How Institutions Work

I wanted to say a bit more about Justin Logan's realist critique of today's column. I especially wanted to focus on the NATO/EU section, because I think it's useful to abstract a bit away from specific controversies over the UN. Disputations with Justin will be below the fold, but first a brief defense of abstracting. The UN is a complicated, highly imperfect institution. People can debate 'till the cows come home how it could be made better. People can also debate 'till the cows come home how the United States (or any other country) ought to respond to the fact that we need to make decisions now while the institutions we have are imperfect. What I find so especially objectionable about John Bolton is that my disagreement with him isn't about these "'till the cows come home" topics, it's about fundamental issues of goals. My big meta-point on the UN is that we should desire a world in which the UN can efficaciously handle global security issues, and, as we manage global security in the interim, one eye should be kept on the ball of bringing that about and not doing things that make that harder to accomplish. The EU and NATO are examples of, to my way of thinking, highly efficacious international institutions that can be discussed in terms of why we should desire the creation of a more efficacious UN.

Justin raises the expected realist objection to the view that NATO and the EU are responsible for the long post-1945 peace among the western powers. Rather, he says, we should credit the threat posed by the USSR and the post-1945 bipolar power dynamic. I don't think that's wrong, as such. It's worth noting, however, that the Cold War ended some time ago. When then happened many prominent realist scholars followed John Mearsheimer in predicting that with the Soviet threat lifted and bipolarity gone, the process of European integration would fall apart and the main European powers would return to armed competitiion. The results of this, he suggested, were likely to be catastrophic to world prosperity. The best way to prevent the return of prosperity-destroying war to the European continent would be for the United States to engage in a policy of selective proliferation of nuclear weapons to the large European powers besides the UK and France (which are already nuclear), primarily Germany. This would set up a nuclear deterrence situation, and prevent national rivalry from turning into war, thus generating a close second-best outcome to the ideal previously provided by the Cold War dynamic.

Needless to say, the Bush I and Clinton administrations didn't take this advice, and Mearsheimer's fears proved to be unwarranted.

The reason, I think, is that NATO and the EU really do work. NATO provision of absolute security guarantees altered, over the decades, the whole orientation of western security establishments and defense industries to create a situation where nobody thinks of capacity-building in arms-race or power-competition terms. At the same time, the EEC (the EU's precursor) created a kind of hyperinterdependence which has made the costs of defection from the institutions that built up around the long peace extraordinarily high. The evolution of the EEC into the EU has created institutional mechanisms for disagreements among European countries to be resolved purely through diplomacy, and treaty-revision process has created a precedent for handling things that can't be handled through the existing formal mechanisms of the EU. The advent of monetary union among most of the EU countries has, of course, only furthered this process.

It's important to note that accomplishing this was, in fact, the explicit purpose of the European Union and even when its functions were much more modest than they are today, those modest functions (pertaining to coal and steel) were chosen precisely because they were maximally-likely to render military conflict infeasible. You have institutions designed to produce a result, you have the result, and you have the skeptics that the institution could produce the result in the absence of an external threat making predictions that have been falsified.

Now where the realists are quite right is that none of this happened by magic or because the leaders of Europe in the late 1940s were just really nice guys. Rather, memory of the super-destructive preceeding era of conflict mixed with an overwhelming external threat to create a situation where leaders were, for perfectly good realist reasons, inclined to see the creation of these sort of institutions as favorable to the natural interest.

A better way of putting my point is that the creation of these institutions worked, at first, to facilitate a policy of cooperation that was adopted for independent reasons. Over time, however, those institutions began to gather momentum of their own, reaching a point where, today, they are basically self-sustaining. If Europe were disunited today, the nations of Europe would find no particular reason to embark on a project of integration. But the existence of decades-long project of integration along with a set of highly elaborated institutions changes the dynamic. There is now every reason to stick with unity and, to some extent, seek to both widen (by adding new countries) and deepen it. And I think that's a very good thing! The governments of Europe all have a lot less autonomy today than they would have if, back in the '40s, they had merely cooperated in an ad hoc, Bolton-style, non-institutional manner. And they would all be a lot worse off for it.