Theory Talk #9: Robert Keohane

Robert Keohane on Institutions and the Need for Innovation in the Field

Theory Talks proudly presents a Talk with Robert O. Keohane, probably the most influential scholar in International Relations since the seventies. While he is especially known for his work on the puzzle of realism vs. cooperation, he has made influential contributions to a big number of debates in the field of international relations. In this comprehensive Talk, Keohane explains amongst others how information affects power, how it is to be a theorist working on policy issues and discusses the nature of institutions.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge/principal debate in current IR and what is your position on this challenge/debate?

Like Alex Wendt, I am hesitant to name a specific debate, and I also think that the rationalist-constructivist debate is not only old but mostly false. A coherent approach to the study of world politics must take into account rationalist, institutionalist, liberal domestic politics, and constructivist insights. The trick is how to synthesize these ways of looking at the world in a coherent way, not to run some sort of phony competition among them. Alex and I and John Mearsheimer were on a panel at the American Political Science Association in 2007 at which we all agreed on this point. So addressing the “isms debate” is not the answer.

By the way, I much prefer “world politics” to “international relations,” since transnational and transgovernmental relations are, in my view, increasingly important; and because so much that is important for world politics takes place domestically, in interaction with what happens elsewhere in the world. “Globalization” is a much broader phenomenon than “international relations” defined as relations among states.

I think that the challenges of change in the world are much richer than the current debates in IR. For the first time in modern history, large and formerly poor countries are undergoing rapid economic development that will inevitably enhance their political power: think of China, India, and Brazil. How will these changes reshape multilateral institutions, the world political economy, and interstate relations? To take another topic, we struggled in the 1970s to understand the implications of changes in the demand-supply relationships in the oil market. Now we face even more rapidly rising prices, but there has been little political analysis of their implications. If I had to choose a purely conceptual and theoretical topic, however, I would agree with my close friend and collaborator Joe Nye and focus on how information affects power. My perspective on this issue stems from Hannah Arendt’s definition of power as “the ability to act in common.” Historically, such communication has been very difficult except through formal organizations, including the state, and all but impossible across state boundaries except with the aid of states. This formerly constant reality has been changing with incredible speed during the last two decades, but we have hardly begun to understand the implications of this momentous fact. One implication may be that collective action on a global scale, for good or ill, is easier than it has ever been before. In this sense, there is more power in the system than in the past.

I am now working on policy issues for the first time in my life. In particular, I am trying to understand how multilateral institutions could be designed to be more effective. I have studied multilateral institutions for most of my career, and I think I have a pretty good idea of why states establish them and how effective, or ineffective, they are. But we do not have very precise explanations of effectiveness and, partly as a result, we cannot say enough that is sensible about how they should be designed, or not designed. I am trying to make some progress on that issue.

With respect to advice for graduate students, I agree entirely with Alex Wendt, when he says: “The most important thing to do, and maybe the hardest, is first to tell us something we don’t already know, and secondly to tell us something that makes people think about the world differently” (otherwise, what’s the point?) In my view all of us in this field are trying to do this every day. It is hard work, and most of us do not succeed most of the time; but it is meaningful and important work.

How did you arrive at your current ideas on how the world works?

Does one ever “arrive?” I think this is instead a continuous journey. I believe with Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos that science is propelled by anomalies – things that happen that don’t fit our pre-existing theories and ideas. Lakatos says that science proceeds “on a sea of anomalies.” And in our field, anomalies keep proliferating, probably faster than answers.

I wrote my Ph.D thesis on politics in the UN General Assembly, because I wanted to understand how effective influence differed from the nominal one-state-one-vote rules. Then, along with Joe Nye, I sought to understand what was political about the international economic relations of the late 1960s and early 1970s – which did not seem to fit either straight economic logic or the “high politics” political science of that day. Nye and I particularly sought to understand how power was related to asymmetrical interdependence, and how international regimes (a term first brought to the field by John Ruggie) operate.

Shortly after publishing Power and Interdependence with Nye, I started to think about the puzzle of institutionalized cooperation: if states are, as prevailing theory emphasized, so concerned to maintain their autonomy, why do they establish international regimes? The answer I eventually came to was to show how even rational and egoistical states could find it in their interest to join multilateral institutions, insofar as those institutions reduced the costs of making and enforcing agreements and therefore facilitated cooperation that was beneficial to the society and to its political leadership. This is the essential argument of After Hegemony, published in 1984. But if you look at chapter 7, you will see that I only accepted the rational premises conditionally, as a way of showing that even on these assumptions institutionalized cooperation could be explained. Bounded rationality and even empathy may also be part of the story. These two research projects did construct two basic premises of my view on how the world works: economics and politics profoundly affect one another through the relationship between interdependence and power; and institutions are both generated by state strategies and have impacts on those strategies.

In the 1990s I became increasingly interested in the role of ideas – what the constructivists emphasize as the “social construction of reality.” Judith Goldstein and I edited a book on Ideas and Foreign Policy in 1993, which emphasized the close connections among interests, institutions, and ideas. These are not opposite but rather complementary ways of looking at the world. As Max Weber said, ideas are like “switchmen,” that determine “the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.” We looked at ideas as “road maps, focal points, and glue” and at how ideas become institutionalized. The insights from this volume made me very skeptical of sheer materialism – of which there is still a great deal in the international political economy field – and intent on synthesizing ideas and material interests.

From the study of ideas it is a short step to normative theory: if ideas matter, maybe changing our ideas about what should be done is a worthwhile endeavor. In a sense, this is a move back to my first love, political theory. I studied political theory most avidly in graduate school, with Judith Sklar, and I married a political theorist, Nannerl Overholser Keohane. What I regard as some of my best work in the last decade is essentially political theory: my presidential address to the American Political Science Association, which is reprinted in my 2002 book, Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World; my 2005 article in the American Political Science Review with Ruth W. Grant on accountability and abuses of power in world politics; and a forthcoming paper in International Organization with Stephen Macedo and Andrew Moravcsik, “Democracy-Enhancing Multilateralism.”

That’s where I am on my journey. V. S. Naipaul writes of the “Enigma of Arrival.” I suppose for me it is the journey that is full of anomalies, and perhaps an enigma itself.

What would a student need to become an IR theorist like yourself?

Again, Alex Wendt puts it so well that all I need to do is to refer readers to his answer to this question on this website.

Do you think it is possible for a theorist who has conceived a “big idea” to change his stripes?

Sociologically and psychologically, it would be too much to expect a theorist to renounce a view that he or she had considered seriously over a period of years and come to after much reflection. Scientists become invested in their ideas; this is why Kuhn emphasizes the need for new generations. I do think that progress is largely made by graduate students “voting with their feet” – going where the interesting new problems are. However, I think it is possible for theorists to engage in continuous growth. The best way to do this is, as Alex Wendt says, to move onto to new problems. The reason that I worked with Peter Katzenstein to produce Anti-Americanisms in World Politics is that I thought I would get stale if I continued to work on institutions, and I wanted to try out a set of arguments that focused more on the individual level, drawing on social psychology, and that took a more constructivist orientation – since it is difficult to understand attitudes, or prejudices, simply on the basis of a rationalist set of premises. I am working now on normative issues, and on policy, partly because they are new to me and I think perhaps I can avoid simply repeating myself. But I suppose that if, as Mark Twain said, history “rhymes,” my choices of topic probably rhyme as well.

You have said that institutions help states keep their promises but they also help to legitimize action. Which prevails?

Neither prevails: it is not a question of either/or. Institutions do both things. They also reflect power realities, institutionalize distributional equalities, tend to freeze the status quo, generate distinctive symbolism, and create bureaucracies with standard operating procedures and some power base of their own. A key to understanding institutions is to see how power and legitimacy concerns interact: they are in tension, but both are necessary. Any genuine understanding of institutions needs to be multidimensional.

In Spain, academics argue that no international institution can overrule powerful states if the states don’t want them to. Is that still true in the 21^st century?

If the question is put that way, the answer is surely “yes.” But I think that this is an uninteresting way to frame the important issues. The more important question is whether, and how, institutions change state strategies. Multilateral institutions are constructed by states and maintained by states, and are weak relative to states. They do not overrule powerful states – and rarely if ever try to do so. But they can change how states act.

You have written about qualitative research methods, and how qualitative and quantitative investigation should be guided by a shared use of the method of inference. Does that make you a method-driven scientist and how would you reply to Wendt (Theory Talk #3) who asserts that method-driven science leads to the exclusion of interesting questions?

Anyone who looks at my career can recognize that I am not a method-driven scientist. My work is driven by interesting changes in the world and the puzzles, or anomalies, that they generate. I co-authored Designing Social Inquiry because I wanted to understand, and then help explain, how we could do more scientific research on important problems – precisely to avoid a dilemma of either working on important problems or working scientifically. So I conclude this “Talk” where I began, in agreement with my friend Alex Wendt.

Robert O. Keohane is Professor of International Affairs, Princeton University. He is the author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (1984) and Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World (2002). He is co-author (with Joseph S. Nye, Jr.) of Power and Interdependence (third edition 2001), and (with Gary King and Sidney Verba) of Designing Social Inquiry (1994). He has served as the editor of the journal International Organization and president of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Related links

• Robert Keohane’s faculty profile at Princeton
• The American Political Science Association (APSA) Homepage
• Watch the Conversations With History 2004 interview with Keohane here (realplayer)
• Read Keohane’s article The Globalization of Informal Violence (2002) here
• Read Keohane & Nye’s article The Club Model of Multilateral Cooperation and the World Trade Organization here (pdf)
• Read Keohane’s 2006 article The Contingent Legitimacy of Multilateralism here (pdf)
• Read Keohane & Martin’s 1995 article The Promise of Institutionalist Theory here (pdf)

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Theory Talk #8: Arend Lijphart

Arend Lijphart on Sharing Power in Africa and the Future of Democracy

Arend Lijphart is best known for his theory of ‘consociational’ or ‘power sharing’ democracy, which enables the peaceful governance of deeply divided societies. While his power sharing model has been widely criticized, it is also being adopted in countries as diverse as the Netherlands, India, Austria, South Africa, and Malaysia. In this Talk, Lijphart explains why, in the relationship between country size and democracy, ‘size doesn’t matter’, how democracy seems to change since the end of the Cold War and discusses the conditions for democracy in Africa.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

For me, that is a difficult question, not only because I’m retired, but also because I consider myself to be a straightforward empiricist, so theoretical debates don’t really have implications for my work. In any case, I certainly don’t belong to the rational choice school, nor would I be able to concretely position myself in any purely theoretical debate. I do think you should think things through theoretically before starting to work, but in the end, for me, sound academic work is mainly about sound empirical testing. I have been quicker then most scholars to assert that if you find a correlation between factor A and factor B, and if factor B is a favorable outcome, then you have found something that has policy implications: you like B? Try to introduce A in order to get B! I, for example, spoke about how to raise voter turnout in my presidential address to the American Political Science Association. If you find a way to raise the rate of voter turnout, and if you also like a higher turnout, then you have an obvious policy implication! I don’t understand why social scientists are often reluctant to draw policy implications from there work. I have been influenced by Marxist reading, but my goal has always been to realize the favorable B, so I guess I could call my self eclectic.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

Well, for me, my personal history has fundamentally influenced my intellectual work. I was born in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, in 1936, and I was raised in small town nearby, called Heerde. Ten years after the war, in 1955, I wanted to go ‘out there’, see something of the world. Since I was too young to enlist in the army, went to college in the US. I was planning to just go there for one year. But one year became two; and after the second, a bachelor degree was just one year more. I gradually became interested in political science, and since that was a study area in the States since the late 19^th century, and in Holland just after the Second World War, quality was simply far better in the States. I guess my interest in both ‘politics’ and the ‘international’ came from my family: my father was a small town politician, so we talked about politics a lot, and my mother had lived in Surinam, Germany, Indonesia and Switzerland before moving to Holland, which is why I got interested in international politics.

Also, I have to admit that living in occupied Holland throughout the Second World War affected my outlook on things. In 1956, for example, I was College in the States, and I noticed how my fellow students reacted differently to events like the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Crisis. While my America friends wondered about being drafted, getting send overseas or getting caught up in a third World War which they would win, I imagined the horrors of living in an occupied country during the Cold War – be it under communists or Americans.

I basically started studying the Dutch political system, and in that process I found out that there are a lot more societies with political divisions, like Lebanon and in various societies in Africa. We’re talking about 1968 here, a very turbulent time, with decolonization in the ‘South’ and discussion and sometimes even revolution in the ‘North’. I lived through those turbulent days in the heart of it all, so to speak, for I was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley at that time. While politically the department were I worked was very much divided, intellectually, I was not really affected by what happened; that year, I published my first book and introduced my concept of ‘consociationalism’ or power-sharing theory in the first issue of Comparative Political Studies. That theory of mine holds that these fundamentally divided societies can actually be governed democratically, if there is a sort of overarching, cooperating elite.

While I first applied it just to the Netherlands, I later found a method to apply it to divided societies more generally. And the most divided society I could find at that time – that was constantly in the news for it – was South Africa. From 1971 on, I went there several times to talk to politicians, civil servants and academics; I became part of the Buthelezi Commission, which recommended applying a consociational model of democracy. By the early eighties they had finally adopted the idea of power sharing at a national level, although what they implemented in the end was just a tiny step towards my model, because most colored voters were not admitted to the political system yet. By thus excluding 72% of the population, they of course made a fundamental error – which is basically why I wrote the book Power Sharing in South Africa in 1985: just to point out the flaws and to lay out my ideas. Luckily, in 1994, they adopted basically all of my recommendations.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

Yet again, I am, as they say, ‘out of circulation’ in the academic world; but I would still say that one needs to study a lot, and if possible, in a place that has an ‘international’ outlook on things. I would say that studying in the States – although things seem to change very fast – is still the best option. The pressure they put on graduate students is very high, but rewarding in the end.

There seems to be a worldwide tendency towards economic integration pared with shrinking the state’s control over the economy. How do you see the future of the consensus state?

There are a lot of people worried about what they see as the ‘definitive’ influence of tendencies such as privatization and globalization. I am, in a way, optimistic, in the sense that I have a feeling that while now the swing of the pendulum may go one way, there will surely be a reverse movement in the other direction, at least concerning political systems. I don’t fear that government will become more majoritarian and less consensus in a definitive kind of way, just because it is possible to change a political system.

Where does ‘power-sharing democracy’ come from?

First of all, it is a Dutch export product. For me, it started in the Netherlands in 1917, with what is called the ‘pacification’ – the leaders of the various social groups coming together to reform the Dutch political system in order to avoid that increasingly rising tensions turn into something more problematic and maybe even violent. Then there’s another view, defended by Hans Daalder who says the system started much earlier, when in the seventeenth century the Dutch Provinces joined together in a decentralized system, and engaged in a long history of a culture of compromise that would become national politics later on.

With regard to power sharing being a Dutch export product, I often heard the criticism – especially in Africa – that I’m trying to implement a European model in Africa, which is not true anymore: it is, for a long time already, also the political model of India, Malaysia and Lebanon.

You’ve defended convincingly that consensus democracies (such as the Netherlands) are ‘kinder’ states. There is however a common sense assumption, based on the work of, amongst others, Rousseau, that this kind of democracy is only possible in small states – bigger countries tend to be less (consensus) democratic.

Here we face two common sense assumptions: one, that the Netherlands is a small country; and two, that consensus democracy only works in small countries.

Concerning the first assumption: Holland is not such a small country! We have about the same population size as Australia, and a very strong economy. Yes, Australia is a lot bigger in geographical terms, but I think that theoretically, that does not matter for the democratic functioning of a political system. What does matter, so I assert in my book Patterns of democracy, is that as countries get bigger, they tend to be more decentralized, but yet again, you can have a very democratically decentralized system.

That relates to the second issue: there are a lot of countries that share some aspects of a consensus democracy which are not small at all, such as India and Japan. That doesn’t mean I think Rousseau wasn’t right, I just think that he refers to another scale when comparing the political systems of ‘small’ and ‘big’ countries. When referring to small, he was talking about communities something the size of a small canton in Switzerland, where you can apply direct democracy: have town meetings…

I do think Rousseau was right, though, in the sense that as soon as the unit becomes larger, representation becomes necessary and increasingly indirect. That raises the question of what kind of representation works the best. Representation is quite paradoxical in one sense: it is necessary for democracy, but the more indirect it is, the less democratic you could label a system.

Sub-Sahara Africa is inserted into globalization in a particular(ly dramatic) way, where the ‘consensus democracy’ (power-sharing) model does not seem to be implementable easily, because the state is not properly instituted in civil society, thus giving rise to (ethnically motivated) tensions. What would be needed to make democracy work in Sub-Sahara Africa? And is democracy a first step or an effect of development?

That’s a very old question, first formulated by Lipset in his book Political Man (1960). He shows that there is a very strong empirical correlation between democracy and stages of economical development, and I am quite sure that that correlation still exists. I think democracy and economical development are mutually supportive; an effective democracy will support economical development, and vice versa, although it is not something that works in one direction: you have to have both, which makes it a constitutive relationship and thus problematic to predict.

More specific for the case of Africa, I have to admit that a lot of my ideas on Africa come from Sir Arthur Lewis, whom I respect – and cite – a lot. He was a very interesting man: a black scholar from the Caribbean, an outstanding economic who won one of the first Nobel Prizes in that field, and who was economic advisor to, amongst others, the governments of Ghana and Nigeria. What he advised them, and which he repeats in his book Politics in West Africa (1965), is that the argument that in order to have economic development, you need to have a non-democratic government, was a sham. He argued as one of the first, that exactly because those countries were plural, divided and decentralized, you need a deep democracy. I credit him to be the first consociational scholar.

Why do some countries adopt a consociational model and others don’t?

I basically formulated that in my book Democracy in Plural Society, which has been widely discussed and criticized. Luckily, I think it to be better to be criticized than to be ignored. One of the criticisms was that I did not list the conditions under which the adoption and retention of a consociational democracy occurs. I think that was right, so I responded with a list of conditions. I finally formulated nine conditions under which it would be favorable for a country to adopt a power sharing democracy, like for example: is there an ethnic majority, then they will prefer a majority rule. A culture of compromise is another. The rest I formulate in my ’96 article on India published in the American Political Science Review.

Do you see any global pattern of change in the way democracy is implemented in the state?

Actually, since the end of the Cold War, I have observed that a lot of countries have changed their electoral systems. I don’t know if there is a connection with the end of the Cold War; that remains to see. One of the most outstanding examples is New Zealand, which in 1996 went from a British-style system to a more proportional representation, inspired on the German model, which has fundamentally changed the nature of New Zealand politics – they have a multi-party system now, coalition cabinets or sometimes a minority cabinet… In terms of its political system, it starts looking a lot more like Northern European countries like Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, while the tendency of the ‘shrinking state’ would dictate a change the other way around. And there have been more countries that changed, apart from, of course, the ones that were in the sphere of Soviet influence. And that is peculiar, because of something called ‘institutional conservatism’: institutions tend to become stable and difficult to change. But the examples of New Zealand and other countries show that change is possible and never definitive.

Looking forward to the coming elections, I’m curious about the book you’re working on, comparing American democracy to that of 28 other countries. How is American democracy different?

The book will compare the States to 28 other countries that have been a democracy at least since the start of the nineteenth century and have a population exceeding five million, and the American system differs in almost all aspects. I’ll give you a few: the States is almost unique in being a fully presidential system; it is completely unique in being a ‘clean’, exclusive, two-party system; also the primaries, that is, the way to nominate candidates for the presidency office, run by the state and not the parties themselves, is something idiosyncratic. In all other countries, those are managed by the parties themselves, if they have competition. In the States, it’s huge. Another example, I’m currently filling out my ballot for the coming state elections here in California, the second this year, and there’s one more coming up. I’m voting for about 25 propositions. That’s not just more than in any referendum of any other country, it is way more. People are generally not aware of these fundamental differences.

Last Question. There’s some debate going on about global governance, and even a world state. What are your thoughts on that debate?

I would most certainly be in favor of a world state, because I prefer Grotius’ world in which there are governing norms to the anarchy of Hobbes which is – still – popular in the United States. I’ve had the privilege to work with Karl Deutch, together with Ernst Haas one of the big integration theorists of the fifties and sixties, who picked up on Grotius to argue that our world is not completely anarchical. Furthermore, he argues that is might even be better not to have a world government, but some kind of decentralized governance, because we would still pick fights about who gets to manage that super-powerful central government. My point of view would be: if we have a world government, it would have to be a power sharing one.

Arend Lijphart is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, and specialized in comparative politics, and his current research is focused on the comparative study of democratic institutions. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (1977), Power-Sharing in South Africa (1985), Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences (1986), Parliamentary versus Presidential Government (1992), Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies (1994), and Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (1999). Lijphart has received numerous awards throughout his prestigious career in recognition of his groundbreaking research. In 1989, he was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and from 1995-96 served as President of the American Political Science Association.

Related links

• Lijphart's Faculty Profile at UCSD
  
• Visit the Lijphart Elections Archive, a static research collection of district level election results for approximately 350 national legislative elections in 26 countries that was maintained through 2003, here
• Read a summary of Lijphart's mayor works here
  

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Theory Talk #7: Joseph Nye

Joseph Nye on Teaching America to be more British

Theory Talks proudly presents a Talk with Joseph S. Nye Jr., the scholar behind the popular concept of ‘soft power’, by which he adds a dimension to the classic realist notion of ‘hard’, or military, power. Being one of the top-ten most influential IR-scholars in the world, Nye continues to criticize American unilateralism as simply not the right way to survive: in an increasingly interdependent world, even ‘success in the War on Terrorism depends on Washington’s capacity to persuade others without force’, and, as Nye constantly argues, that capacity is in dangerous decline. In this Talk, Joseph Nye subsequently argues why the future of international politics lies in cooperation, and why the US can learn from 19^th century Britain.

What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR?

One of our biggest challenges is understanding the way the information revolution is affecting power, and the way the world is changing from simple inter-state politics to global and world politics. This was caught by the rationalist/constructivist debate at the end of the Cold War, and the reaction against simple materialist definitions of power that underlay what structural realists such as Waltz considered “theory of international politics.” This does not mean that the nation-state or realist theory is obsolete, but it does mean that the stage of world politics is becoming more crowded with extra actors, the distinction between domestic and international is not so neat, and the politics of transnational relations and complex interdependence need an understanding of liberal and constructivist approaches as well as classical realism.

What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

I have challenged what philosophers call the “concrete fallacy” in the definition of power by introducing the concept of soft power. If power is the capacity to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, you can do it with material sticks and carrots (coercion and payment), but also by affecting the preferences of others and attracting them to want what you want. I call this ‘soft power’. Classical realists like Machiavelli and Morgenthau understood this dimension, but in its search for parsimony, structural realism settled on a truncated and impoverished materialist view of power. In my work with Robert O. Keohane, I explored different models of power and interdependence including the mixed coalitions typical of the ideal type we labeled ‘complex interdependence’. I have applied this approach to current policy issues as well as theory.

How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?

I came into IR though a side door, so to speak. I was interested in how economic rationality and political ideology interacted in the structuring of markets in newly independent Africa. I did my dissertation in Africa on “Pan Africanism and East African Integration.” (Today it might be called constructivist analysis.) I came into IR through regional integration theory, and that led to broader work on transnational actor and interdependence. A spell in the State Department dealing with nuclear proliferation led to a book on called Nuclear Ethics (1986), which also discussed arms control and the future of American power. It may seem a winding path, but the guiding thread was my curiosity.

What would a student need to become a specialist in IR?

I argue in my text Understanding International Conflicts (1997), that students should have a good grounding in realism, liberalism, and constructivist approaches. Then find some puzzles or interesting anomalies and see how the theoretical approaches can be combined with empirical investigation to illuminate the problem. Keep going back and forth between theory and history, and beware of the tendency to elegance that leads many in the field to say more and more about less and less.

In what kind of international world do we live?

We live in a hybrid world. Part of our positive and normative world is Westphalian and based on sovereignty, and part is post-Westaphalian in which transnational actors and the norms of international humanitarian law transgress sovereignty. Both are likely to persist for decades, so good positive and normative analysis will have to be able to account for both.

Keeping in account this configuration, how do you see the near future?

In interstate relations, we are seeing a gradual movement of power that is often summarized as the “rise of Asia.” Some see this as American decline, but as I argued in Bound to Lead (1990) and The Paradox of American Power (2003), I think this is mistaken: I have argued that power resources depend upon context, and that there are three quite different contexts in world politics, something like a three dimensional chess game.

• On the top board of military relations among states, the world is still unipolar and I do not see China, Europe or others surpassing the US in the near future.
• On the middle board of economic relations among states, the world is already multi-polar.
• On the bottom board of transnational relations that cross borders outside the control of governments – pandemics, climate change, transnational terrorism – power is chaotically distributed.

These issues can only be dealt with by cooperation among governments, and which is why the US, even as an undisputed military hegemony, cannot go at it alone.

Who should respond to the increasing scarcity of natural resources, states or the international society?

As the most powerful country, the United States should define its national interest broadly to include the provision of global public goods (as I spell out in The Paradox of American Power) much as Britain did in the 19^th century.

In the 21^st century, no one state can handle these issues alone, and it will be important to develop a broad range of more effective international institutions. This raises a number of interesting and difficult issues about participation, accountability and democratic theory within international institutions.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is also the Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations and former Dean of the Kennedy School. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a PhD in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. In 2004, he published Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics; Understanding International Conflict (5th edition); and The Power Game: A Washington Novel.

Related links

About Nye

• Joseph Nye’s faculty profile at Harvard
• A 1998 interview with Joseph Nye by Harry Kreisler, Conversations With History (1998)

Nye’s work

• Read Nye’s monthly comments on (international) politics and leadership here (available in English, Spanish, French and other languages)
• Read Nye’s article Farewell to Arms Control (Foreign Affairs, 1986) here
• Read Nye’s influential Foreign Policy article Soft Power (1990) here (pdf)
• Read Nye’s article Think Again: Soft Power (Yale Global, 2006), in which he reviews his 1990-concept of ‘Soft Power’, here
• Read a review of Nye’s 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power here
• Read Nye’s observations on the implications of soft power for the contenders in the US presidential race here

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