of the United States and Guatemala. And there are power dimensions of interdependence, and we tried to analyze that. But the notion of interdependence was essentially conceived of as in trade, when goods are produced in two different countries, the U.S. and Japan, for example, and they trade them back and forth. We started talking about internationalization, and the phrase became "globalization."
John Ruggie has the best analogy. John wrote me once that the difference between interdependence and globalization is the difference between national post offices and Federal Express. Federal Express takes everything to Memphis every night and redistributes it, so it doesn't matter where it comes from, the cost is the same. Globalization is an increase of the thickening of interdependence, the globalization of patterns, not just regionally but worldwide, and the shrinking of distance. Essentially, it's the process by which distance is shrunk, so that it's easier to have an effect in a faraway place than it was.
In my view, globalization is not merely to be seen as economic, as it often is. It's social, it's ecological, and it's political/military. So, 9/11 is an example of globalization. The fact that a small number of people armed with box cutters can destroy the largest building in the biggest, most important city of the United States -- that's a form of globalization, that they launched that plot in Afghanistan and Germany and elsewhere, and were able to take action at a distance.
So it's not just economic globalization, it's economic, social, ecological (global warming is a good example of globalization) and political/military.
You mentioned 9/11. That event was a trauma for the United States, coming out of the blue, at least in terms of public consciousness. Did it also shatter some of our notions about where the international community was going, where international organizations were going? I'm talking both about the event and the U.S. response.
It certainly has; it's changed the pattern a lot. I did an essay right after 9/11 on what I called the globalization of fear, and I drew an analogy between the globalization of formal violence in the period after World War II and the globalization of informal violence in 9/11, informal violence being violence by non-state actors who don't necessarily have a huge amount of force at their disposal and who are not undertaking it in any formal way.
Formal violence became globalized with the transcontinental bomber, nuclear weapons, and missiles. In 1944, Walter Lippmann said that now we, the United States, face the problem that we have to worry about who controls Europe and Japan as never before because they can attack us, and they didn't use to be able to attack us. The oceans, he said, used to be a barrier, and now they're a way in which [an enemy] can carry a force across. The United States strategy changed dramatically with nuclear weapons, because the United States had to follow a deterrence strategy, a forward strategy; we couldn't simply sit back and say, "The oceans protect us. We have plenty of time. If somebody gets really dangerous, like the Germans did under Hitler, we can then rearm and deal with it."
The globalization of informal violence which 9/11 represents led to a fundamental change in U.S. strategy, because no longer could we wait and simply say, "We are going to sit back and not worry about this very much, because we're protected." Now we saw the jet aircraft across the ocean with terrorists coming into the U.S. and then getting on the planes, and of course they could also get on planes in Frankfurt directly, and try to attack the United States.
So there's a sense of the globalization of informal violence. I used my mentor's discussion of fear to say that for much of history, liberals have been noted not for belief in progress, but for the fact that they fear coercive government violence. And now as liberals we have to be worried about coercive nongovernmental violence.
Are you surprised by the way the Bush administration has tipped the balance against international organizations and toward a unilateral response?
I'm not surprised, because they came into office talking against international organizations, although in a different form. It was the old classic Realist form: we've been giving up too much autonomy to international organizations -- Condi Rice saying we shouldn't have the 101st Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten in Bosnia. It was very disdainful of humanitarian missions, and some of the other activities of international organizations. So I'm not surprised by it.
It's very disappointing from a professional point of view, because when those of us who emphasize and value the role of institutions in world politics think we won the debate (which I think we did, intellectually, in the academy), it's disappointing to see these throwbacks -- people (some of them old, like Rumsfeld; some of them not so old, like Rice) who still just don't get it. An academic teaching people over a period of twenty years hopes, at least, they will learn some of these newer truths. So that's disappointing.
Now, what the Bush administration did, I would differentiate. I would differentiate three phases of the Bush administration since 9/11. The first is the Afghanistan phase, when they acted exactly as I think any great power would have acted. They had the authority from the United Nations to act against Afghanistan; would have acted anyway. It was a clear case of self-defense, and a case where efficacious action required a destruction of the bases for terrorism. Even though that wouldn't be a sufficient response, it was clearly a necessary response. Almost every state in the world recognized that, and almost everybody in the U.S. recognized that. So that's the first phase, which was entirely consistent with what any U.S. administration would have done.
The second phase was their distinctive blend of Realism plus neo-conservatism. It wasn't Realism, mostly. It was the belief they could change the whole world for the better by attacking Iraq. It's clear that wasn't linked to Afghanistan; even they didn't believe that. The weapons of mass destruction story was overblown dramatically, if not concocted. The Realists, actually, were opposed to this war because they said, "The weapons of mass destruction are not a big problem. Lots of countries have them. We can deter Iraq; why are you invading it?" I said this before the war, that it was like Thucydides's discussion of the Peloponnesian War: the real cause was the one kept most out of sight.
The real cause, I believe, was to demonstrate American power in the Middle East, to intimidate the Palestinians and to intimidate the Iranians, the Libyans, the Syrians, everybody else. I think that was the hard-line offensive Realists's purpose -- Rumsfeld and Cheney -- and people like Wolfowitz probably felt they were going to institute democracy in Iraq, and it was going to be an easy process.
So for all of this, they said, "If we can get the UN on board for our mission, fine, but we're not going to let the coalition determine the mission," in Rumsfeld's words, "and so we're going to disdain the UN if it won't go along," which it wouldn't. Not only would the UN not go along, no more than four Security Council member would have voted for the U.S. resolution in the end.
Then we see a third phase, and the third phase becomes evident by about September or October of last year, when the U.S. starts realizing that the mess in Iraq is so bad and the U.S. so much lacks legitimacy that it can't solve the problem in Iraq. It can't get a moderately democratic, even minimally democratic, stable government -- that is, no civil war and no base for terrorism, and a regime which is not totally opposed to the United States. Those goals can't be attained without the UN. And so you have Paul Bremer, like Henry IV at Canossa standing in the snow for three days. Bremer didn't stand in the snow, but he went to Kofi Annan's headquarters and begged Annan to come and do the report on the elections. And very much the same thing: "Okay, we were wrong ... " They'll never say they were wrong; they haven't admitted being wrong to anything. But they have to, in effect, admit that they have to go back to the United Nations.
So the overall story, although it has more bumps in the road than I expected, is a story which shows the importance of international institutions, because the test of that doesn't come when a regime of people who are in favor of international institutions is in power. The test comes when people are in power who are opposed to them, instinctively. When they have to go back to them, then that tells you something.
Now, I had it a little bit wrong in the piece on 9/11. I thought that coming back to the UN right away after 9/11 would show [the importance of international institutions], and I didn't anticipate they would then so pigheadedly reject the United Nations and attack Iraq. But the overall story comes through in the same way, because once they attacked Iraq they discovered that they needed international institutions, because you can't mobilize a longstanding coalition which is legitimate, of democratic countries whose publics care about legitimacy, unless you are aligned in some way with an international institution -- the UN or something else -- which is seen as representing the views of not just ourselves. That's the overall lesson of Iraq, and that, therefore, sustains the view that international institutions are terribly important, even in this high politics security area, which is certainly interstate relations, the war in Iraq.
In that essay that you wrote shortly after 9/11 you also applied some of the concepts you had developed to the problem of terrorism, talking about the asymmetry of information that the terrorists had. Talk a little about that insight, and what it tells us about the future in terms of how we should deal with terrorism.
Let me go back a step, because one of the problems with much of the work on
interdependence in the 1970s was that it often ignored power, and it assumed
that everything was going to be harmonious, we're all in the same boat. The
rhetoric of policymakers, even Henry Kissinger, was like that. But, of course,
the reality is that there are powerful and there are weak states and powerful
and weak non-state actors, like multinational corporations or NGOs. 
Joe Nye
and I developed a notion of asymmetrical interdependence. The concept was
that asymmetrical interdependence generates power relationships. So the more
asymmetry you have in your favor, the stronger you are, the more you have
of some resource, the more your advantage in influencing the outcome of an
event.
So if we go to 9/11, the asymmetries of resources run hugely in favor of the United States and its allies and hugely against the terrorists, al Qaeda and the rest of them. But asymmetries of information before 9/11 rested heavily in favor of al Qaeda because they understood the U.S. vulnerability, they understood that they were at war with the United States. The U.S. didn't understand that we were at war with them, and we weren't tracking them very well. So they had a temporary advantage, and they exploited it. Now, that advantage was temporary, because now they no longer have asymmetrical information working on their behalf, given the high-tech capabilities of the U.S., especially.
But the larger lesson dealing with terrorism goes more to the Iraq/UN experience than to the informational point. The larger lesson is that you need to follow policies that make you seem legitimate in the eyes of large numbers of people. Mao said about guerrillas that "the fish swim in the sea." That is, the militants only survive if they have a lot of supporters among ordinary peasants. I think terrorists only survive if they have a lot of supporters in the population. Some people may feed them and support them and give them safe-houses; others would just not report, would just not oppose them. And if our policies are seen as reckless and arrogant and oppressive to people in Pakistan or Indonesia, then they are not going to mobilize against terrorism. They may [provide] a breeding ground for terrorists, or at least they're going to harbor them. We have to worry about what Joe Nye calls our soft power, our ability to persuade people that their lives will be better if they cooperate with us. That's not going to be done on the barrel of a gun.
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See also the Conversations with History interview with Joe Nye (1998)