Book Review: Ideology and International Institutions
Erik Voeten’s Ideology and International Institutions eloquently explores the fundamental ways in which ideological conflicts have influenced global politics.
By: Lune Klappe, Staff member
Erik Voeten is the Peter F. Krogh Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal International Organization and a contributor to the “Monkey Cage” blog of the Washington Post.
Voeten’s latest work, Ideology and International Institutions, was published in January. The book introduces an innovative theoretical framework for understanding how social, economic, and political conflicts influence international institutions and their place in the global order. According to James Vreeland of Princeton University, Voeten makes a “unique ... contribution” to the literature on international relations that will potentially “reshape the way we think about international institutions.”
The discussion in Voeten’s book is inspired by challenges currently faced in the liberal international institutional order. Amongst those challenges are the rising power of illiberal states and domestic political changes inside liberal states. Voeten argues that multilateralism has always been rooted in ideology and ideological divisions. As a result, states have well-ordered preferences over the principles that multilateral institutions should advance and therefore act purposefully to achieve results matching those preferences.
Because of states’ individual preferences, Voeten says that multilateral institutions should be viewed as efforts by states to reorient other states’ policies towards their own ideological viewpoints. In support of his statement, he measures individual states’ perceptions of global ideological conflicts over the past seventy-five years. For example, Voeten begins his book by describing the choice Ukrainian politicians faced in 2014: sign a free trade agreement with the European Union (EU) or opt for closer economic cooperation with Russia and its proposed customs union. Ukraine, as an embodiment of ideological disparities within close geographic proximity, is a prelude for the discussions to come. Voeten’s emphasis on such ideological conflicts distinguishes his book from the existing literature.
Voeten’s claim is that much, but not all, distributive conflict over multilateral institutions takes place in an ideological space that is low-dimensional. In a relatively low-dimensional ideological space, institutional politics often move the status quo into one state’s preferred direction. In other words, ideology is like the glue in the international legal order. This “glue” therefore has its effect on multilateral institutions.
Voeten develops and explains new theories and measures to understand the challenges presented to multilateral institutions. Several chapters empirically demonstrate that ideological struggle lies behind the shaping of international institutions. To illustrate these contentions, Voeten develops a spatial modeling framework as simple as other modeling frameworks that illustrates rationalist analyses of cooperation, such as the prisoner’s dilemma, the coordination dilemma, the battle of the sexes, and other two-by-two games.
The model starts from the assumption that actors have their ideal points in a common low-dimensional ideological space. Voeten uses his framework to describe different scenarios. For example, a simple spatial model with interdependent states explains that interdependence creates incentives for cooperation but also pressures harmonization. Such pressure potentially undermines the ability of citizens to steer their government to implement domestically oriented policies. Thus, countries minimize their sovereignty as a result of interdependency constraints. Institutions may help shift policy status quos in such directions.
The model gives us important insights. For example, the institutions that achieve the largest gain usually require the least extensive institutional infrastructure. Also, if an institution’s member states are highly interdependent, then institutions are self-enforcing. Importantly, the creation of institutions among states may affect the utility of other states. If some states coordinate their policies, other states may incur policy losses because they see states with whom they interact move away policy-wise from their ideal points.
Unlike other spatial models and frameworks of international relations, Voeten’s spatial modeling framework models the interdependencies between states. This model illustrates most importantly the way cooperative arrangements between states can adversely affect other states. All in all, this is a novel contribution to international relations scholarship because it presents a cohesive framework that puts ideological disputes at the center of its analysis of how the international institutional order hangs together.
Voeten rejects existing scholarly literature that conceives of institutional principles as shared norms that define standards for appropriate behavior. Instead, he argues that the opposite is true. Namely, he argues that states have well-ordered preferences. Even more, states purposefully act in pursuit of outcomes that match those preferences. Institutions often merely allow, and only sometimes compel, governments to commit to ideological directions.
This new perspective confronts the voluntarist interpretation that underlies rationalist institutionalist understandings of international institutions and law. A voluntarist interpretation is the belief that international law only affects those who willingly commit to be bound by international law, most commonly by ratifying a treaty. Voeten thus contends that institutions may affect the welfare of states that do not voluntarily commit.
To conclude, Ideology and International Institutions is a unique contribution to the literature on international relations. Voeten’s innovative theoretical framework enhances our understanding of how social, economic, and political conflicts influence international institutions and their place in the global order.
Lune Klappe is an LL.M. student at Columbia Law School and a staff member of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. She graduated from Leiden University, The Netherlands, in 2020 with an LL.M. in Public International Law and an LL.M. in Tax Law.