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Problematic Lucidity: Stephen Krasner's “State Power and the Structure of International Trade”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Robert O. Keohane
Robert O. Keohane
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Abstract

Stephen D. Krasner's article in this journal in 1976, “State Power and the Structure of International Trade,” defined the agenda for years of scholarship by being both lucid and problematic. Krasner presented a clear puzzle but manifestly failed adequately to answer the questions that he raised. His key proposition, that strong international economic regimes depend on hegemonic power, was supported by only half of the six cases that he discussed. Yet the cogency of Krasner's formulation of the argument, and the pungency of his rhetoric, led “State Power” to serve as a focal point in a coordination game among three major constituencies in the international political economy field. Liberal transnationalists, statist realists, and their audiences all benefited from Krasner's lucid specification of the issues. As a result of research prompted by Krasner's article, we understand the relationship between international political structure and economic openness much better than we did before it appeared.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 50 , Issue 1: Special Issue , October 1997 , pp. 150 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1997

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References

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3 I am indebted to Ronald Rogowski for pointing out to me that strategic trade theory could support Krasner's closure–relative advantage proposition. For an early work on strategic trade policy, see Krugman, Paul R., ed., Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar. David Lake also discusses this issue, in “Leadership, Hegemony and the International Economy: Naked Emperor or Tattered Monarch with Potential? International Studies Quarterly 37 (December 1993)Google Scholar.

4 Skepticism and controversy abound over other questions: whether democratic governments actually act on the basis of strategic trade considerations (rather than principally reacting to societal pressures) and whether such governments would be capable of intelligently crafting policies along strategic trade lines.

5 I am indebted to Stephen Krasner for his observations on an earlier version of this essay, which stimulated this point.

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26 Ibid., 181.1 am especially indebted to Professor Marc Busch of Harvard for pointing out the correspondence between Mansfield's findings and Krasner's theory.

27 I claim no prescience in this respect. I recollect that my first reaction to Krasner's paper was more critical of the unsatisfactory nature of his evidence than appreciative of the lucidity with which he defined his variables and stated his key proposition. Since recollections are usually biased in favor of the reputation of the teller of the tale, this one is probably, unfortunately, correct.

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29 Ibid., esp. 86–87. Krasner made a similar argument in Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

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37 As I sought to do in “The Theory of Hegemonic Stability” (fn. 13).

38 As Stephen Krasner recalls, Joseph Nye was a recently tenured member of the Harvard faculty at that time but did not stifle discussion.

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41 See especially the chapters in Keohane and Milner (fn. 39) on Europe by Geoffrey Garrett, on Japan by Frances Rosenbluth, on the Soviet Union and Russia by Matthew Evangelista, and on several developing countries by Stephan Haggard and Sylvia Maxfield.

42 Garrett and Lange, “Internationalization, Institutions, and Political Change,” in Keohane and Miher(fn.39).

43 Levi, , Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 2, “The Theory of Predatory Rule.”