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“Less Filling, Tastes Great”: The Realist-Neoliberal Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Emerson M. S. Niou  and
Peter C. Ordeshook
Emerson M. S. Niou
Affiliation:
Duke University
Peter C. Ordeshook
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
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Abstract

This essay examines and reformulates the realist-neoliberal debate. It focuses initially on the issue of the attribution of instrumental goals to states—the goals they pursue as a function of the environment they confront—and argues not only that such goals are epiphenomena of other things but also that their specification constitutes a mere redescription of the alternative equilibria that states can achieve in anarchic systems. The world orders that realists and neoliberals envision are but alternative equilibria to a more general game. In that game cooperation, regardless of its form, must be endogenously enforced, and a debate over instrumental goals (whether it is best to model states as relative or absolute resource maximizers) is not central to the development of a theory that explains and predicts world orders.

Instead, the realist-neoliberal debate should be recast. The central research agenda should be to develop models that illuminate the following: how the equilibrium to a game in which states structure international affairs influences the types of issue-specific subgames states play, how countries coordinate to equilibria of different types; how the coordination problems associated with different equilibria can be characterized; how institutions emerge endogenously to sustain different equilibria; how states can enhance the attractiveness of an equilibrium; and how states can signal commitments to the strategies that are part of that equilibrium.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , January 1994 , pp. 209 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1994

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References

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32 To illustrate this game's structure, suppose there are three countries with the initial distribution of resources (120,100,80). Then the sequence of moves is as follows:

Step 1. A country, chosen at random, moves first. Suppose this country is 1 and suppose it can threaten (150,150,0), (150,0,150), or “pass.”

Step 2. If 1 passes, then 2 moves; and if 2 also passes, 3 moves (all moves parallel those of state 1 in the obvious way).

Step 3. If 1 threatens at step 1, its partner must decide whether to participate in the threat. If the partner declines to participate, then 2 moves as in step 2.

Step 4. If l's partner accepts, the threatened state (2 if 1 threatens (150,0,150), 3 if 1 threatens (150,150,0)) must choose between transferring resources to 1 or offering a counterthreat. Counters for 2 are (0,150,150) and (150,150,0) whereas counters for 3 are (150,0,150) and (0,150,150).

Step 5. Suppose that if 2 or 3 proposes a transfer, it transfers to make 1 indifferent between its threat and the transfer. Hence, if 2 transfers, it proposes (150,70,80) whereas 3 proposes (150,100,50). Assume 1 accepts the transfer to avoid any cost of implementing a threat. And suppose that once anyone controls half the resources in the system, the game ends, because any subsequent action gives that country the opportunity to take advantage of conflicts, to become predominant, and to overcome all states in the system.

Step 6. If a threatened country instead proposes a counterthreat, its partner chooses between accepting or rejecting.

Step 7. If the counter is rejected, the original threat is implemented. Step 8. If the counter is accepted, it becomes a new threat, and as in step 2, the threatened player much choose either a new counter or a transfer.

33 Niou, Emerson M. S. and Ordeshook, Peter C., “Alliance in Anarchic International Systems,” International Studies Quarterly 38 (June 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Krasner (fn. 3).