Threatening Friends and Enticing Enemies in an Uncertain World

Membership in international organizations is increasingly offered as part of a long-term strategy to influence the behavior of rogue or "risky" states. The long-term economic, military, and political gains from membership in organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the European Union, NATO, and the United Nations are offered or denied based on certain membership conditions. These conditions socialize risky states by requiring a combination of immediate policy changes and long-term behavioral modifications based on established institutional guidelines and codes of conduct.International relations scholars disagree about the motivations behind seeking membership in international institutions and the effect membership has on state behavior. Institutional theorists from various schools of international relations theory argue that states will seek out membership in international institutions in order to further their interest. From this perspective, states establish and abide by rules, norms, and procedures specified in international institutions because doing so enables them to achieve valued objectives unattainable through unilateral or bilateral means (Keohane, 1993:274). Compliance results from short- or long-term self-interest, making enforcement needs minimal (Keohane, 1982). Furthermore, institutionalists argue that state interests and actions will shift to reflect the addition of institutional rules, norms and procedures to the context of interaction in world politics (Kratochwil, 1989). Neorealist critics disagree about the ability of institutions to modify state behavior. They argue that under conditions of anarchy the interests of states remain focused on the ever-present uncertainty and the potential for conflict (Grieco, 1993:301-338). Relative gains will remain paramount and multilateral cooperation will be fleeting. Lacking sufficient resources to enforce compliance, international institutions will not be able to alter state interests or actions in any fundamental way.This chapter contributes to the institutionalist-neorealist debate by identifying the conditions under which membership in international institutions can play a role in socializing risky states (Baldwin, 1993; Keohane, 1986a; Powell, 1994). The success of these efforts depends both on the ability of international institutions to entice new membership and secure compliance by providing benefits unattainable without membership, as the institutionalists argue, and on their ability to coerce and thereby enforce compliance as required by the neorealists. The ability to attract new members and secure compliance of existing members with institutional guidelines and codes of conduct is a function of the sanctions, both positive and negative, that the organization can offer or deny its members (Hufbauer and Scott, 1985; Shambaugh, 1996). The conditions under which these means can be used to secure compliance are complex, yet they remain largely underspecified in the international relations literature. This chapter seeks to fill this gap by specifying the conditions under which international organizations can use threats and promises to secure compliance by formerly risky states. The resulting model enables insights from both institutionalist and neorealist arguments to be incorporated under a single framework, rather than decreasing parsimony by applying them to different actors and issue-areas. The effectiveness of promising or denying membership as a form of political influence varies depending on the specific goals membership is intended to achieve, the costs and benefits membership imposes on the international organization and the risky state, and the distribution of these costs and benefits on their constituents. The causal mechanisms at work in this dynamic will be analyzed and used to evaluate the specific conditions under international institutions are likely to secure compliance by formerly risky states. The findings suggest that states will alter their behavior to secure membership in international institutions under certain generalizable conditions. Riskiness will decline as a result. At the same time, however, states place a sufficiently high value on membership under these conditions that denial of membership or grants of membership to their rivals may increase their propensity for risky behavior.