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Before Hegemony: Generalized Trust and the Creation and Design of International Security Organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2011

Brian C. Rathbun
Brian C. Rathbun
Affiliation:
School of International Relations, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Rationalist accounts of international cooperation maintain that states create international institutions to solve problems of distrust. They rest on a particular notion of trust, a strategic variety in which states trust based on information about others' interests. I seek to overturn this conventional wisdom. Drawing on social psychology, I point to the importance of generalized trust, an ideological belief about the trustworthiness of others in general. Generalized trust precedes institution-building and serves as a form of anarchical social capital, facilitating diffuse reciprocity and allowing state leaders to commit to multilateralism even in cases that rationalists deem inhospitable to cooperation and without the institutional protections that rationalists expect. In case studies of U.S. policy on the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations, I demonstrate that generalized trust is necessary for explaining the origins of American multilateralism and the design of these organizations.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 243 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 2011

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