Alan’s post on Monday focused on the views of G8 members about the possibility of expanding their membership. This post was drafted before Alan’s and focuses instead on the G-8’s outreach efforts.

I’ve described in previous posts the different bases for constructing international groupings and how the BRIC and IBSA originated but have not expanded so far.

There is still another way to construct an international grouping, and that is through the workings of external actors. Institutions can be constructed in an artificial hothouse environment, at the instigation of others. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) came into being in April 1948 and emerged from Secretary of State Marshall’s desire to have a coordinated vision for postwar reconstruction and an integrated request for aid. Similarly, Continue reading →

In a previous post, I distinguished three bases for grouping countries. In this blog, I discuss the BRIC and its possible expansion to BRICSAM in that context.

The Creation of Clubs

States form international institutions self-consciously to achieve some objective(s). The institutions can be organized along areal or functional lines. They can be universal and include all members of some specified set or they can be clubs of subsets. Creating any institution then requires some agreement on purpose, membership, and procedure.

Most groupings emerge from the vision of political leaders and their political needs. The BRIC case was somewhat different.

Origins of the term in objective analysis

The term BRIC was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs. It was a Continue reading →

BRICSAM is being proffered as a new grouping of states. Alan has written a set of excellent blogs asking whether the BRICSAM states have comparable wealth and power positions and whether all the countries fit in the same category or class. What began as a Goldman Sachs grouping of BRICs was expanded by CIGI with the addition of SAM (South Africa, Mexico and somewhat more problematically ASEAN (in some form)).

The exercise raises the question of how groupings of states emerge and how categories of states develop in international politics.

Objective Grouping

Some groupings emerge from some objective criterion. States can be assigned as elements to a set by some observable attribute: the set of nuclear powers, the set of oil producers, the set of democracies, the set of Latin America states, the Continue reading →

The conversation about BRICSAM takes place against the backdrop of assessments about the international system. And the problem is that there is an ever-present cottage industry extrapolating from short terms dynamics to make sweeping generalizations about the course of the history, and it is typically wrong. Put differently, we are experiencing yet another wave of declinism.

In the late 1950s, the fear was that US was being overtaken by the Soviet Union. Sputnik signaled the inadequacy of American science and high Soviet growth rates (contrasted with anemic US growth and three Eisenhower recessions) would eventually mean that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the US.

Beginning in 1970 with Herman Kahn’s The emerging Japanese superstate, Americans were subjected to two decades Continue reading →

I attended a talk by a sociologist, Noah Friedkin (UCSB), discussing the structure of influence in networks and groups and his findings strike me as interesting for our discussion of multilateralism.

Friedkin has done experiments in which people are asked for some assessment and then get a chance to interact and then make a post-discussion assessment. A general finding in groups of 3 or more is that the second assessment almost invariably is within the bounds set by the initial assessment. Whether people modify their initial assessments or Continue reading →

Bob Wolfe asks an important questions, what is new in the new multilateralism. One of his answers has to do with how the term is currently being used by different governments and different ends of the political spectrum. The tack I take here is to try to present an analytic answer which has to do with the altered international environment.

Multilateralism reflects a basic reality of international politics, the distribution of power. Modern multilateralism, consisting largely of the international institutions developed over the course of the last 150 years, has emerged in quite different settings. The first wave emerged during a multipolar age, when there were a number of great powers. The ability to fashion arrangements for such a setting was critical. Thus, the standard criticism that the League of Nations failed in part Continue reading →

Multilateralism and unilateralism constitute attitudes towards the external world.  It is interesting to see how these fit with other characterizations.  Jeff Legro presented a paper at UCLA’s international relations workshop and he distinguished three types of states: trustees, hermits, and rebels.  Rebels are states interested in upending the established order (a revolutionary Soviet Union was one example).  Hermits are isolationists interested in separating themselves from the world (Tokugawa Japan, for example).   Trustees are states who are neither hermit nor rebels, but are integrated into the international community and upholders of the existing order.

How does Legro’s typology map onto the multilateralism/unilateralism dichotomy?  Hermits are certainly not multilateralists, but isolationism would not qualify as unilateralist if the latter presumes some degree of involvement in Continue reading →

1) multilateralism does not imply the non-use of force. One can imagine circumstances in which one expects either universal agreement or the use of force being foreclosed as an option. But there are too many issues that matter to many members of the international community that include states that act as renegades and where the option of force to obtain compliance is clearly on the table. Multilateralism implies a cooperative enterprise among a set of countries but not necessarily all countries. And in some cases, force will be one of the options. Joint humanitarian intervention is a cooperative venture among the interveners but is clearly conflictual towards the miscreant country. To foreswear force Continue reading →

In the war in Iraq, known in official US documents as Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), the US has carried the bulk of the military effort. More than 130,000 US soldiers have been in Iraq throughout the period since the early days of the war. The United Kingdom has contributed fewer than 10,000 soldiers. No other country contributed more than 5,000 soldiers, and only South Korea, Italy, Poland, Netherlands, Spain, and Ukraine provided more than 1000. Romania, Japan, Denmark, Bulgaria contributed between 500 and 1000; Georgia, Australia, El Salvador, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Albania, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Norway, Dominican Republic, Thailand, Hungary, Portugal, and Singapore provided between 100 and 500; and Czech Republic, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Macedonia, Kazakhstan, Philippines, New Zealand, Moldova, and Tonga contributed fewer than 100. Moreover, the contributions of a number of these countries were specifically limited to non-combat roles. Among others, Japan contributed only medics Continue reading →