Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

IV. Nation-State Under Siege

A. Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces

The previous sections dealt with psychological processes likely to play fundamental roles in world politics in the foreseeable future. Cognitive, motivational, biomedical and social constraints on rationality will be of recurring concern as long as human beings make decisions that determine the fates of nations. Influence strategies will be foci of political debate as long as humanity is divided into nation-states that make conflicting claims over scarce resources. In each section, however, the analysis was remarkably state-centric. Psychological processes influenced political outcomes through the formal institutions of national governance. Presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and their associates made decisions (under risk and uncertainty) and selected among influence tactics based on bounded-rationality calculations of the likely reactions of other actors, both domestic and foreign.

This analytic framework is ill-equipped to deal with the dramatic changes that many pundits now anticipate. We can no longer assume the nation-state to be the unchallenged decision-making unit. Sub-national and super-national actors appear to be playing progressively more prominent roles. On the one hand, existing state structures are subject to increasing challenge by the divisive forces of identity politics as racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups demand autonomy or outright secession (Horowitz, 1985; Moynihan, 1993). If we posit that each distinct, homogeneous people (a staggering definitional challenge in itself) has a right to political self-determination, even to its own state, the number of states could expand exponentially (Tilly, 1993). On the other hand, the same state structures are under strain by the integrative forces of the new global economy as capital markets and technological innovation erode the capacity of governments to set budgetary priorities and to control what their citizens think (Fukuyama, 1992; Ohmae, 1995). Jobs, money, and ideas pass increasingly easily across national borders as investors seek higher returns on equity and as people use modern telecommunications to forge new relationships and to satisfy their curiosities. In brief, the world seems to be simultaneously falling apart and coming together. There is no guarantee that citizens will continue to commit their primary loyalties to the nation-states within which they happen to have been born. People may redirect their attachments to larger transnational units or to smaller subnational ones. There is, moreover, no necessary link between integration-fragmentation and war-peace. Transnational integration could ultimately take the form of world federalism or it could be a prelude to clashes between trading blocs or even civilizations (Huntington, 1993). Subnational fragmentation could take the form of ethnic chaos (Kaplan, 1994) or peaceful "consociation" (Lijphart, 1984). And the current arrangement of nation-states could imply a continuation of geopolitical competition (Mearsheimer, 1994/95) or the emergence of "international regimes" that rational national actors see an interest in cultivating (Keohane, Nye, and Hoffman, 1993).

Forecasts of radical impending change may exaggerate the plasticity of group identifications. But such forecasts do highlight important trends. Theories of group identification and intergroup conflict -- largely laboratory-based -- can not only enrich our understandings of identity politics but can be enriched by recent developments that shed light on how people cope with conflicting allegiances. Theories of distributive and procedural justice can not only deepen our understanding of support and opposition to emerging free trade zones but can themselves be deepened by addressing tensions between the unsentimental monetary logic of global capitalism (good investors should maximize after-tax, risk-adjusted return on capital, even if that means investing abroad) and the deeply emotional psycho-logic of nationalism (good citizens should respect the patriotic symbolism of extended kinship and shared language and territory, even if that means foregoing opportunities to make more money by buying foreign goods or moving operations abroad).

The chapter focuses here on three promising domains for exploration: (a) subnational fragmentation, ethnicity, and identity politics; (b) supranational integration, economic interdependence, and judgments of fairness of cross-border transactions; (c) the prospects for evolving beyond anarchy toward a normatively regulated international order.

B. Subnational Fragmentation

Cursory inspection of history reveals that there is nothing inevitable about nationalism. It is a relatively recent social invention that takes a kaleidoscopic variety of forms: religious, communist, fascist, liberal, conservative, integrationist, separatist, irredetentist and diaspora (Greenfeld, 1992; Haas, 1986; Hutchinson & Smith, 1994; van Evera, 1994). But there may well be something inevitable about the more fundamental processes of group identification and loyalty. Human beings are group-living creatures who appear to have a basic need to become emotionally attached to other human beings (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). It is reasonable to suppose that loyalty grows as people become more aware of others who are important to them and begin to identify with others in their group (Druckman, 1994). The experimental literature illustrates how easily such group identifications could build up into various forms of nationalism (Brewer and Brown, Handbook chapter; Fisher, 1990; Stern, 1995; Tajfel, 1981). Once people categorize themselves into groups, researchers often observe a host of effects: (a) people exaggerate intergroup differences and intragroup similarities (“we” are different from “them” who, in turn, are strikingly similar to each other); (b) people perceive the acts of in-group members more favorably than identical acts of out-group members; (c) people place more trust in fellow members of the in-group; (d) people allocate resources to in-group members in ways designed to maximize absolute gain but allocate resources to out-groups in ways designed to maximize the relative advantage of the in-group vis-a-vis the out-group; (e) people who have recently suffered an experimentally-induced setback to their social identity are especially likely to display the previously mentioned effects. Reviewing this impressively cross-cultural data base, Mercer (1995) has noted a curious parallelism: subjects in minimal group experiments behave approximately as Waltzian neorealism would predict. They have low thresholds for dividing the social world into “us” against “them”, for perceiving “them” as threatening, and for pursuing policies of relative gain toward out-groups.

Psychology is less helpful, however, in explaining the groups with which people identify and the inclusion/exclusion rules that people use to distinguish their group from others. Of the infinity of possible ways of partitioning the social world into group categories--endless gradations of ethnicity, race, language, class, and region and countless variations in political and religious belief--why do people “choose” certain categories over others? Basic-process explanations may correctly identify the psychological functions underlying partitioning strategies. People may indeed draw group boundaries in cognitively efficient ways that maximize between-group variance and minimize within-group variance on important attributes or in self-esteem enhancing ways that call attention to invidious in-group/out group distinctions or in economically self-serving ways that legitimize claims on scarce resources. But such explanations give us little handle on why the nation-state in particular emerged as such a divisive and decisive symbol of group identity over the last few centuries. The more satisfying “explanations” are grounded in contingent details of history. By these accounts, nationalism (as opposed to some other “ism”) emerged because of the functional requirements of mass mobilization (the state makes war and war makes the state: rulers had to whip up nationalistic passion to persuade ordinary people to die for their country--Tilly, 1991), because of the infrastructure requirements of emerging industrial economies (Gellner, 1983), and because of a human need for new transcendental objects of belief amidst religious uncertainty and conflict (Anderson, 1983). Whatever the exact reasons, once the nation-state became a salient basis for drawing in-group/out-group distinctions, nationalism became a full-blown functionally autonomous motive in its own right (Allport, 1954). Historical accident or not, tens of millions have died in this century to advance or thwart competing nationalist claims.

But group identifications that history has put together, history can tear asunder. Ethnic, racial, and religious subgroups that were once content to identify or comply with superordinate nationalist norms have in the late twentieth century made increasingly assertive demands for autonomy and statehood (Horowitz, 1985). The evidence--from Eritrea to Azerbaijan to Quebec--is indisputable (Gurr, 1994). A viable analytic framework has yet, however, to be advanced. A major obstacle here is integrating the largely low-stakes, experimental literature (preoccupied with testing nomothetic hypotheses) and the high-stakes case-study literature (preoccupied with the idiographic ebb and flow of identity politics in particular places and times). Although these two literatures sometimes diverge, the cumulative weight of the evidence suggests an initial explanatory sketch of intercommunal strife that can tear nation-states apart. The key warning signs include:

(a) the two groups make incompatible claims on scarce resources (Levine & Campbell, 1972). Although minimal-group experiments have conclusively demonstrated that economic competition is not a necessary condition for intergroup conflict (Brewer & Kramer, 1985), case studies suggest that conflicts over jobs, government patronage, and control of markets often play a critical catalytic role by convincing elites within the community that they can maintain their privileged status only through concerted collective action organized around shared symbols and the political goal of asserting ethnocultural autonomy (Diamond & Plattner, 1994; Horowitz, 1985). Experimental simulations are hardpressed to capture the magnitude and symbolism of the material stakes in real-world confrontations as well as the power of charismatic politicians to mobilize interethnic grievances;

(b) one or both groups perceive injustices in existing methods of allocating scarce resources (Horowitz, 1985). The poor tend to endorse external attributions for their plight (current discrimination and market exclusion, historical legacy of past oppression) whereas the affluent tend to endorse internal attributions for both their own relative success ("we" are hardworking, entrepreneurial and, smart) and other groups’ lower standing ("they" are lazy, apathetic and, dumb). Poorer groups press for state intervention to level the playing field and to implement radical redistribution. The well-off perceive these appeals as self-serving efforts to obtain through political means what they had to achieve through individual initiative and hard work. Activists can play on these diverging attributions, fueling perceptions of bad faith and political polarization;

(c) one or both groups seek to reaffirm damaged socialidentities( Brown, 1985; Horowitz, 1985; Tajfel, 1981). Groups that have recently suffered losses (or have been reminded by activists of losses suffered long ago) seem especially susceptible to political appeals that derogate out-groups, idealize the in-group, and call for mobilization around emotionally evocative collective symbols (religious texts, ethnic-racial purity, ...);

(d) the two groups do not possess a common enemy or shared objective that motivates searches for integrative solutions to their disputes or at least suppresses expressions of enmity.

Although useful, these warning signs are still not sufficient to distinguish ethnonationalist rivalries that are resolved through peaceful procedural means from those that descend into genocidal barbarism. Advocates of pre-emptive interventions and diplomacy--who seek to prevent mass murder--need to draw upon a wider network of psychosocial indicators to keep their false alarm rate at an acceptable minimum. Drawing on van Evera (1994) and Staub (1988), additional warning signs include: (a) leaders who explicitly dehumanize outgroups; (b) bitter grudges rooted in collective memories of atrocities that “they” committed against “us”; (c) widespread lack of public confidence in national institutions of order and justice; (d) the emergence of security and military units whose primary loyalty is to one or another of the contending groups.

Answering exact questions about the timing, intensity, and modes of expression of interethnic conflict requires the full complement of levels of analysis. For instance, one influential explanation for the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia invoked the combination of: (a) the death of Tito and the institutionalization of a rotating Collective Federal Presidency that created strong incentives for local political elites to advance regional causes at the expense of broader national interests (Gagnon, 1994); (b) the demise of the Soviet Union which eliminated a massive external threat that contributed to Yugoslav cohesion and permitted ancient rivalries to resurface (Mearsheimer, 1990). This explanation still fails however to account fully for the differences between the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and the peaceful “velvet divorce” of the Czechs and Slovaks. At this juncture, observers resort to a mixture of historical explanations that invoke the longstanding enmity among Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims (a dreary legacy of mass murder and dehumanizing stereotypes) and contemporary explanations that invoke key political personalities (the Czech leader was a sophisticated integratively complex humanist who sought peace, prosperity, and democracy whereas the Serbian and Croatian leaders were authoritarian demagogues who nurtured intergroup hostilities and irredentist claims to silence domestic demands for democratization -- Gagnon, 1994). Yugoslavia, from this perspective, is a sad story in which too many predisposing causes for intergroup violence just happened to be activated at the same time.

It is understandable that so much attention is riveted on bloody failures of nation building. Demography is not, however, destiny. Ethnic divisions do not always translate into violence; diverse groups sometimes manage to live together peacefully under “consociational” frameworks that grant various forms of local autonomy and minority rights (Lijphart, 1984). Here comparative case studies coupled with experimental and field work on procedural justice (Tyler and Smith, Handbook Chapter) may suggest guidelines for crafting integrative political frameworks that satisfy the concerns of conflicting subnational entities. Also useful is work on ameliorating intergroup conflict via superordinate goals and cooperative, equal-status contact mandated by respected in-group authority figures. We should be wary, though, of rushing to normative judgment. On the one hand, some states may not be worth saving. Their boundaries are artifacts of past oppression and bring together groups and territories that could easily have been self-governing units in their own right. “Clean” divorces in these cases may be preferable to “messy” marriages. On the other hand, few divorces will be clean. Secessions often create more problems than they solve. Regions seeking self-determination are usually home to their own ethnic minorities who, in turn, harbor their own hopes of national autonomy. We quickly run into unsolved riddles of political philosophy. By what process should self-determination occur? If electorally, is a majority vote sufficient? If a “primary” minority is allowed to break away from the state, why shouldn’t “secondary” minorities be permitted to break away from the “primary” minority in a potentially infinite regress of matrioshka nationalisms? The paradox is that the people cannot decide until someone, somehow, decides who the people are and what the appropriate decision rules and constraints should be.

C. Beyond anarchy

Integrative economic forces? For over two centuries now, prominent economists have expounded the thesis that trade leads inexorably to peace. The earliest proponents -- Smith, Ricardo, and Mill -- were sharp critics of beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilist policies that nurtured domestic monopolies by excluding foreign goods. In addition to articulating the still deeply influential doctrine of comparative advantage (Bhagwati,1988), these early economists specified how economic interdependence could transform a world of warring nation-states into one of peaceful commerce: by motivating countries to work out basic rules of exchange, by opening up new export markets (stimulating employment) and making low-cost imports available (checking inflation), and by creating powerful domestic constituencies interested in expanding international commerce and in averting costly wars. Subsequent political theorists have added an explicitly cognitive dimension to the argument by stressing how economic exchange and negotiation serves as a medium for communicating perspectives and cultivating conflict resolution skills (Deutsch, 1957; Haas, 1964). To be sure, there is no guarantee of peace and there have been embarrassingly premature prophecies of the end to war (most notably, Norman Angell’s ill-timed argument in 1911 that Europeans were now too interconnected by commerce to go to war). But considerable evidence does indicate that commercial interdependence raises the threshold for going to war (Oneal, Oneal, Maoz, & Russett, 1996). The presumed benefits of conflict must at least outweigh the costs, including the foregone gains from trade.

With the passing of the ideological and geopolitical struggles of the Cold War, issues of trade loom especially large, once again, on the international agenda. From a social psychological perspective, however, trade can trigger conflict as easily as it can cooperation. Indeed, the very success in lowering tariffs among nations and the resulting growth in world trade can highlight new tendentious issues by bringing the problem of incongruent in-group policies to the foreground (A. Stein, 1993). Whenever the regulatory, fiscal, and monetary policies of countries diverge, critics of open trade can argue that the playing field is not even and their country has been unfairly handicapped because, for example, it has a higher minimum wage or more stringent anti-pollution laws or higher health and safety standards or even an inappropriately valued currency. These debates can be fueled by ethnocentric attributional biases, domestic producers seeking protection from stiff foreign competition, nationalist concerns about loss of sovereignty from increasing dependence on foreign goods and subordination to international forms of adjudication, egalitarian concerns about the impact of free trade with low-wage nations on the distribution of income within the importing country, and environmentalist concerns about the impact of free trade with nations that have lax regulatory policies. The intense debate within the United States on Mexico's entry into NAFTA illustrates the unusual confluence of forces that can mobilize against free trade, with rightwing nationalists (Patrick Buchanan), leftwing egalitarians (Jesse Jackson), environmentalist organizations and assorted industrial groups fearing Mexican competition uniting in opposition to the treaty.

The political psychology of global trade not only makes for odd bedfellows; it raises questions about the connections between theories of group identity and distributive and procedural justice. To what extent is egalitarian sentiment confined to the in-group? Although the political left has historically been a key supporter of foreign aid (Lumsdaine, 1992), it has emerged as a vocal critic in some wealthy countries of free-trade agreements that open domestic markets to low-wage competition. What causal and moral attributions do egalitarians use to justify protectionist policies that they believe protect well-paying jobs “here” but destroy low-paying jobs “there”? Shifting to the other end of the ideological spectrum, how does the political right cope with the tension between global capitalism (which is indifferent to national boundaries and erodes traditional prerogatives of sovereignty) and patriotism (which endows national sovereignty with deep symbolic significance)? More generally, when do people perceive trade in zero-sum versus positive-sum terms? Do improvements in per capita income count as gains only if one’s nation is growing prosperous more rapidly than other nations? Are “we” willing to be poorer to prevent “them” from getting richer (as the classic minimal-group experiments suggest--Tajfel, 1981)? Do people perceive trade imbalances in favor of other states as prima facie evidence of unfairness (as work on self-serving and ethnocentric attribution biases suggests)? “They” must be paying workers “slave wages”, engaging in predatory competition to gain monopoly control of markets, and implementing sneaky regulations designed to keep out our goods. Do people perceive trade imbalances in favor of their own state as prima facie validation of their own collective virtues? “We” must be hardworking, frugal, entrepreneurial, and smart. These questions remind us of the many sources of psychological friction likely to slow progress toward an integrated global marketplace.

D. Beyond Anarchy

Integrative normative forces? Through much of this chapter, we have challenged the neorealist presumption of rationality but have implicitly accepted the classic realistic view of international relations as a never-ending struggle, with no recourse to shared norms of justice or effective institutions of norm enforcement. This presumption of anarchy by no means commands universal agreement. Since Immanuel Kant, influential dissenters have insisted that there is nothing inevitable about the lawlessly competitive state system and that it is possible to create a community of humanity by building up democratic, constitutionally constrained institutions of international governance. This “idealist” counter image of world politics underpinned, in part, Woodrow Wilson’s ill-conceived effort to design a new world order in the wake of World War I.

The Kant-Wilson challenge to the idea that international relations are inherently anarchic continues in empirical form to this day in the work of scholars who stress the importance of emergent international regimes that provide principles, norms, and procedures that actors expect each other to draw upon in resolving disputes. Considerable evidence suggests that such understandings can constrain competition in a variety of policy arenas, including fishing rights, whaling, ozone depletion, nuclear nonproliferation, trade, finance, public health, and civil aviation (Katzenstein, 1996; Keohane & Nye, 1989; Kratochwil, 1989; Ruggie, 1986). From this standpoint, far from being a good first-order approximation, anarchy is a deeply misleading caricature of world politics. When we take into account the rapidly expanding quantity, velocity, and diversity of international transactions -- what Ruggie (1986, p. 148) has called “dynamic density” -- we appreciate the necessity, indeed inevitability, of more elaborate and powerful international institutions. Indeed, some theorists argue that powerful international institutions are already in place (Ikenberry, 1996) and invoke as evidence the "failure" of the neorealist prediction that cooperation among advanced industrial democracies (e.g., NATO) was driven solely by Cold war threats and hence would disappear as soon as the threat (the Soviet Union) disappeared. This argument illustrates, once again, how difficult it is to reach agreement on ground rules for testing conditional forecasts in world politics (Tetlock, 1992b). Neorealists and norm theorists can argue endlessly over whether the external threat has truly disappeared, over how long we should wait for new balancing alignments to emerge, and over what should count as evidence that institutional norms are efficacious.

Effective international institutions -- that can police agreements on arms control, human rights or environmental protection -- can be thought of as public goods that, in turn, require effective institutions to come into existence. Just as most of us would expect tax-collection receipts to fall dramatically if there were no collection agency with coercive powers, so many rational-choice theorists argue -- drawing on standard microeconomic logic -- that we should expect international institutions to be anemic because it would be irrational for states to contribute to public goods that other states cannot be prevented from “consuming” but cannot be compelled to help provide. Efforts to overcome anarchy run aground against the classic obstacle to collective action: the free rider.

This objection, by itself, does not demonstrate the impossibility of all forms of world government. One can martial diverse theoretical counterarguments -- drawing on game theory, social constructivism, and transaction-cost economics -- that not only affirm the possibility of international institutions but specify when such institutions will arise (Caporaso, 1993). Some game theorists argue that even self-interested actors will work out ground rules for monitoring norm compliance when they expect repeated interaction with each other, when side-payments are permitted, and when a small “k” group of players is motivated -- by self-interest or moral outrage -- to jump-start the process (Rabin, 1993; Weingast, 1996). Some social constructivists argue that conversation is a key ingredient for the emergence of negotiated order and intersubjective understandings necessary for interstate institutions (Kratochwil, 1989; Katzenstein, 1996). And some political economists argue that the power of institutions to reduce steep transaction costs will persuade even recalcitrant guardians of national sovereignty to give up some autonomy to international institutions such as GATT (Keohane & Nye, 1989).

One can also martial some rather compelling empirical counterarguments:

(a) Recent historical evidence suggests that most states most of the time respect international law, even if it is not in their immediate self-interest to do so (Kratochwil, 1989; Joyner, 1995). Democracies dealing with other democracies may be particularly law-abiding because they do not just sign agreements; they enter into economic and security understandings that are embarrassingly difficult to retract because of the relative transparency and accountability of the policy process and because of the emergence of potent domestic lobbies with strong interests in preserving good relations with other states (Ikenberry, 1996; Martin, 1996). Inspection of longer-term historical trends also reveals deep changes in the de facto (as well as de jure) norms that constrain interstate behavior. Once common forms of conduct -- killing or enslaving inhabitants of conquered countries was standard operating procedure in the days of Thucydides--would make a state a total pariah today (Mueller, 1989);

(b) Laboratory experiments on n-person social dilemmas -- which should, in principle, be good simulations of world politics -- suggest that people are not as irredeemably selfish as the free-rider argument assumes. Many people willingly sacrifice their own material well-being to help those who are perceived as fair or kind (Dawes & Thaler, 1988). And, perhaps even more important, many people are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to punish those who behave in a selfish or exploitative fashion (Roth, Prasnikar, Okuno-Fujiwara, & Zamir, 1991; Thaler, 1988) -- in effect, acting like fairness norm-enforcers. The net result is that collectivities sometimes succeed in generating public goods even in the absence of a leviathan monitoring all transactions (Rabin, 1993; Tyler & Dawes, 1993). How successful they are, though, depends partly on ideological and cultural variation in social values: whether participants are trying to maximize joint outcomes (as they might if they define their in-group expansively to include other nations), the absolute value of their own outcomes (as they might if they care solely for their own national in-group but do not feel threatened by others) or the gap between their own outcomes and others’ outcomes (as they might if they see the international system as brutally competitive). Success also hinges on the incentive structure and interaction ground rules: How tempting is defection? Do the parties expect long-term interactions, sensitizing them to the risks of mutual defection? Do relationships of trust exist among the parties? Are the parties allowed to communicate? How large -- and therefore difficult to coordinate -- is the group?

But the free-rider objection does help to explain why progress toward empowering international institutions has been so slow, episodic, and subject to frequent reversals. Moreover, the difficulties are even greater than so far indicated: even if we grant that many leaders are motivated by moral or political-identity arguments to do the “right thing,” there are often deep ideological disagreements over what counts as the “right thing”. For instance, most Western elites see nuclear nonproliferation as a legitimate public good that reduces the long-term likelihood of nuclear war but some Asian and African leaders still see it as a transparently self-serving bid by the "nuclear club" to preserve its monopoly control of such weapons. And some neorealists dispute the claim that nuclear nonproliferation will make the world safer. Waltz (1995) suggests that it may even have the opposite effect insofar as nuclear deterrence is robust and reduces the likelihood of conventional warfare by increasing fear of escalation to the nuclear level. Similar disagreements erupt on issues such as global warming, whaling, population control, and trade barriers. One pundit’s public good is another’s meddlesome and misguided bureaucracy.

V. Concluding Thoughts

Twenty-seven years ago, the previous author of this Handbook chapter confronted a bipolar world dominated by two nuclear-armed, ideologically antagonistic superpowers. The debates that dominated the scholarly literature revolved around challenges to the intellectual hegemony of the rational-actor model and deterrence theory (cf. Kelman, 1965). As this review attests, these debates continue, but we have learned a lot in a quarter century. The literature offers more nuanced analyses of cognitive, motivational, and social obstacles to, and facilitators of, vigilant information processing. Scholars are now more appropriately circumspect about their epistemic warrants to label judgmental tendencies as error and biases. There is growing recognition of the difficulties of specifying how policy-makers should have thought or acted in specific situations. So much depends on assumptions about the marginal utility of further information search and analysis which, in turn, hinges on speculative counterfactual reconstructions of what would have happened if policymakers had given more weight to that argument and adopted an alternative policy. And although some advocates of deterrence and spiral theory still insist that their prescriptions are unconditionally best, there is now widespread recognition that such claims are wrong -- wrong because the outcomes of influence attempts are highly sensitive to the other side’s intentions, beliefs, and capabilities which are both difficult to assess and prone to vary from one geopolitical circumstance to another.

Today we confront a multipolar world and expert opinion has fractionated into a cacophony of discordant diagnoses. Old arguments--on the rationality of leaders and the effectiveness of strategies--persist, albeit in new forms as some American hawks from the Cold War era have been transformed into doves who favor a quasi-isolationist stance and some American doves have been transformed into hawks who support humanitarian military interventions in places such as Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda and aggressive tariff retaliation against “unfair” trading practices (cf. Holsti, 1992). And new arguments have arisen. Perhaps the most profound cleavage in expert opinion is now between pessimists and optimists. At the pessimistic end of the continuum are the neo-Malthusians who foresee an exponentially expanding population that will make impossible demands on the finite resources of the planet (Ehrlich, 1979; Kennedy, 1993). These observers also foresee unprecedented threats to the planetary ecosystem such as global warming and ozone depletion that international institutions are still far too weak to check. When we combine these ominous demographic and ecological trends with growing inequality in the distribution of wealth (affluent, older countries versus poor, younger countries) and an apparent resurgence of religious fundamentalism and ethnic chauvinism, we have a recipe for disaster on an apocalyptic scale. It is only a matter of time before weapons of mass destruction slip into the hands of some very angry and desperate people. At the optimistic end of the continuum, we find cornucopians who foresee long-term trends toward greater prosperity, more widespread educational opportunities, improved health, longer life spans, and ever-expanding access to the amenities of middle-class life. Whereas the neo-Malthusians emphasize growing demands on dwindling resources, the cornucopians--often free-market economists (J. Simon,1987)-- emphasize the ingenuity with which people find cost-effective substitutes for scarce resources and invent ways of improving standards of living (from electricity to computers to biotechnology). The optimists stress the planful, rational, and constructively competitive aspects of human nature coupled with favorable macro trends that mutually reinforce each other. Accelerating economic development leads to demands for democracy and individual autonomy (reducing the likelihood of war as the democratic-peace hypothesis predicts); instant worldwide communications further undercut oppressive regimes; increasing education levels promote more tolerant, open minded and cosmopolitan outlooks on the world and increased skepticism toward would-be demagogues. The dominant forces of the twentieth-first century are moving us toward a peaceful global federation of democratic, capitalist societies. Bartley (1993) suspects that future generations will look in bemused befuddlement at the "crabbed pessimism" of environmental and egalitarian doomsayers. Kennedy (1993) returns the compliment. He suspects that the boomster optimists of the late 20th centuryare as blind to the imminent peril confronting them as were those thinkers of the early 20th century who confidently declared that humanity had achieved a degree of economic interdependence and moral sophistication that made war unthinkable.

In one set of scenarios, humanity progresses inexorably toward a new millennium of peace, prosperity, and happy long lives (Fukuyama, 1992); in the other set, humanity slips inexorably into a nightmare world of war, famine, and ecological disaster in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. Underlying these radically discrepant visions of our future is a tangle of competing assumptions about the physical world (is nature fragile or robust?), human nature (how capable are we of recognizing our common interests as a species and transcending more narrowly defined identifications? how inventive, rational, and resilient are we?), and world politics (how locked are we into an “anarchic” international system?) It is, of course, possible to identify midpoints along the continuum in which mixtures of “boomster” and “doomster” scenarios come to pass. But whatever directions events might take in the next generation it is a good bet that true-believer boomsters and doomsters will demonstrate the power of belief perseverance and claim at least partial vindication for their contradictory prophecies. The dramatic end of the Cold War --unexpected by almost everyone only ten years ago -- certainly does not seem to have changed many minds (Gaddis, 1993).

Two challenges loom especially large in applying the insights of our discipline to this changing world scene: acknowledging our own ideological biases (biases that can warp the standards used in evaluating causal claims) and developing both analytical frameworks and empirical methods for integrating “micro” and “macro” perspectives on political processes. Overcoming the first challenge is a necessary, albeit not a sufficient, condition for surmounting the second. A strong case can be made that social psychological work on international relations often strays far from the traditional scholarly ideal of value neutrality. This state of affairs is at least mildly ironic. One might suppose that social psychologists--aware as we are of judgmental bias--would be attuned to the danger that our applied work in a complex, ambiguous and emotionally involving domain such as world politics could easily become an extension of our partisan preferences rather than of our scientific research programs. Like most social scientists, social psychologists have for several decades been largely liberal in our political sympathies (Lipsett, 1982). Some found it tempting during the Cold War to characterize conservative advocates of deterrence as cognitive primitives ("Neanderthals") who had failed to adjust to the new strategic realities of nuclear weapons or as biased social perceivers who overattributed Soviet foreign policy to dispositional causes or even as emotionally unstable individuals who were projecting worst-case motives onto the other side (Mack, 1985; Osgood, 1962; White, 1984). Such arguments veer dangerously close to the "ad hominem" in the eyes of international relations scholars. Some advocates of the conflict spiral school of thought were also quick to interpret ambiguous historical evidence as supportive of GRIT during the brief thaw in the Cold War of 1963 and even quicker to dismiss the claims of deterrence theorists that credible threats of retaliation played a pivotal role in preserving the peace at various junctures in the Cold War (Etzioni, 1967; White, 1984). The same school warned in the early 1980's that the Reagan administration was recklessly upping the ante in a conflict spiral dynamic and that the most likely outcome was a much worse relationship, perhaps even nuclear war (Deutsch, 1983), but dismissed the Reagan administration as irrelevant when, in the late 1980's, the Soviet leadership embraced many of the Reagan administration's earlier "insulting" proposals (White, 1991a). Some social psychologists were also sharply critical of the Bush administration’s decision to go to war to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, accusing it of relying on crude enemy imagery and simplistic historical analogies (White, 1991b). Indeed, one writer confidently assigned a biomedical cause -- thyroid malfunctioning -- for Bush's decision to resort to force against Saddam Hussein (Abrams, 1992).

As citizens, social scientists have every right to take whatever policy positions they wish; but when we write in our capacity as social scientists, we have a special responsibility to acknowledge the lacunae in the evidence. And there have been plenty of lacunae. Our understanding of the exact mechanisms underlying the end of the Cold War--and the role, if any, played by American policy in the mid-1980's--is imprecise, to say the least. Our understanding of the role played by nuclear deterrence in averting a third “conventional” world war is highly conjectural. The strategic wisdom of routing Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait hinges on speculative reconstructions of what would have happened if the Western allies had relied purely on economic sanctions and moral suasion. Did the West prevent the emergence of Iraq as oil-wealthy, nuclear-armed regional hegemon? Or has the West sown seeds of hatred and resentment that will contaminate relations with the Arab world well into the future? Dissonant though it is not to be able to answer such important questions, acknowledging counterfactual possibilities and uncertainties is an integral part of sound scholarship and of checking belief perseverance.

Political passions of investigators will surely continue to be engaged by the controversies of the next quarter century. It will be just as tempting in the future as it was in the past to introduce value-laden characterizations of belief systems: alarmists who see environmental doom as imminent versus Panglossian optimists who engage in denial and psychic numbing; xenophobes who oppose sacrificing national sovereignty to international institutions and trading regimes versus apologists for multinational corporations who are all too willing to sacrifice sovereignty for profit; and callous isolationists who are indifferent to suffering abroad versus arrogant interventionists who seek to impose Western conceptions of human rights everywhere.

To be sure, perfect value-neutrality is impossible. Language is inevitably evaluative. So too is hypothesis-testing in politically charged domains. Whether one is exploring correlates of belief systems or assessing the efficacy of deterrence, one must balance the risk of Type I versus Type II errors against each other--a moral-political decision in its own right. There is still, however, much to recommend in the century-old Weberian ideal of value-neutrality, with its emphasis on the unbridgeable logical gap between the descriptive/explanatory and normative/prescriptive (“is” and “ought”). Whereas a value-biased social psychology tilts the methodological playing field in favor of certain hypotheses and aggressively combines epistemic and political goals in designing reformist interventions (in the Lewinian spirit of action research), a scientific community committed to value-neutrality places a premium on even-handedness in hypothesis-testing and counsels caution in mixing scholarly and political pursuits (Tetlock, 1994). Insofar as social psychologists hope that the voice of their discipline will be heeded in policy debates over the long term, they may be well-advised to eschew whatever short-term relevance they can acquire by joining the partisan fray.

The second challenge returns us to the reductionist syllogism with which the chapter began. The topics that social psychologists study--social cognition, influence processes, group dynamics, cooperation and conflict--are, in principle, relevant to all facets of world politics. But figuring out exactly how these processes shape and are shaped by political-economic structures is a nontrivial problem in its own right. We can approach the problem as but one more variant of the familiar external-validity complaint that experimental results don’t generalize beyond this subject population, task, context or culture. Or we can also try to forge links between current social psychological theories and the neorealist, neoinstitutionalist, and game-theoretic formulations that dominate the study of world politics.

In this integrative spirit, consider, once again, the argument advanced by some game theorists and neorealists that rationality is a necessity because states that allowed cognitive biases to shape their security policies would be ruthlessly out-maneuvered by their more rational adversaries. The strong form of this argument dismisses the “error-and-bias” literature. It is easy, however, to construct weaker forms of the argument in which a neorealist emphasis on competition and a cognitivist emphasis of bias coexist, albeit perhaps uneasily (cf. Camerer, 1995). The game theorists may be right that error-prone leaders are at a competitive disadvantage, but may have exaggerated the magnitude of the disadvantage. Perhaps the international environment is quite lenient toward certain cognitive errors (those that virtually everyone commits and that are difficult to spot or to exploit) but quite efficient in eliminating others (those where we find striking individual and cultural differences in susceptibility and that are easy to detect and exploit). The study of social cognition would benefit from a more nuanced analysis not only of when particular response tendencies “hold up”, but also of when those tendencies prove especially adaptive or maladaptive; the study of international relations would benefit from seriously considering the implications of various deviations from rationality for interstate conflict and cooperation. To invoke an earlier discussed example, the fundamental attribution error may turn out in certain international settings to be neither fundamental nor an error. Sensitivity to contextual constraints on conduct may be normative in many cultures (Markus & Kitayama, 1992). And setting a low threshold for making dispositional attributions may be prudent in environments with high base rates of predatory powers or in two-level games in which one’s domestic political career can be ruined for failing to protect the in-group from real or imagined exploitation by out-groups. The example illustrates how the macro context can define both empirical boundary conditions on micro processes (when will a particular response tendency appear or disappear?) and normative boundary conditions (when is it reasonable to label a response tendency rational or irrational, moral or immoral?). But micro processes do not play purely passive dependent-variable roles; this chapter has repeatedly shown how difficult it is to derive clear-cut predictions from strictly structuralist formulations. Even many neorealists and game theorists now acknowledge the need to "model agency" by specifying both when decision-makers perceive other states to pose threats and when they opt to pursue relative as opposed to absolute gains in dealings with those states (Grieco, 1990; Powell, 1991; Walt, 1991). The human factor is apparently indispensable for determining which of a potentially infinite set of competing macro generalizations will be switched off or on in a given situation. Which arguments prevail in policy debates -- power-maximization vs. norm-adherence, one constituency vs. another, one principle vs. another, one call to group loyalty vs. another -- hinge critically on the mind-sets of elites who occupy key choice-point positions. Awkward and messy though it may make the disciplinary division of labor, the micro and macro are inextricably intertwined in world politics.