International regimes are an attempt to address creatively the dynamism of the international system. As such, they are perceived by many authors as real but as yet, are not fully denned. The incongruence of the term when applied to national and international spheres is also known (so much so that in its more widespread use, the term often connotes a certain authoritarianism). Yet, even if not clearly denned, the notion of international regimes makes sense and has a lot to offer (significantly, the literature on the subject is growing: see also the recent and good National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime by Dana Fisher.) A deepening of the debate emerges now with William Zartman and Bertram Spector's effort to explore the link between international regimes and negotiations.
The focus of the volume is on post-agreement, and the claim in the book is that little attention has been paid to the crucial question of how regimes sustain themselves and evolve. Therefore, the book offers a very good and illuminating (at times sharp) introductory chapter by Zartman, who very clearly elaborates "six analytical propositions" (pp. 14,15) to capture the dynamism of regimes. Also, the chapter offers an intriguing framework for the work ahead. Yet, a few questions linger: what additional clarity does the focus on post-agreement negotiation bring to our overall understanding of international regimes and the negotiations that foster them? Shouldn't we ask what the role of negotiation is in understanding what regimes are and how they function? I am not convinced that Getting it Done fully helps us to answer these broader questions. For example, are not all regimes the fruit and product of negotiation in the first place? If regimes are dynamic, if not from negotiation, from where does that dynamism come? To further the understanding that Zartman and his colleagues have outlined here, we should probably pay greater attention to how different negotiation styles and strategies contribute to particular outcomes and how they more broadly affect international regime formation and sustainability.
In the book, the case studies are well developed, in particular the chapter by Janie Leatherman. Yet, the gist of the overall argument of the broader volume that indeed negotiation makes a difference in the post-agreement phase of international regimes seems either obvious (regimes are by default a product of protracted and recursive negotiations) or not developed. This book, with its advances, will be especially valuable for students of international conflict resolution because it argues correctly that regimes are relevant, are different in their natures, are emerging, dynamic, and ever-changing, and therefore always the subject and object of negotiations. Nonetheless, the book does not fully advance our understanding of the types of negotiations that regimes presuppose, imply, facilitate, and make possible. For example, sufficient attention is not given to the simple observation that regimes -as concerted sustained efforts to address a common issue cooperatively-suppose no use of violence or threat of it among the participants.
This observation is crucial to addressing the fundamental tautological trap of the negotiation argument, that is to say, that states allow regimes to emerge as they serve their own interests and are willing to negotiate because they rightly perceive that their interests are better served by a sustained recursive use of negotiation, namely: regimes emerge out of negotiation because they are the product of negotiations. Because of this fundamental orientation, as with any recurrent collective human effort, states learn that there is no need to reinvent the wheel all the time. Rather, knowing that a certain path of communication namely negotiations-can produce acceptable results for them, they pursue it. Hopefully, Zartman and Specter's book will spark new inquiry into this intriguing area and help further our understanding of how recurrence itself might "change" negotiation. In other words, how does the existence of what Zartman terms "a negotiated formula" (p. 7) of a regime change a state's calculation of its own interests? Moreover, in what ways might a fundamental "lack of violent threat" shape the possibility of a regime's evolution that would be otherwise impeded by the pending possibility of violence? The book very convincingly makes the point that regimes change over time and that this change is managed properly through negotiations. It is certainly convincing to argue that no system, such as those supposed by international regimes, could survive if it did not maintain an intrinsic ability to handle change. Zartman and Specter's book represents an important invitation to delve even deeper.
[Author Affiliation]
Andrea Bartoli
Columbia University
Edited by Bertram I. Spector and I. William Zartman. Washington, DC, United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003. 312pp.
Copyright Academy of Political Science Spring 2005