Channeling power: International organizations and the politics of coercion.

摘要

Why do powerful states conduct coercive foreign policies through international organizations (IOs)? Weak states often require institutional participation to influence international politics; powerful states, on the other hand, have no such necessity. Since involvement with international institutions limits policy autonomy and imposes certain behavioral constraints, we might expect a state with sufficient capability to avoid institutional commitments. Yet this is often not the case: States with viable unilateral options and no obvious material motivations frequently---and quite voluntarily---channel their policies through multilateral organizations.; A set of largely rationalist causal mechanisms can account for this phenomenon. Powerful states engage IOs because doing so lowers the political costs of coercion that might otherwise be imposed by third-party states (that is, states other than the target of coercion). Two processes are key, one at the interstate level and the other primarily domestic. First, working through an IO sends a credible signal to third-party states that the coercer's intentions are limited and relatively benign. By choosing to channel its power through an IO and thus imposing constraints on itself, the powerful state is able to minimize the perceptions of threat and costly reactions that might otherwise result from coercive behavior. Second, channeling coercive policies through an IO increases the probability that third-party governments will support the coercer by allowing their leaders to frame the coercion to their own domestic audiences as justified and in the collective international interest. International support thus becomes viable from the perspective of internal politics.; These complementary functions, international signaling and internal framing, serve to lower the political costs of coercion by conveying critical information to leaders and publics around the world, information that leads to greater support---both tacit and direct---of the coercing state's policies. An important intervening variable, the degree of independence of available IOs, helps explain which IO will be chosen over others (or over unilateralism) in a given episode. The argument is substantiated with case studies in the areas of security, economics and the environment.