This special issue of International Organization looks back on the first fifty years, and especially the last thirty, of this journal. As former editors, we were asked by the editorial board in 1996 to create a special fiftieth anniversary issue. In good academic style, the thought came late and the issue is tardy: you will notice that this is volume 52 of International Organization (founded in 1947). Like many a graduate student over these decades, we hope that the quality of our product will compensate for our long-standing “incomplete.”

Immanuel Kant believed that democracy, economic interdependence, and international law and organizations could establish the foundations for “perpetual peace.” Our analyses of politically relevant dyads show that each of the three elements of the Kantian peace makes a statistically significant, independent contribution to peaceful interstate relations. These benefits are evident even when the influence of other theoretically interesting factors—such as relative power, alliances, geographic contiguity, and economic growth—is held constant. Increasing the number of shared memberships in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) by one standard deviation reduces the incidence of militarized disputes by about 23 percent from the baseline rate for a typical pair of bordering states. If both members of a dyad are democratic, conflict is 35 percent less likely than the baseline; increasing both the dyadic trade–GDP ratio and the trend in trade by a standard deviation reduces the chance of conflict by 38 percent. Together, all the Kantian variables lower the probability of a dispute by 72 percent. We check for reverse causation and find reason to believe that a feedback system is at work, with IGOs reducing conflict and low-conflict dyads joining IGOs. Democracies and interdependent states are more likely to join IGOs with one another, bringing together the three elements of a system for Kantian peace.

This article explains (1) the origins of central banking and (2) variations in the spread and durability of central banks across nations. Early central banks helped bind governments to honor their debts and thereby furthered governments' capacities to efficiently finance military expenditures. The origins of central banking are problematic because government credit-worthiness and efficient wartime fiscal policy are public goods, subject to the free-rider problem. Applying a variant of the joint-products model, I argue that governments offered private benefits (monopoly privileges) to select creditors to induce participation in central banks. To explain cross-national differences, I argue that the level of domestic political decentralization negatively affected the incidence and durability of central banking. Countries with decentralized political systems faced regulatory competition from strong local authorities as licensers of banking monopolies, making it difficult to adopt or sustain central banking. Qualitative and statistical evidence from Europe and the United States to about 1850 support the arguments.

The internationalization of capital markets that occurred during the era of the classical gold standard (1870-1914) was part of a broader set of trends that threatened to drain local markets from capital and channel that capital to the national financial center and, from there, toward other national financial centers. Still, internationalization was neither inevitable, uniform, nor irreversible but was a political choice informed by redistributional considerations between rival domestic interests and decided by politically dominant coalitions. The domestic institutional structure in each country determined the composition of the politically dominant coalition. Decentralized structures allowed potential losers to curb public policies favorable to capital market internationalization, whereas centralized structures allowed expected winners to promote such policies. As a result, economies with centralized states ended up being the most dependent on the international capital market, whereas economies with decentralized states took a less active part in the globalization of finance.

Neoliberals and their neorealist critics have debated the relative importance of two main obstacles to international cooperation—problems of cheating and enforcement and problems of relative gains. By contrast, I argue that problems of international cooperation have a common strategic structure in which a third, distinct obstacle plays a crucial role. Almost regardless of the issue area, states must first resolve the bargaining problem of agreeing on terms before they can implement and begin to enforce an agreement. Furthermore, the bargaining and enforcement problems interact. Using a game model, I show that if states must bargain to determine the deal to be enforced, the “shadow of the future” cuts two ways. A high expectation of continued interactions may make enforcing the agreement easier, but it can also give states an incentive to bargain harder, delaying agreement in hopes of getting a better deal. Empirical evidence from trade and arms control negotiations suggests that this mechanism may help to explain the costly standoffs that are often observed in international politics and are problematic for received neoliberal theories.

The effects of financial capital mobility on monetary policy autonomy are relatively well understood, but the importance of particular monetary regimes in distinct national-institutional settings is not. This article is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the effects of monetary policy regimes on unemployment in different national wage-bargaining settings. Based on a rational expectations, two-stage game of the interaction between the wage behavior of labor unions and the monetary policies of governments, I argue that monetary policies have real (employment) effects in all but the most decentralized bargaining systems. Specifically, in intermediately centralized bargaining systems a credible government commitment to a nonaccommodating monetary policy rule will deter militant wage behavior with salutary effects on unemployment. In highly centralized systems, by contrast, restrictive monetary policies will clash with unions' pursuit of wage-distributive goals and produce inferior employment performance. Only in highly fragmented bargaining systems is money “neutral” in the sense that employment performance is unaffected by monetary regimes. The model has clear consequences for the optimal design of central banks and collective bargaining arrangements and suggests new ways to study institutional change (hereunder the causal effect of increasingly globalized capital markets). The argument is supported by pooled time-series data for fifteen OECD countries over a twenty-one-year period.

A distinct subfield of international relations, IPE, has emerged over the last thirty years, largely in the pages of International Organization. IPE began with the study of international political economy, but over time its boundaries have been set more by a series of theoretical debates than by subject matter. These debates have been organized around points of contestation between specific research programs, reflecting fundamental differences among the generic theoretical orientations in which these research programs are embedded. The fate of specific research programs has depended on their ability to specify cause and effect relationships and to operationalize relevant variables. Scholarship in IPE has become more sophisticated both methodologically and theoretically, and many of its insights have been incorporated into policy discussions. Past points of contestation, including those between realism and its liberal challengers and between various conceptions of domestic structure and international relations, help us to understand recent debates between rationalism and constructivism.

This article examines the effects of party politics and presidential election cycles on U.S. recourse to force abroad. I analyze a game-theoretic model to generate predictions about these effects. In the unique time-consistent equilibrium outcome of the one-shot game, policy varies across political parties. In a subgame–perfect equilibrium outcome of the repeated game, the use of force is invariant to the partisan composition of government. In neither case does policy respond to the electoral cycle.

An empirical analysis supports the predictions of the repeated game. Between 1870 and 1992, U.S. recourse to force abroad responds neither to partisan politics nor to the domestic political calendar. It responds only to changes in U.S. power status and to the advent of general wars.

Plans for the European Monetary Union (EMU) are based on the conventional postulate that increasing the independence of the central bank can reduce inflation without any real economic effects. However, the theoretical and empirical bases for this claim rest on models of the economy that make unrealistic information assumptions and omit institutional variables other than the central bank. When signaling problems between the central bank and other actors in the political economy are considered, we find that the character of wage bargaining conditions the impact of central bank independence by rendering the signals between the bank and the bargainers more or less effective. Greater central bank independence can reduce inflation without major employment effects where bargaining is coordinated, but it can bring higher levels of unemployment where bargaining is less coordinated. Thus, currency unions like the EMU may require higher levels of unemployment to control inflation than their proponents envisage. They will have costs as well as benefits, and these will be unevenly distributed among and within the member nations, depending on the changes they induce in the status of the bank and of wage coordination.

Theories of international cooperation rely on claims about joint gains to argue that governments create international institutions to mitigate information and enforcement problems and realize efficient solutions. We present a model in which politicians propose international institutions to resolve domestic political dilemmas and suggest that the international institutions they propose are sometimes intentionally redistributive. We apply both approaches to the Basle Accord and conclude that domestic politics rather than international market failure motivated American policymakers to propose international regulation, that through international regulation the United States sought to redistribute income from Japanese to American commercial banks, and that, therefore, the Basle Accord did not offer joint gains. Agreement was reached only after the United States used financial market power to eliminate the regulatory status quo. The Basle Accord is an instance of redistributive cooperation. The case suggests that domestic politics should supplant aggregate benefits in explanations of why governments propose and create international institutions.

The international relations (IR) discipline is dominated by the American research community. Data about publication patterns in leading journals document this situation as well as a variance in theoretical orientations. IR is conducted differently in different places. The main patterns are explained through a sociology of science model that emphasizes the different nineteenth-century histories of the state, the early format of social science, and the institutionalized delineation among the different social sciences. The internal social and intellectual structure of American IR is two-tiered, with relatively independent subfields and a top layer defined by access to the leading journals (on which IR, in contrast to some social sciences, has a high consensus). The famous successive “great debates” serve an important function by letting lead theorists focus and structure the whole discipline. IR in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom has historically been structured differently, often with power vested more locally. American IR now moves in a direction that undermines its global hegemony. The widespread turn to rational choice privileges a reintegration (and status-wise rehabilitation) with the rest of political science over attention to IR practices elsewhere. This rationalistic turn is alien to Europeans, both because their IR is generally closer to sociology, philosophy, and anthropology, and because the liberal ontological premises of rational choice are less fitting to European societies. Simultaneously, European IR is beginning to break the local power bastions and establish independent research communities at a national or, increasingly, a European level. As American IR turns from global hegemony to national professionalization, IR becomes more pluralistic.

In an era when many fear the breakdown of the global trading order through the emergence of relatively closed regional trading blocs, assessing the effects of European integration on external European Union trade is particularly important. Surprisingly, despite a severe recession accompanied by record levels of unemployment, a history of increasing protection under similar economic circumstances, and alarming predictions about “fortress Europe,” external trade policy in the region has liberalized in recent years. Prominent trade policy explanations emphasizing changing interest group demands or changing ideas of policymakers are inadequate to account for this significant change in trade policy. Instead, much of this liberalization can be best understood as an unforeseen consequence of the Single European Act. Completing the single market undermined the effectiveness of national trade measures and made it difficult to enact new trade barriers, thus producing a liberal bias in European policy.

The European Middle Ages have recently attracted the attention of international relations (IR) scholars as a “testing-ground” for established IR theories. Neorealists, historicizing neorealists, and constructivists dispute the meanings of medieval anarchy and hierarchy in the absence of sovereignty. On the basis of a detailed critique of these approaches, I offer a historically informed and theoretically controlled interpretation of medieval geopolitics revolving around contested social property relations. My interpretation is meta-theoretically guided by dialectical principles. Lordships are the constitutive units of medieval authority, combining economic and political powers and assigning contradictory forms of rationality to their major agents, lords, and peasants. Interlordly competition over land and labor translates directly into distinct forms of geopolitical relations, generating a culture of war. Against this background, I clarify the specific meanings of the medieval “state,” territoriality, frontiers, peace, war, anarchy, and hierarchy before drawing out the wider implications of changing social property forms for IR theory.

Studies of international institutions, organizations, and regimes have consistently appeared in the pages of International Organization. We review the theoretical and empirical work on international institutions and identify promising directions for the institutionalist research program. Early studies of international institutions were rich with empirical insights and often influenced by theoretical developments in other fields of political science, but lacking an overarching analytical framework they failed to produce a coherent body of scholarship. Current efforts to reinvigorate the study of international institutions draw on a new body of theory about domestic institutions. We argue that the assumptions of this new approach to institutions are more appropriate to international studies than those of earlier attempts to transfer theories across levels of analysis. We suggest that the most productive questions for future research will focus on specifying alternative mechanisms by which institutions can influence outcomes and identify particular sets of questions within this agenda that are especially promising.

Existing explanations of European monetary integration, emphasizing economic interdependence, issue linkage, institutions, and domestic politics, take a predominantly regional approach. In the international monetary thesis developed here, I argue that U.S. policy disturbances, transmitted through the international monetary system, created compelling incentives for European states to cooperate on exchange-rate and monetary policy. I develop a general theory of macroeconomic power, based on open economy macroeconomics, and show how the exercise of such influence can drive regional monetary integration. This article then tests the international thesis with reference to monetary integration within the European Union by examining four periods in which the United States acted to stabilize the international monetary system and seven episodes in which it disrupted the system. European governments and central banks reduced regional monetary cooperation when the United States supported system stability and strengthened it after each episode of disruption. The evidence thus strongly supports the inference that the link is causal.

The effect of increased capital mobility on the national control of macroeconomic policy continues to be a topic of debate. Empirical contributions to this debate share the assumption that domestic macroeconomic policy is driven by either partisan or countercyclical motivations, and that the effects of international financial flows have roughly similar effects in all countries. This article reevaluates the integration hypothesis in a framework in which manipulations of the macroeconomy derive from opportunistic motivations. The article emphasizes the ways in which prior institutional choices effect the way these motivations are translated into actions. Evidence from individual country and pooled time-series tests suggests that opportunistic cycles are less likely to occur when (1) a government maintains a fixed exchange rate in the presence of highly mobile capital or (2) when the central bank enjoys above-average independence.

International relations has often been treated as a separate discipline distinct from the other major fields in political science, namely American and comparative politics. A main reason for this distinction has been the claim that politics in the international system is radically different from politics domestically. The degree of divergence between international relations (IR) and the rest of political science has waxed and waned over the years; however, in the past decade it seems to have lessened. This process has occurred mainly in the “rationalist research paradigm,” and there it has both substantive and methodological components. Scholars in this paradigm have increasingly appreciated that politics in the international realm is not so different from that internal to states, and vice versa. This rationalist institutionalist research agenda thus challenges two of the main assumptions in IR theory. Moreover, scholars across the three fields now tend to employ the same methods. The last decade has seen increasing cross-fertilization of the fields around the importance of institutional analysis. Such analysis implies a particular concern with the mechanisms of collective choice in situations of strategic interaction. Some of the new tools in American and comparative politics allow the complex, strategic interactions among domestic and international agents to be understood in a more systematic and cumulative way.

Contrary to widely accepted theories of interest-group demand for protection, industries that experience high and rising import competition after a reduction in trade barriers often become less rather than more protectionist in the long term. To unravel this paradox, I propose and test a theory that explains variation in domestic producer groups' demand for protection over time. This model of industry behavior suggests that trade liberalization has a “positive feedback” effect on the policy preferences and political strategies of domestic industries, compelling them to adjust to more competitive market conditions and thereby reducing their future demand for protection.

Although it is widely acknowledged that economic interests influence the politics of trade policy, most research on international relations treats security issues differently. Do conflicting economic interests shape political debate over foreign policy even when security issues are highly salient? To answer this question, I test a range of hypotheses about conflicting interests in the economic stakes of U.S. foreign policy during the early Cold War era. I present evidence that economic interests in their home states were closely related to senators' voting patterns on foreign policy issues. These patterns hold across economic and security issues. I also find that political parties play an important mediating role, making senators more or less receptive to various economic interests.