Why do powerful states channel coercive foreign policies through
international organizations (IOs)? Governments that lack resources or
expertise often require IO assistance for material and technical reasons,
and weak states rely on international forums to increase their political
clout and bargaining power. Powerful states, by contrast, typically do not
need IOs to achieve specific objectives. On the contrary, because turning
to an international institution complicates policymaking and entails some
loss of autonomy, one might expect powerful states to avoid such
entanglements. Yet even superpowers sometimes channel coercive actions,
including the use of force, through IOs, despite viable alternatives that
offer more flexibility and control—namely unilateralism and ad hoc
multilateralism. The literature lacks a coherent explanation of the
political logic for conducting coercion through IOs. Understanding this
behavior has implications for important theoretical debates—engaging
a range of rationalist and constructivist scholarship—over the role
of formal institutions in international politics.
IOs have played a prominent if uneven role in statecraft since World
War II. Even in the Cold War environment, the United States turned to the
United Nations (UN) for the Korea intervention and sought cover from
regional organizations to take action in Cuba, the Dominican Republic,
Panama, and Grenada.1
The relevant bodies
were the Organization of American States (OAS) in the first three cases
and the Organization of East Caribbean States in Grenada. In the end, the
OAS did not endorse the Panama intervention.
Since the Cold War,
powerful states have increasingly turned to IOs when using force. The
United States has achieved endorsements from the UN Security Council or
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or both, for virtually
every intervention since 1990, including those in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia,
Rwanda, Haiti, Zaire, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. The British have behaved
similarly and pushed hard for a Security Council resolution authorizing
the 2003 Iraq war. Russia and France have also sought UN or regional cover
for interventions in the “near abroad” and francophone Africa,
respectively. Some middle powers, including Germany, Japan, and Canada,
simply will not intervene without an IO mandate.
The Security Council has come to play a uniquely important role in
this regard. Even in cases where the Council failed to endorse
intervention policies, as in Kosovo in 1999 and Iraq in 2003, there was a
concerted effort to gain such approval. Security Council enforcement
powers have been employed with dramatically increased frequency—more
than two hundred Chapter VII resolutions were passed between 1990 and
2004, compared to only seven during the Cold War—and its practice of
authorizing coalitions of states to conduct coercive actions is well
established and increasingly common.2
This is
a conclusion of the so-called Brahimi Report, commissioned by the
Secretary-General to study UN peacekeeping practices. UN Doc.
A/55/305–S/2000/809, 21 August 2000. Most
invocations of Chapter VII have come in the context of peacekeeping
missions and do not qualify as coercive interventions. However, these
operations are often complex and evolve toward a mixture of consent and
coercion, sometimes with extensive authority to use force. See Fenton 2004; Roberts 2004,
136–39.
As one UN scholar concludes, “The most
important development in Council decision-making since 1990 has been its
disposition to authorize the use of force.”
3 The
widespread hostility to the most recent Iraq war, and specifically the
decision to bypass the UN, further illustrates the importance attached to
IOs and especially the Security Council when it comes to the use of force.
Indeed, intervention without some effort to gain approval is now virtually
obsolete, a remarkable feature of contemporary international relations
that merits both theoretical and policy attention.
I shed light on this phenomenon by exploring the political advantages
of conducting coercion through a formal, standing organization. Borrowing
insights from the literature on delegation to domestic political
institutions, especially U.S. congressional committees, I present a
theoretical framework for explaining why and under what conditions states
turn to IOs in the conduct of statecraft. I conceptualize IOs as agents of
the international community (including both leaders and their publics)
that serve to constrain and assess the policies of potential coercing
states, thereby generating politically important information that can be
used to screen desirable from undesirable actions. Under certain
conditions, coercers have incentives to subject their actions to such
scrutiny and limitations because doing so lowers the political costs of
exercising power. The effect of IO involvement is especially important
when the organization is more politically neutral, a function of
the distribution of interests among the institution's members. A
neutral IO is less likely to share the preferences of the coercer in terms
of the means, timing, and goals of a policy and is more likely to be
viewed as credible in the eyes of the international community. Coercing
states face a tradeoff: as they turn to more neutral institutions, the
constraints and the variance in outcomes increase but so do the political
benefits.
My argument centers on the notion of strategic information
transmission. When a coercing state works through a sufficiently
neutral IO, this sends information to both foreign leaders and their
publics, information that can determine the level of international
support—material or political, direct or tacit—offered to the
coercing government. Two processes, involving two types of information and
two intended audiences, are key. First, the costs of channeling a policy
through an IO allow the coercer to signal benign intentions
vis-à-vis third-party states (that is, nontargets), a signal
directed primarily at foreign leaders. In the context of coercion,
especially by powerful states, these leaders feel threatened and are able
to achieve some assurance and control through IO involvement. Second, the
endorsement of a neutral IO sends policy-relevant information to foreign
publics, who are “rationally ignorant”4
of
international affairs and seek information shortcuts to determine the
consequences of coercion and whether it is justified. This second audience
can be as important as the first because leaders are often constrained by
domestic politics from supporting another state's use of force. While
the international relations (IR) field has considered the strategic role
of domestic publics for coercing states,
5 the
importance of foreign publics has been largely overlooked.
Increased international support from these two audiences is desirable
for a coercing state because it determines the political costs of a given
policy and may affect its long-term success. The argument applies to any
case of a powerful state—one that does not require logistical
support or resources from an IO to achieve its objectives—conducting
a policy of coercion. While my theoretical claims have relevance for the
actions of any coercing state, limiting the analysis to powerful states
has the advantage of helping to isolate political variables from simple
issues of capacity. I confine my discussion to coercive military
interventions (thereby excluding standard peacekeeping and purely
humanitarian missions), although the argument theoretically speaks to
economic and diplomatic coercion as well.
The phenomenon explored here has traditionally been explained in terms
of the legitimacy conferred on a state's policy by IO approval, which
leads to greater international support. Since Claude's influential
article, countless scholars and policymakers have pointed to the
legitimation function of IOs, especially the UN.6
However,
while there is a virtual consensus that this legitimation effect matters,
the term is used loosely, and there is no clear theoretical understanding
of how it occurs. I provide a set of causal mechanisms in the rationalist
tradition to help explain why IO approval increases international
political support for state policies. I also offer an informational
rationale for why states have coordinated around the Security Council as
the primary institutional legitimizer of the use of force.
7 The article proceeds by briefly reviewing the relevant literatures on
why political actors use institutional agents as a means of generating
information. In particular, I introduce informational theories of
legislative committees to explain why formal IOs are informative and why
some institutions transmit information more efficiently than others. In
the second section, I present the theoretical argument and hypotheses, and
I discuss observable implications. The third section presents a case study
of U.S. efforts to work through the Security Council during the
1990–91 Iraq conflict. Detailed qualitative analysis is the most
appropriate method for uncovering the relevant causal mechanisms. I then
briefly consider an alternative argument drawn from
constructivism—and arguably reflecting the conventional
wisdom—that explains the benefits of working through IOs in
legitimacy terms. The final section summarizes and discusses additional
implications of the argument.
Power, Institutions, and Informative
Agents
For years the nexus between institutions and power remained
understudied by IR theorists busy arguing that either one or the other was
important. A handful of recent works shed light on why powerful states
subject themselves to institutional entanglements in the security sphere.
Ikenberry argues that powerful states can build institutions to exhibit
“strategic restraint,” a form of self-binding that lowers the
costs of maintaining world order by reducing fears of domination.8
Lake explains why states sometimes go beyond mere
cooperation to create “hierarchical” security relationships
that protect against opportunism.
9 My puzzle is distinct: I ask why
states work through institutions while exercising power in particular
foreign policy episodes, not why they create or maintain institutions over
time. Institutions are exogenous in my analysis. In this respect, my
question is closer to Martin's investigation of how institutions
benefit a state pursuing economic sanctions.
10 Unlike these scholars, I find the information transmission role of
institutions to be more important than their ability to solve commitment
problems, which are less relevant in the context of a single coercive
episode. While costly constraints imposed by institutions are important in
my account, they serve primarily to transmit information rather than to
address time-inconsistency.11
While IOs
increase the costs of backing out of commitments to a particular course of
action, they typically cannot solve this problem when it comes to powerful
states. The U.S. decision to abandon the UN before the 2003 war against
Iraq is a good example. In fact, the IR literature frequently conflates
the analytically distinct problems of signaling and credible commitment. I
maintain the distinction both conceptually and empirically.
IR
scholars have had a rather limited view of strategic information
transmission, focusing almost exclusively on signaling games where a
state's “type”—private information regarding
preferences and thus intentions—is the source of uncertainty.
12 My argument
places equal weight on information regarding policy consequences, that is,
the relationship between policy choices and their effects. Under certain
conditions, IOs can provide these two types of information,
intentions
information and
policy information, and thus states have
incentives to rely on them when this information is valuable.
Political actors delegate authority to political institutions for a
variety of reasons. They may do so to solve collective decision-making
problems, to forge credible commitments, to reduce their workload, or to
generate information.13
Information-based theories of delegation fall
into two main categories, based on the type of information that is hidden:
those that focus on reducing uncertainty surrounding the principal's
preferences, and those that focus on the production of policy information
by specialized agents. Typical of the former category, delegation to
independent central banks is sometimes understood as a costly sign of a
government's devotion to sound monetary policy, which can serve as a
signal to investors.
14 Government reliance on central banks and independent
judiciaries may also signal a preference for stability or reform.
Political actors also delegate to extract policy-relevant information.
Because they are politically neutral and have superior expertise, for
example, central banks can provide credible information to legislators and
political parties regarding the government's policy choices and their
economic consequences.
15 Bureaucrats also possess
“knowledge and expertise that politicians lack,”
16 and this creates incentives for legislators and
executive branch officials to rely on executive agencies, even if doing so
entails some loss of control.
17 Even more relevant to the international sphere are informational
theories of legislative organization, developed most extensively in the
context of the U.S. Congress.18
Arguably, delegation to congressional committees,
composed of a subset of the membership, more closely matches circumstances
at the international level than does delegation to large, autonomous
bureaucracies, which have fewer analogs among international institutions.
Similar to these committees, IOs are composed of a subset of states in the
international system. Informational theories propose that committees serve
to provide information to the legislature on alternative policies and
their consequences. The most important design feature is their composition
in terms of member preferences, which largely determines how informative
the signals sent by committees are. Specifically, a committee that is
heterogeneous—that is, whose membership is diverse and
“bookends” the median preference of the floor—sends more
information than a homogeneous committee; and a committee composed of
“preference outliers”—that is, whose membership has
extreme preferences relative to the floor median—is less informative
than one with a more moderate composition. While all committees have an
information advantage insofar as they specialize in a substantive area,
only some—those that are diverse and representative—are able
to transmit information that is seen as credible and therefore informative
to the legislature as a whole.
These principles of information transmission by institutional agents
can be usefully applied to international institutions. I highlight the
distinct role played by formal IOs, as uniquely informative among
international institutions, and explain how the properties of the Security
Council render it especially informative when it comes to military
intervention.
Coercion, IOs, and Information
Transmission
IOs as Informative Agents
Coercing states face the problem of minimizing the international
political costs that might be imposed by third-party states—that is,
states that are not themselves targets of coercion. These costs are
potentially high when coercion is conducted unilaterally and may come in
the form of short-term “active” sanctions, designed to oppose
the policy directly, and longer-term “passive” sanctions,
designed to frustrate the coercing state over time.19
Through uncooperative behavior and issue-linkage,
even weak states can impose costs on the most powerful if their interests
are threatened. According to one U.S. policymaker, the 1998 unilateral
bombing of a chemical plant in Sudan (designed to target al Qaeda)
“aggravated bilateral relationships all over the place” and
made them “more difficult to manage.”
20 Author's interview with a senior White House official,
Washington, D.C., 17 May 1999.
In the late 1980s, U.S. employment
of “Super 301” measures to coerce its trading partners
engendered substantial political backlash, complicating the Uruguay Round
negotiations and regional talks.
21 The
situation following the 2003 Iraq war is also illustrative, as the United
States has had considerable difficulty garnering cooperation for
peacekeeping and reconstruction.
Formal IOs play a unique role in international affairs because of
their independence, which derives from their ability to act with relative
autonomy and neutrality.22
It is the neutrality
of IOs in particular that allows them to serve as informative agents of
the international community. Because they have standing memberships with
diverse interests and cannot be controlled by individual states, they have
two advantages as information generators. First, IOs are able and willing
to impose constraints on a coercer, making signaling of limited ambitions
possible; and second, IOs act as representatives of the international
community, allowing them to generate information on policy consequences
that is regarded as disinterested and thus credible. Intentions
information and policy information are important to third-party leaders
and their publics as they formulate a response to the coercive action.
Unilateral claims by a coercing state clearly lack the neutrality of
IOs in the eyes of the international community. Simple multilateralism, as
an intermediate strategy between unilateralism and IO-based action,
provides only limited information; ad hoc coalitions are by definition
composed of like-minded states, as the phrase “coalition of the
willing” reflects. In the language of the legislative signaling
literature, these coalitions are homogeneous and usually composed of
preference outliers. Because the ideal point of the median member of such
a coalition is close to the ideal point of the coercer on the question of
intervention, the coalition is not likely to impose substantial
constraints and approval from the coalition is not informative to the
median member of the international community. Figure
1 maps these preferences. Among the most robust findings in
theories of strategic information transmission is that actors with more
similar preferences can send more informative signals to each other.23
It follows that, by itself, multilateral support of a
coercer conveys little information to third parties. The involvement of a
formal IO thus offers unique political benefits, beyond those conferred by
multilateralism alone.
Preferences with a multilateral condition
Informational theories of legislative organization help us further
understand why the Security Council plays a special role when it comes to
the use of force. Figure 2 presents graphically
a situation where the IO membership is both heterogeneous (reflected in a
wide preference distribution) and representative (reflected in a roughly
normal distribution and a median preference that matches that of the
international community). In security matters, the Security Council best
matches these characteristics. Approval from the Security
Council—with its fifteen members representing various regions,
geostrategic interests, and levels of development24
The ten nonpermanent seats are distributed geographically,
with five allocated to Asia and Africa, two each to Latin America and
Europe, and one to Eastern Europe.
—requires nine members to
vote affirmatively and the absence of a veto from any permanent member.
The distance between the IO's median preference and the
coercer's ideal point suggests that the organization has distinct
interests. The proximity of
xIO and
xi and the heterogeneity of membership
preferences imply that information transmission to third parties is
efficient, that is, that the IO serves as an informative agent of the
international community. Channeling coercion through the Security Council
entails costly constraints—even a superpower usually must modify its
policy and may be blocked altogether
25—but will also produce
high-quality information regarding intentions and policy consequences.
Heterogeneous and representative preference distribution
This logic explains why regional organizations, with less diverse
memberships and more parochial interests, produce a legitimation effect of
lesser magnitude. The information argument presented here thus suggests
that institutional variation presents tradeoffs—political benefits
versus costly constraints—that affect the “forum
shopping” decisions of coercing states, an extension of the
framework explored elsewhere.26
Coercion through IOs is thus a calculated choice by the coercer to
generate international support or, at least, to minimize opposition to its
policy. This leads to the following general proposition: When powerful
coercers work through IOs, they do so strategically to lower the
international political costs of coercion. This proposition rules out
the possibility that states act through IOs primarily because of an
internalized desire to behave in a legitimate or appropriate way.27
For a discussion of this possibility, see
Hurd 1999.
By focusing on political
costs and benefits, the proposition also rules out material needs and
logistical support as the primary motivation.
28 Burden sharing is rarely a central concern for powerful
states conducting military coercion (see Finnemore
1998, 183; Chapman and Reiter 2004, 901),
though it is clearly valued during peacekeeping and national-building
missions.
Finally, the argument implies that this behavior cannot
be explained in terms of domestic politics within the coercing state. Two
hypotheses presented below go beyond the general proposition to address
specific causal mechanisms.
Two Pathways of Information Transmission
There are two channels by which IOs transmit information during
coercive episodes, each centered on a different audience. I assume that
state leaders are well informed about policy alternatives and consequences
in the security sphere and that IOs do not have an information advantage
over them in this regard. Other leaders do, however, lack information
regarding the intentions of the coercing state's leadership. Coercion
is associated with expanded influence, especially when pursued by the
powerful, and the precise intentions of the coercer determine how
threatening its actions are and how they affect the interests of
third-party states. The 2003 Iraq war provides a stark example. Before the
war, governments in the region feared that the United States had ambitious
goals to dominate the region, altering the strategic landscape to their
disadvantage. The U.S. approach did nothing to assuage these fears. As
Telhami assessed the regional mindset after the war, “Most are
… concerned that the war in Iraq was merely the opening move in a
larger strategy; they ask themselves which country will be
next.”29
It is difficult for powerful states to reassure others that their
goals are limited and unthreatening. The decision to work through a
neutral IO serves as an informative signal because it imposes costs on a
coercer that a more aggressive state (one with intentions that threaten
third parties) would be unwilling to pay. The current IR literature
certainly recognizes that institutions impose constraints on states, but
conceptualization of these precise costs is not well developed. At least
four overlapping costs may be imposed when coercion is channeled through
an IO: freedom-of-action costs, organization costs, costs of delay, and
scrutiny costs.
First, a state's freedom of action is almost always limited when
coercion is channeled through an IO. History shows that IOs impose real
constraints that restrict the set of policy options available to even the
strongest states.30
For examples involving
the UN and OAS, see Chayes and Chayes 1995,
41–42. Even NATO, composed of like-minded states, imposed profound
constraints on its superpower leader during the Cold War (Weber 1992) and the Bosnia crisis (Papayoanou 1997).
Some policy restrictions
are endogenous to the process of seeking IO approval. Once a state chooses
to act through an IO, it must bring to the table a defensible set of goals
to gain support, ruling out the most ambitious and aggressive policies
ex ante.
Second, coercers face organization costs—including the costs of
communicating, bargaining, and reaching common positions—when they
work through an IO.31
These are a form of
transaction costs. Any multilateral approach to foreign policy increases
the costs of decision making and of implementing policy: the problems of
collective decision making and coalition warfare in particular are well
known. These are compounded by political factors, or what have been termed
influence costs, “the losses that arise from individuals
within an organization seeking to influence its decisions for their
private benefit.”
32 In Kosovo, for
example, the details and intensity of the bombing campaign were modified
to keep NATO members on board. Reaching consensus among states, a
requisite for IO approval, leads to outcomes that may differ from the
coercer's preferences.
The third type of cost, delay, is largely a product of the first two.
Involving a neutral IO implies a willingness to engage in diplomacy and to
wait for approval of the policy. Finally, working through an IO increases
the level of post hoc scrutiny to which a coercer is subject. Since IOs
increase transparency and require a more public accounting of actions, the
international community is able to track the behavior of a state that
chooses to work under their auspices. Moreover, exchange and discourse
within an IO tends to reveal information about states' preferences
and intended actions,33
leading to more effective monitoring and
higher-quality signaling at the international level. The diversity of IO
members is again key. Unlike a unilateral effort or an ad hoc coalition,
most IOs include states with disparate interests who will watch the
coercer with a critical eye. The presence of scrutiny leads to more
sincere signaling.
34 These various costs, which I refer to generally as the costs of
constraint, allow the coercer to send meaningful information
regarding its intentions. Showing restraint and a willingness to cede some
control reassures nontarget states, which are less likely to oppose the
intervention.
H1 (Intentions information): Channeling coercion through an IO
sends a signal of benign intentions to leaders of third-party states,
thereby increasing the likelihood of international support.
However, even if other state leaders determine that supporting the
coercive policy is in their national interest, they may face domestic
barriers to doing so. They must convince their publics that supporting
another state's use of force is justified. IO approval helps overcome
this additional obstacle by sending policy-relevant information to
domestic publics abroad.35
Publics may also
value information about the coercer's intentions. I assume that
leaders, preoccupied with international competition, are relatively more
concerned than publics about intentions information and thus emphasize the
role of policy information with respect to publics.
While IR scholars have paid increasing attention to how domestic
publics influence state interests and policy, the role of domestic publics
abroad is not well understood. Members of publics are poorly informed
relative to leaders; they lack knowledge regarding the reasons for a given
policy and the relationship between the policy and potential consequences.
This is most acute in international affairs, where issues are less salient
and publics are exposed to little debate and information. Because
individuals also have negligible influence on foreign policy, each has
little incentive to gather and analyze information. In the context of
coercive intervention on the part of another state, publics lack policy
information in two related ways. First, they do not know if the policy
serves collective interests or whether it reflects selfish interests with
potentially undesirable consequences. Second, they do not know if the
proposed policy is a reasonable means to achieve the stated goals.
Ignorance, however, does not imply indifference. Publics seek
“information shortcuts” to assess international issues,36
and IO endorsements can perform this function.
Because the claims of IOs are more neutral than claims of individual
governments or ad hoc coalitions, the information they convey regarding a
policy is more credible and meaningful. This is evidenced by public
attitudes toward the search for weapons in Iraq before the 2003 war.
Two-thirds of Canadians surveyed in January 2003 said they would believe
the UN rather than the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush if
there was disagreement over the state of Iraqi weapons.
37 Ipsos-Reid/CTV/Globe and Mail poll, released 17
January 2003.
Absent a UN imprimatur, publics around the world
were skeptical that the United States was seeking the collective goods of
eliminating an Iraqi threat and upholding Security Council resolutions;
most saw selfish goals involving oil, Israel, and political influence.
38 In
the context of a military intervention, as law scholar Wedgwood observes,
IO authorization “can be seen as an impartial certification that an
adversary does indeed pose a threat to international peace and security,
and that the use of force is not intended to serve the narrow interests of
a single country.”
39 The logic is captured in
a basic principle behind the informational rationale for committees.
“In the presence of uncertainty,” write Gilligan and Krehbiel,
“diversity of interests on the committee promotes informational
efficiency.”
40 Individual
members of the public, like legislators, do respond to new policy
information and update their beliefs in sensible ways.
41 Through this process of policy information transmission to domestic
publics abroad, a coercer that achieves IO approval makes it easier for
foreign leaders to offer support. In “two-level games” terms,
the information transmitted to publics increases the size of the domestic
win-set for third-party leaders by minimizing internal opposition. This
second path of information transmission is captured in a second
hypothesis:
H2 (Policy information): IO approval informs domestic publics
abroad that the coercive policy has desirable consequences, thereby
increasing the likelihood of international support by minimizing domestic
opposition.
Observable Implications
The most definitive evidence of the information transmission argument
would uncover the motivations of the coercing state's leadership and
would show that third parties—both leaders and publics—receive
the information hypothesized and react to it accordingly. It is impossible
to directly observe intentions or whether particular information has been
received, though there are reasonable indicators that shed light on the
processes hypothesized here, and consideration of different types of
evidence can increase one's confidence.
The framework rests on the proposition that powerful states channel
coercion through IOs in a calculated effort to reduce the international
political costs of coercion. Two types of evidence shed light on this
argument. First, one should see leaders express that their motivation for
working through an IO was indeed a desire to reduce international
political fallout, and this should be confirmed by contemporaneous
observers. Alternative motivations, such as a logic of appropriateness or
a desire for material support from the IO, would have to be ruled out.
Second, one can demonstrate that the political costs of coercion would
have been higher absent IO involvement. This can be done by carefully
tracing international reactions within the case and through comparisons to
similar cases that vary in terms of IO involvement.
For the first hypothesis, on intentions information, one should
observe the imposition of costly constraints on a coercer as a result of
IO involvement. One should also adduce evidence that foreign leaders were
concerned about the threat posed by the coercer, and that the costs of
constraint served to allay such concerns. This is best done through
in-depth case research and the use of counterfactual arguments to
demonstrate that international reactions would have been different absent
IO approval.
The second hypothesis—that IO approval sends policy information
to domestic publics abroad—is the most empirically challenging. It
is impossible to know precisely how and why individuals updated their
beliefs about a given policy. One should first establish that third-party
leaders are constrained by domestic opposition from supporting the coercer
and that they view IO involvement as key to alleviating this problem. In
terms of public opinion, a procoercion shift should occur following IO
approval. One can also compare public opinion in cases that vary in terms
of IO involvement; IO authorization should correlate with more favorable
attitudes toward the action.
I propose an additional indicator for Hypothesis 2, based on the
framing strategies of leaders, that helps capture both the concerns of
publics and the information they receive during coercive episodes. If
leaders believe that IOs can transmit politically useful information to
their publics, one should see them frame their actions in specific ways in
statements designed for public consumption. Leaders should stress not only
involvement by the IO but also its informative properties, namely, its
neutrality as a function of its diverse and representative membership.
Because the press “index” their coverage of foreign policy to
the statements of high-level government officials,42
how
events are framed by these officials shapes the information received by
publics. Indeed, strategic communication by leaders can even stretch
across borders to reach foreign audiences directly.
43 To the extent that leaders are well informed about
their constituents, their framing strategies also should shed light on
what type of information is important to publics as they assess
policies.
Given these indicators, assessing the argument requires fairly
detailed analysis of a given case to reveal the information transmission
processes, with contextual comparisons to other cases to isolate specific
variables and assess counterfactuals. The case study below is guided by
the arguments and observable implications summarized in Table 1.
Hypotheses and observable implications
The United States and the Security Council
in the Gulf War
Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, the United
States went to great lengths to work through the UN to pressure and
ultimately expel Iraq from Kuwait, seeking Security Council resolutions at
every stage of the conflict. Resort to force came only after twelve
resolutions condemning Iraq and imposing various sanctions, culminating in
the passage on 29 November of Resolution 678, which authorized member
states “to use all necessary means.” Most observers of Gulf
War diplomacy agree that by turning to the Security Council the United
States was able to “legitimate” and achieve greater support
for its use of coercion. But few analysts go the next step. Why and how
was the UN able to perform this function? Why did its role change how the
international community reacted to events? Understanding the logic of
information transmission helps address these questions and explain why the
United States chose an IO-based strategy.
The 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict is an ideal case for assessing
the arguments presented here. Because the episode involves an extremely
powerful state using military force against a much weaker one, it
represents an unlikely case for showing the importance of institutional
involvement. The opportunity costs of using institutions are higher for
powerful states—they have more to lose by ceding control. U.S.
efforts to gain Security Council support have indeed been rebuffed on
multiple occasions, a reflection of the body's diverse interests, its
supermajority voting rules, and the veto power of the permanent members,
who frequently have divergent preferences.44
Looking at a
case where the most powerful state turns to the most neutral IO should
render salient the tradeoffs and causal mechanisms identified in my
theoretical argument.
Motivation and International Political Costs
In military terms, the Gulf War was remarkably decisive. The vast
majority of the forces and equipment were American, and in fact the
coalition proved to be a significant burden.45
As President
George Bush and his advisors confirm, they were primarily seeking
political advantages, not military ones, in turning to the UN.
46
Security Council consent was viewed as critical for avoiding some specific
costs that unilateral coercion might generate, such as increased
anti-American terrorism.
47 Author's
interview with a former member of the National Security Council,
Washington, D.C., 17 May 1999.
Relations were perceived to be at
stake with other influential states, such as the Soviet Union, and with
smaller nations that had come to abhor U.S. intervention in the developing
world.
48 These decisions were motivated instrumentally and not by
adherence to multilateralist norms. As one Bush administration official
conceded, efforts to gain UN support “did not flow from lofty
principles of international unity.”
49 New York Times, 30 August 1990, A1.
In the end, the United States suffered no serious diplomatic setbacks
as a result of the war. The political success of U.S. efforts was
reflected in the widespread support it achieved, summarized in Table 2. Almost forty countries contributed personnel
to the coalition, and more than twenty provided military hardware.
Financial contributions of $54 billion were also made to the United
States, mostly from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Japan,
and Germany.
International support of military intervention against
Iraq
But perhaps the same third-party states that supported the U.S.-led
operation would have done so regardless of any UN involvement. There may
even be endogeneity: UN approval may have been a result rather than cause
of widespread international support. This argument can be rejected for two
reasons. First, most states that ultimately supported the intervention
were deeply torn initially and through much of the prewar period. Most
Arabs loathed the idea of Western troops entering the region, and some saw
merit in Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's accusations against Kuwait.
Even King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, facing the most immediate threat of
continued Iraqi aggression, strenuously resisted U.S. assistance.50
Non-Arab leaders were no more eager. Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev faced strong domestic opposition to supporting the United States
and insisted through the end of October that the use of force was
unacceptable. Others, such as France and Turkey, faced substantial losses
from the cessation of trade and the oil embargo.
By November, with the exception of the United Kingdom, every European
and Arab member of the emerging coalition, as well as Canada and the
Soviet Union, had made Security Council approval a condition of their
support for offensive action.51
See New
York Times, 16 November 1990, A12; Toronto Star, 13 November
1990, A1; and Washington Post, 9 November 1990, A1.
Without such a resolution, continued sanctions and diplomacy were almost
universally preferred. In sum, support of U.S. action in the Gulf War was
by no means a foregone conclusion, and Security Council endorsement was a
key variable in determining reactions to the policy.
Signaling Intentions to State Leaders
As the world's only superpower contemplated the use of military
coercion, the international community was clearly concerned with U.S.
intentions. Goals that included overthrowing Saddam, occupying Iraq or
establishing an indefinite, large-scale military presence were viewed as
threats to third-party interests. Goals limited to restoring the
pre-invasion status quo, by contrast, were generally viewed as benign.
Gulf states had a genuine concern for their sovereignty and the
encroachment of U.S. military influence.52
Those states most immediately affected, such as Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia, were effectively being asked to submit to protectorate
status for the duration of the American military presence. Lake 1999, 235–36.
Arab leaders reacted
with fear and suspicion of ulterior motives, including a desire to exploit
local resources and establish political dominance in the region.
53 Khalidi 1991, 167.
For example, Saudi Arabia's King Fahd suspected the United States of
wanting to establish additional permanent military bases. Heikal 1992, 212.
War aims that included
toppling Saddam were entirely unacceptable to these regimes. Those outside
the region were worried about the precedent being set and with their own
political influence in the Gulf. European governments viewed initial U.S.
reactions to Iraq's invasion as hasty and aggressive. For example,
the French hoped that Iraq would not be unduly weakened so that their
trading relationship could be preserved, and France's defense
minister warned that U.S. “hegemonic temptations” would
threaten France's “freedom of choice” in the Middle
East.
54 Le Monde, 31 January 1991,
6.
After losing Europe to the West, the Soviets had political and
strategic apprehensions over U.S. motivations and long-term goals in the
Gulf, a Cold War battleground.
55 As one
foreign ministry official complained early in the standoff, “There
are no guarantees that the United States will leave Saudi Arabia after the
crisis is over.”
56 New York
Times, 31 August 1990, A13. During a meeting with Bush on September
9, Gorbachev sought assurances that the United States intended to withdraw
its forces from the region as soon as possible following the conflict.
News Conference 1990, 1345.
For most
leaders, U.S. muscle flexing was inherently threatening and
undesirable.
The United States thus faced the problem of signaling its intentions.
As Hypothesis 1 suggests, by channeling its coercion through the Security
Council, the United States assumed costs that helped signal its limited
goals. Aside from the operational difficulties that arose from putting
together a multinational force, U.S. political and military leaders faced
a number of real costs in the form of delays, limits on policy autonomy,
and additional scrutiny. The Bush administration was constrained by the
methodical decision-making process and influence costs that resulted from
seeking approval during each phase. As one senior administration official
lamented, “When you try to bring people on board, you have to listen
to them.”57
Newsweek, 1
October 1990, 20.
At two stages in particular U.S. policies were delayed and adjusted to
mollify the Security Council: the decision to enforce the initial embargo
on Iraq and the decision to launch the military operation called Desert
Storm. Resolution 661, passed on 6 August 1990, imposed a trade embargo on
Iraq. Though the United States—and the United Kingdom, whose navy
was also patrolling the Gulf—was willing and able from the start to
enforce the embargo, ships were allowed to pass through the blockade for
weeks. Scowcroft describes the dilemma:
The question was, do we move unilaterally to stop them, or do
we wait and try to get additional authority from the UN? We had lengthy
discussions with the British about it and of course [British Prime
Minister Margaret] Thatcher said go after the ships….
[U.S. Secretary of State James] Baker was insistent that we
wait. He convinced the President we would lose the Soviets (who were still
adamantly opposed to using force) and perhaps the chance for a positive
vote in the Security Council on enforcement if we went ahead
unilaterally.58
U.S. National Security Advisor Colin Powell and Defense Secretary
Richard Cheney agreed that, for political reasons, they should wait for UN
approval.59
The French and Soviets worried that enforcement action would provoke
retaliation by Iraq and thereby trigger war, and they argued that
Resolution 661 alone could not be used as authorization. The Soviets were
the major obstacle, delaying by at least ten days a new resolution
approving force.60
Toronto Star, 25
August 1990, A1.
Ultimately, approval came on 25 August in the
form of Resolution 665, which authorized the use of force to disable ships
that refused to stop for inspection.
Waiting for UN endorsement to enforce the embargo was costly, beyond
the fact that supplies were reaching Iraq in the meantime. To begin with,
there was a credibility issue, as Freedman and Karsh point out:
“Here was the first potential use of force and the United States
dare not back down lest it appear a ‘paper tiger.’ If it
hesitated, inevitable questions would be raised about its readiness to
stay the course.”61
Moreover,
waiting for another resolution raised the prospect of lost flexibility.
Seeking further approval, Thatcher complained, would “tie our hands
unacceptably.”
62 This fear proved well
founded. China, the Soviet Union, and France insisted on strict wording
for the resolution that did not simply state that “minimum use of
force” could be used—the Americans' preferred language,
which had almost unlimited interpretations—but rather spelled out
that only measures “commensurate to the specific circumstances as
may be necessary” could be employed. There is evidence that France
and China explicitly sought Resolution 665 as a way to stall and impose
limits on the use of force.
63 As one British journalist noted at the
time, “the Soviet Union wanted to get as many constraints as
possible on U.S. military action in the Gulf.”
64 Independent, 27 August 1990, 7.
For U.S. decision makers, the next great debate—and
delay—was over the launching of Desert Storm. Thatcher again warned
Bush that going back to the UN would constraint them unduly. In seeking a
further resolution, she argued, “We risk amendments,”
therefore it was preferable to “go to war on our own
terms.”65
The information rationale suggests
that it was precisely the prospect of constraint and even outright
rejection, a function of the Security Council's neutrality, that made
going to the UN so politically important.
In the end, the United States waited four months from the invasion
until Resolution 678 authorized the use of force. Considerable diplomacy
and consultations took place before the United States could even propose
language for a resolution, and Security Council voting rules (the dual
obstacles of supermajority and the veto) gave other governments
considerable leverage. A senior Bush administration official described the
difficult process of garnering the necessary votes: “We have an idea
of the kind of resolution we'd like. But that's very different
than presenting countries with draft language of a proposal that you are
going to consider tabling in the council…. Each country is one
vote; you need nine votes to pass a resolution, and some are in different
places on this.”66
Quoted in
Washington Post, 16 November 1990, A21.
Indeed, the
strategy of other Security Council members was to insist on a resolution
authorizing force so they could influence the timing and scope of any
potential combat.
67 New York Times,
11 November 1990, A1.
Baker spent much of the month of November
painstakingly organizing support by soliciting input and offering
concessions and side-payments—efforts that would have been largely
unnecessary outside the context of an IO.
The Soviets in particular pushed for more moderate language and
insisted on more time for diplomacy throughout the month. Even when a date
for a Security Council vote was settled, while the United States hoped to
set a relatively prompt deadline for Iraqi withdrawal, the Soviet Union
and France insisted on a “pause for peace” as a condition of
the resolution's passage. The Soviets asked for a 31 January 1991
deadline; the French compromise of 15 January was selected. The very idea
of an “announced” war, it should be noted, represented a
constraint, as U.S. planners had preferred a more flexible approach.68
Ibid., 14 November 1990, A1.
Delay was costly for three reasons. First, it allowed Saddam to
prepare for hostilities and required the size of the Allied force to be
augmented accordingly. Bush worried in early January that the United
States would pay a high price in lives by allowing the Iraqi army to dig
in.69
Part of this waiting period was needed
to move troops and equipment into position, but its duration exceeded by
weeks the optimal length of time. Another potential cost of delay came in
the domestic political realm. The U.S. antiwar movement developed momentum
in January, including within Congress, and thus delay was risky for Bush
from a political standpoint.
70 Finally, some
feared it would be hard to maintain a coalition over time as diplomacy and
the fading memory of Iraq's transgression rendered the military
option less appealing, thus making delay risky.
71 This argument was made most prominently in a Washington
Post editorial by Henry Kissinger. Washington Post, 11
November 1991.
The wait was valuable politically: it satisfied European countries
that hoped to further explore diplomatic means and allowed Arab leaders to
investigate “Arab solutions.” It also showed that the United
States was willing to be constrained and to accommodate the interests of
others. Reflecting the success of this benign signal, Gorbachev told Baker
in early November, “[We] have noticed that in this
situation you are not losing your cool.”72
When the United States, with operation Desert Storm underway, declared
a cease-fire on 28 February, reactions were mixed. The abrupt end and
Saddam's continued rule sparked accusations that the coalition had
not truly succeeded, and within months of the war Bush's popularity
ratings had plummeted. Early in the episode, various options, including
invasion and the removal of Saddam, were on the table. The IO-based
strategy required that these more ambitious goals be removed to generate
consensus in the Security Council. Bush knew it would be costly to accept
and adhere to a limited UN mandate, as prewar polls showed a strong public
desire to remove Saddam.73
Yet U.S.
leaders remained committed to limited goals partly because they felt
constrained by the mandate and did not want to risk forfeiting the
attendant political benefits. According to Bush, “I firmly believed
we should not march into Baghdad. Our stated mission, as codified in UN
resolutions, was a simple one—end the aggression, knock Iraq's
forces out of Kuwait, and restore Kuwait's leaders. To occupy Iraq
… would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of international
law bestowed by the resolutions.”
74 While other factors were involved, such as the costs of an
occupation and fear of a regional power vacuum, the president's son
and future president, George W. Bush, and Powell both confirmed that the
senior Bush felt constrained by the resolutions to do no more than force
Saddam from Kuwait.
75 Relinquishing some decision making to the Security Council allowed the
United States to credibly signal that it preferred a limited operation
(restoration of the pre-invasion status quo) and was not motivated by
hidden ambitions. U.S. assertions before the Security Council that it had
limited goals consistent with the UN mandate76
UN Doc. S/22090, 17 January 1991.
were more
credible than Iraqi arguments that the policy represented an effort to
impose domination on the region. A day after the war began, the Egyptian
foreign minister expressed his confidence that it “does not have the
purpose of destroying Iraq but of liberating Kuwait.”
77 UN Doc. S/22113, 18 January 1991.
This increased confidence regarding U.S. intentions made leaders more
willing to offer support.
Transmitting Policy Information to Foreign
Publics
From the time U.S. troops began arriving to defend Saudi Arabia,
leaders throughout the international community faced tough domestic
political questions in deciding whether to support a U.S.-led invasion.
Potential coalition governments knew that IO approval would help them
“sell” support of the war to their domestic audiences, and
this provided additional motivation to push for a Security Council-based
approach. For their part, U.S. policymakers clearly had foreign publics in
mind when they chose to work through the Security Council. Scowcroft
believed that the UN “could provide a cloak of acceptability to our
efforts and mobilize world opinion behind the principles we wished to
project.”78
Hypothesis 2 captures this as a
process of information transmission: IO approval serves as an information
shortcut for publics as they assess whether intervention offers collective
international benefits and is worthy of their government's
support.
When they address domestic politics, scholars studying the role of IOs
in U.S. military intervention typically focus on the audience at home.79
By focusing instead
on the role of foreign publics, I am not arguing that politics in the
United States were unimportant—multilateralism benefited the Bush
administration in terms of public opinion and the debate in Congress.
Nevertheless, decision makers were not primarily motivated by political
concerns at home when they turned to the UN. Bush was willing to proceed
to war without majority approval and without a favorable vote in
Congress.
80 Moreover, recent history shows that IO endorsements have a
mixed effect on U.S. public opinion of interventions; indeed, presidents
are often viewed as being “tough” and effective when they
proceed unilaterally.
81 Despite an abstract preference for
multilateralism, Americans tend to rally behind their leaders regardless
of the approach taken.
In the 1990–91 case, many governments, having concluded that it
might be in their interest to support U.S. action, initially felt
constrained by their publics from doing so. Domestic audiences were most
skeptical in the Arab and Muslim world, where Western military
intervention was an especially sensitive issue. Following the Iraqi
invasion, no Arab regime dared to call publicly for U.S. assistance; even
Kuwait's desperate call for international help was qualified with an
explicit preference for an “Arab solution.” A study of Arab
public opinion during the Gulf War concludes that Arab governments, though
autocratic, were constrained by domestic attitudes and calibrated their
policies accordingly.82
The domestic political challenges facing leaders outside the region
were qualitatively different but also important. As one newspaper
characterized the situation in Europe in late August 1990, while
condemnation of Iraq was unanimous, “domestic political difficulties
and wariness about jumping aboard a U.S. bandwagon are still causing
division on the issue of military action outside a UN umbrella.”83
Independent, 25 August 1990,
7.
Most Europeans were skeptical of a military solution and
opposed toeing the U.S. line. To the east, Gorbachev faced myriad domestic
challenges, leading him to insist that any decisions on military action be
taken by the Security Council. In the wake of Afghanistan, it was
difficult to generate public enthusiasm for an overseas intervention, and
there was pressure from the right and the military to dissociate Soviet
policy from the appearance of U.S. influence.
84 Speaking to Baker, Gorbachev put a fine point
on the problem: “You are asking the Soviet Union to approve the use
of American force against a long-time ally of the Soviet Union.”
85 Diplomatic efforts by the United States
were frustrated as much by domestic opposition as by any international
factor.
These domestic political barriers were largely removed as a result of
the UN's involvement. As U.S. policy toward Iraq became increasingly
enmeshed in the Council, domestic opposition around the world was
diminished to the point where few governments felt constrained. Despite
lingering resentment, fears of upheaval in the “Arab street”
were not realized. Governments with Muslim populations saw a UN-based
approach to Iraq as key to overcoming domestic barriers to the
intervention. Egypt and Turkey, for example, strongly urged Baker to seek
Security Council resolutions “to protect themselves against domestic
political opposition.”86
New York
Times, 2 December 1990, A3.
It is interesting to note that
even those governments that supported Saddam throughout most of the crisis
still endorsed UN sanctions and welcomed UN involvement.
87 While
support of—and subordination to—the United States was
distasteful, support of the UN was politically acceptable and indicated to
publics that collective interests were at stake.
Once Arab leaders decided that the risks of a more powerful Iraq were
too great and that Western intervention was sufficiently unthreatening,
they targeted their publics with a “coordinated information
campaign” centered around the multilateral nature of the
intervention.88
UN cover allowed Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak to argue to his citizens that Saddam “is one man against the
world,” and his pro-intervention stance was ultimately supported by
a clear majority of the population.
89 See
New York Times, 8 November 1991, A1; and “Poll Shows
Majority Egyptians Back Government Policy,” Xinhua Overseas News
Service, 20 January 1991 (accessed via Lexis-Nexis), citing a poll
conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Cairo.
Gorbachev
also maintained enough domestic support (albeit barely) by pointing to
Security Council approval and by framing the operation to the public as a
collective mission. The UN became the rhetorical focal point of Soviet
policy. A foreign ministry spokesperson justified his country's
involvement by declaring, “We are for the Security Council to tackle
this most urgent issue now.”
90 In a
sixteen-sentence joint statement released by Gorbachev and Bush on 9
September, there were seven references to the UN or the Security Council.
Calling on “the entire world community,” the two leaders
insisted that “Nothing short of the complete implementation of the
United Nations Security Council Resolutions is acceptable.”
91 Gorbachev understood that his domestic audience
would be influenced by knowledge of the UN's role. As one observer
notes, the UN umbrella “made it possible for the Soviet Union to
support the anti-Iraq coalition without any explicit connection to the
United States.”
92 Various Western leaders also relied on the UN to make support
politically possible. France would not have participated outside the aegis
of the UN. Though French President François Mitterrand felt that
Article 51 was sufficient from a legal perspective, he knew it could not
justify military coercion to his domestic audience. “Article 51
doesn't mind public opinion,” he explained to Baker.
“Fifty-five million French people are not international lawyers. We
need that resolution [to authorize the use of force] to ensure
the consequences it will entail.”93
Germany
and Japan both faced cultural and constitutional barriers to supporting
military action. In order to justify their financial support, their
governments framed the intervention as a collective effort under the
UN's umbrella.
94 For publics around the world, Security
Council resolutions “converted the United States policy of military
coercion against Iraq … into a United Nations policy of military
coercion.”
95 That leaders around the
world were so eager to stress UN involvement suggests that this
information was received and viewed as important by their
constituents.
The details of leaders' framing strategies are also consistent
with the information rationale for Security Council influence. Beyond
references to UN involvement, in statements designed for public
consumption U.S. and third-party leaders stressed certain characteristics
of the Security Council to emphasize its neutrality, namely that its
membership was heterogeneous and representative of the international
community. Baker understood the political importance of framing the
conflict as a collective effort in the collective interest: “We
believed it was imperative to keep the debate from turning into an
Iraq-versus-the-United States confrontation, which would have made it more
difficult to build and maintain a coalition.”96
As
evidence that global interests were at stake, U.S. leaders pointed to the
votes of the Security Council. “These goals are not our own,”
Bush proclaimed. “They have been endorsed by the United Nations
Security Council.”
97 Baker portrayed Resolution 678
as representing “the will of the international community.”
98 The
composition of the Security Council—the ten rotating members at the
time were Canada, Colombia, Ethiopia, Finland, the Ivory Coast, Cuba,
Malaysia, Romania, Yemen, and Zaire—gave its endorsement
considerable credibility. Its heterogeneity allowed Bush to argue
reasonably in his 1991 State of the Union speech that “diverse
nations are drawn together in common cause.”
Leaders of other countries also stressed the neutrality of the
Security Council in their public statements. At a 9 September press
conference, Gorbachev referred to “efforts being taken by the
international community working together within the Security
Council.”99
In a speech before the House of
Commons following the passage of Resolution 678, Canadian External Affairs
Minister Joe Clark summarized the situation facing Iraq: “It is now
up to Saddam Hussein to determine whether the international community will
have to use the authority of the UN to achieve our collective goal through
the use of force.”
100 Toronto
Star, 29 November 1990, A1.
Referring more directly to the
informative properties of the Security Council, French Foreign Minister
Roland Dumas described the body as “an expression of the community
of nations as a whole and also of all that community's
diversity.”
101 UN Doc. S/PV.2943,
25 September 1990, 33.
During Security Council meetings
throughout the episode, representatives repeatedly referred to the
Security Council and its resolutions as representing the
“voice” and “will” of the international
community.
102 For examples of such
statements by representatives of Canada, Ethiopia, Finland, France, the
United Kingdom, Malaysia, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Zaire at key
junctures of the Iraq episode, see the following UN documents:
2/PV.2934, 9 August 1990, 13–15, 16, 21; S/PV.2938, 25
August 1990, 33, 38, 48; S/PV.2943, 25 September 1990, 33, 46, 66, 74;
and S/PV.2963, 29 November 1990, 79. It should be noted that
statements made before the Security Council are carefully crafted and
intended for public consumption, not for active deliberation or
debate.
In other words, leaders were careful to stress the institutional
characteristics that render institutional agents—from legislative
committees to IOs—most informative: a heterogeneous and
representative membership. While public statements explain little about
what motivates speakers themselves, these statements are potentially
revealing with respect to their intended audience. Based on the two
assumptions identified in the previous section—that the information
received by publics about foreign affairs derives largely from their
leaders, and that leaders have some understanding of what information is
persuasive to their publics—this lends further support to Hypothesis
2.
Finally, a useful comparison of international public opinion can be
made to the 2003 Iraq war, conducted with no IO mandate. While roughly 70
percent of Western Europeans supported intervention in the first Gulf War,
only 19 percent of Europeans polled by EOS Gallup Europe in January 2003
supported the second.103
Washington
Post, 25 October 1990, A31 (summarizing a Gallup poll conducted in
October 1990); EOS Gallup Europe, “International Crisis
Survey.” Available at 〈www.eosgallupeurope.com/int_survey〉. Accessed 4
June 2004.
UN authorization was a key variable. When asked if the
United States should intervene militarily in Iraq without UN approval, a
plurality in only one European country (Slovakia) out of thirty agreed.
When asked if their country should participate in a military intervention
with Security Council approval, the number of pluralities jumps to
fifteen. A Gallup International poll also conducted in January 2003 showed
that few populations were in favor of war. When asked if their country
should support a war, majorities in only the United States and Australia
responded positively; in the remaining thirty-seven countries there was no
majority support. The prospect of UN authorization, however, raised
favorable attitudes toward the war by 30 to 50 percent in most EU
countries, and by 46 percent in Canada, 56 percent in Australia, and 29
percent in India.
104 As noted above in the discussion of
Hypothesis 2, publics were highly skeptical of whether war was justified
and would provide collective benefits. Absent UN approval, they had more
negative views of the policy and generally did not find the stated
rationale to be credible.
In both wars, even when government leaders had decided that supporting
the intervention was in their country's interest, many faced domestic
opposition. The Security Council's imprimatur was the most powerful
tool for convincing these publics that the coercive policy was reasonable
and worthy of support. As one Turkish diplomat notes, contrasting the 2003
Iraq war with the first, “[A] resolution gives us
something to work with domestically; we just didn't have that in the
second case.”105
Author's
interview with a Turkish diplomat, New York, 13 November 2003. The
interviewee was confident that UN authorization of the 2003 intervention
would have swayed public opinion sufficiently to allow more active
support, such as providing a base of operations for U.S. ground
troops.
Those leaders who did support the “coalition of the
willing” were in some cases punished afterwards by their
electorates.
I have offered indirect but suggestive evidence that channeling
coercion through the UN during the 1990–91 episode served to
transmit policy-relevant information to publics around the world, thus
removing a domestic political barrier to third-party support. Many leaders
were constrained by domestic politics from supporting the United States
initially, but these constraints largely disappeared as the policy became
firmly entrenched in the Security Council.
Information versus Legitimacy
My empirical discussion has focused largely on providing confirming
evidence for my information argument. I have briefly considered specific
alternative explanations (domestic politics in the United States, burden
sharing, and endogeneity) for the Security Council's role but I have
not directly addressed the most prominent theoretical alternative: that
the observed “legitimation effect” of IO approval rests on the
importance of legitimacy. Legitimacy is fungible and can be transferred
from an institutional holder to another actor.106
Thus it is
possible that the international community views IO approval as conferring
legitimacy on state actions, appealing to an internalized norm that
legitimate behavior is appropriate and thus worthy of support. This
legitimacy logic arguably represents the conventional wisdom for
understanding the political effects of IO approval.
It is difficult to disentangle these distinct logics—rational
information transmission versus normative legitimacy—since their
broad effects are observationally equivalent. In both cases IO approval
leads to more international support. On closer inspection, however, there
are distinct observable implications for both mechanisms that can help one
assess their relative explanatory power in a given case. I consider three
sources of evidence in this section: the design features of the Security
Council, the behavior of foreign leaders, and the attitudes of
publics.
The legitimacy and information rationales make different predictions
about what sorts of institutional design features generate the greatest
political effect. I have noted the consensus among scholars and
practitioners that the UN, especially the Security Council, is a uniquely
powerful legitimizer of state policies. Leaders covet its approval over
regional endorsements and publics are more likely to support the use of
force endorsed by the Security Council as compared to regional IOs or
allied coalitions.107
So one might usefully ask whether the Security
Council's design is more consistent with an informative institution
or with a legitimate institution. I have offered evidence that the
heterogeneity and representative nature of its membership make it a
neutral and thus credible information provider to the international
community. By contrast, the Security Council has few features of a
legitimate institution or of an institution that creates legitimate rules.
For example, it lacks the requirements of procedural legitimacy, such as
transparency, democracy and accountability, and its decisions are
inconsistent and based on ambiguous law.
108 It is not well designed to
confer legitimacy through its resolutions.
Moreover, if legitimacy is operating, one would expect smaller IOs
with more homogeneous memberships to be most influential in generating
support. Constructivist scholars show that norms and socialization
processes matter most in more intimate, “in-group”
settings.109
Hurd and
Franck both argue that legitimacy can only operate in the context of a
coherent social community.
110 One would thus expect common standards of legitimacy
to be strongest among countries that share values and norms, such as
within NATO or the OAS.
111 Schimmelfennig
(1998/1999) makes precisely this
argument.
The Security Council, by contrast, has a diverse,
worldwide membership—and one with no shared culture or values.
112 Yet its endorsements matter more in practice. In short,
Security Council features are more consistent with an information function
than with a legitimacy function, and the legitimacy argument does not
account for the Security Council's unique ability among IOs to
generate international support.
Turning to the behavior of leaders, I have already shown that U.S.
policymakers, in seeking IO approval, were motivated instrumentally and
not by an internalized desire to act appropriately. But perhaps foreign
leaders were motivated differently. If legitimacy is operating, one should
see leaders supporting the policy because it is the “right”
thing to do and not because of a cost-benefit assessment of
self-interest.113
What one sees in fact is that leaders
such as Gorbachev, Mitterrand, and Fahd were calculating the effects of
intervention on their domestic and international positions, as a function
of U.S. intentions and their own publics' reactions. Moreover, many
leaders sought to extract side-payments in return for their support or
were motivated by a desire to share in the spoils of the intervention in
the form of increased regional influence.
114 As Johnston notes, such material motivations are
inconsistent with behavior driven by social norms.
115 It is perhaps more likely that foreign publics reacted to Security
Council approval through legitimacy rather than information mechanisms.
Two sources of evidence suggest this is not the case. First, while
Security Council approval led to more international public support for the
U.S.-led intervention, this support did not translate into a commensurate
desire to actively participate in the intervention. Arguably, a normative
motivation would be associated with a desire to participate in what is
perceived as a legitimate action, just as legitimate rules inspire a felt
obligation to comply. In October 1990, while 73 percent of French approved
of Bush sending troops to Saudi Arabia and 75 percent approved the use of
force, only 42 percent of those polled in early November approved of
French participation. On the eve of war, while support for the use of
force was high, 57 percent were opposed to French military involvement.
Similarly, while most Spaniards supported Bush and favored the use of
force, 60 percent were against their government's move to send troops
and warships. Three-fifths of Italians favored the use of force and
approved of Bush's actions, but only a third favored sending Italian
combat troops.116
See various polls
conducted by Gallup and Sofres-Le Figaro, cited in The Times, 19
October 1990; New York Times, 19 October 1990, A10; Index to
International Public Opinion 1990–1991, 579–80; and Canal
Ipsos, 11 February 2003. Available at 〈www.ipsos.fr/CanalIpsos/articles/1067.asp〉.
Accessed 1 September 2005.
So while there was support for the
policy and the consequences it would entail, there was much less desire to
participate. This behavior—support coupled with free-riding—is
more consistent with a rationalist-materialist logic than with a normative
one. Publics should want and even feel obligated to participate in an
action deemed legitimate.
The second source of evidence again involves the public statements and
framing strategies of leaders. If the legitimacy conferred by IO approval
is important to publics, we should see leaders framing Security Council
involvement in legitimacy terms. I analyze the content of the four
Security Council resolution debates most closely associated with the
question of coercion during the Gulf War conflict: the 6 August discussion
of Resolution 660, imposing an economic embargo; the 25 August discussion
of Resolution 665, authorizing enforcement of the embargo; the 25
September discussion of Resolution 670, extending and strengthening the
blockade; and the 29 November discussion of Resolution 678, authorizing
force.117
The relevant UN documents are
S/PV.2933, S/PV.2938, S/PV.2943, and
S/PV.2963.
While there is considerable discussion of the informative properties
of the Security Council, as discussed above, there is virtually no mention
of its institutional legitimacy or the legitimacy of its resolutions. In
325 pages of transcribed speeches, the terms legitimacy and
legitimate are used approvingly to describe the Security Council
or its resolutions only once (by the Soviet Union on 25 September).
Ironically, the only representatives who address the issue of Security
Council legitimacy are from Cuba and Iraq—and they do so to condemn
its actions as illegitimate. The question of legitimacy was certainly on
the minds of Security Council representatives, as they referred frequently
to the legitimacy of the Kuwaiti government in exile. But despite their
preoccupation with the concept, in these lengthy and carefully crafted
public speeches there was seemingly no concern with stressing the
legitimacy of the Security Council. This suggests that their respective
publics were not motivated primarily by legitimacy concerns and were not
swayed by Security Council approval through legitimacy-based
mechanisms.
This section by no means provides an exhaustive competitive test
between these two theoretical perspectives, information versus legitimacy.
I have offered several observable implications of the legitimacy argument
involving institutional design, the behavior of leaders, and the behavior
of publics, and in each case there are reasons to question whether IO
approval confers legitimacy per se on state actions. Nevertheless,
especially with respect to publics, it is quite likely that actors are
motivated by both rationalist and normative concerns, and any complete
theoretical account of the legitimation effect should include both
components.118
For an effort to synthesize
these perspectives, see Thompson
2005.
Conclusion
Understanding why even the most powerful states subject themselves to
the constraints of international institutions remains among the most
intriguing theoretical puzzles for IR scholars. I explore the theoretical
intersection of power and institutions by asking why states often channel
coercive policies through IOs. This question has typically been answered
by pointing to the legitimation effect of IO approval, however the causal
mechanisms of this phenomenon are not well understood. I provide a largely
rationalist theoretical explanation based on the informative properties of
institutions as agents of the international community. Formal IOs that are
neutral, with heterogeneous and representative memberships, are uniquely
capable of providing credible information regarding a coercing
state's intentions and the consequences of its policy. Leaders and
publics rely on this information when deciding whether to support or
oppose the action.
I conduct a detailed case study to uncover the dynamics of information
transmission. During the 1990–91 Gulf War, the world's only
superpower showed a willingness to cede some control to an IO that was
able to independently assess and impose costly constraints on the coercive
policy. By working through the Security Council, the United States was
able to send information regarding its intentions to other states leaders
and to send policy-relevant information to publics abroad. This
information increased international support for the intervention, thus
explaining the incentives to seek IO approval. A preliminary comparison
suggests that legitimacy-based explanations cannot account for the
behavior of state leaders or their publics in this case, and fail to
explain the unique role of the Security Council as an endorser of military
intervention in the contemporary world.
The framework can be extended both theoretically and empirically. I
offer a ceteris paribus argument insofar as a state may bypass IOs when
the anticipated political costs of action are already low or when there is
high sensitivity to the costs of constraint. Elaborating these tradeoffs
would help one understand how coercers choose among institutions with
different designs and thus different constraints and informative
properties. I only begin to address these “forum shopping”
issues here. While I have treated institutions themselves as exogenous in
my theoretical model and empirics, my argument has implications for the
endogenous treatment of institutions. The political advantages of
channeling statecraft through IOs helps explain why powerful states create
and join these institutions in the first place, and why they design them
with certain properties. To further explore the boundaries of the
argument, it should be applied to cases of economic and diplomatic
coercion as well. While the nature of costs and benefits will change in
these settings, the central theoretical insights should apply beyond cases
of military intervention.
Finally, a wider range of hypotheses and observable implications
should be used to compare the rationalist framework presented here with a
norm-based framework based on the importance of legitimacy. More eclectic
theorizing and testing will help one “get to the bottom” of
the widely observed legitimation function of IOs, an increasingly
important phenomenon in international affairs.
