Reason, Emotion and Cooperation
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Reason, Emotion and Cooperation Richard Ned Lebow Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 3755, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
The realist, liberal institutionalist, social capital, ‘tit-for-tat’and ‘thin’ constructivist explanations for cooperation rely on the same explanatory mechanisms imported from micro-economics. They further assume that international cooperation should be studied from the perspective of egoistic, individual actors responding primarily to external stimuli. These several explanations assume much of the cooperation they purport to explain. They also rest on questionable ontological assumptions, as their unit of analysis, the autonomous, egoistic individual is a fiction of the Enlightenment. Most actors, states included, have social commitments that lead them to frame their identities and interests at least in part in collective terms. Collective identities lead to a general propensity to cooperate with another group of actors. They explain why actors may cooperate in instances that may not appear to be in their interest if cooperation is studied on a case-by-case basis — as it is by the approaches I critique —. To understand how a propensity to cooperate develops, we must look at the ways in which reason and emotions interact to create and sustain common identities. International Politics (2005) 42, 283–313. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800113 Keywords: Reason; emotion; cooperation; identity
Introduction Cooperation and its absence are hot topics in international relations. The former is at heart of the European project, and so in some ways is the latter. The survival of NATO beyond the Cold War, and the desire of former communist states to join, illustrates the robust nature of certain forms of cooperation. From the perspective of the Bush administration, the failure of NATO to participate in the so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing,’ or to assume the kind of ‘out of area’ responsibilities perennially sought after by Washington is a stunning example of non-cooperation. Not only alliances but also states and the societies on which they rest are held together by various forms of cooperation, the breakdown of which lead to state collapse and civil war. Cooperation is also on the front burner of international relations theory. In part, this is a response to the issues that dominate the headlines. More fundamentally, it is a response to the realist framing of the international environment as anarchic. In the absence of a hegemon or other means of
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enforcing order and contracts, cooperation is supposed to occur on a case-bycase basis, and regarded as anomalous if it outlives the interests or other conditions that brought it about. There is a large and growing literature that attempts to explain enduring forms of cooperation under conditions of anarchy. Some approaches, including those rooted in neo-liberalism and constructivism, contend that some regional systems and, to a lesser extent, the international system have been able to escape the mo
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