Description
Why do states commit so resiliently to cooperating in multilateral regimes with other states, even while mistrust deepens and these states may be preparing for war with each other? This puzzle is as urgent today, as international organisations struggle amid resurgent tensions among great powers, as it has been since international regulatory regimes first emerged. In a new book (in press, Oxford University Press), we present a novel neo-Durkheimian institutional explanation, showing shows that specific forms of social organisation in government can cultivate particular types of institutional buffering between aspects of external policy which can sustain commitment despite deepening conflict. To develop our explanation, using very large bodies of primary archival data, we examine Britain’s relations with the first global regulatory regime, before any norms of simultaneous cooperation and conflict could were institutionalised. This was the regime for international telegraphy, submarine telegraph cables and radiotelegraphy from the 1860s to the outbreak of war in 1914. The regime was created in a period of European wars, and cooperation, not least between Britain and Germany, which deepened cooperation in telegraphy even as war neared. Despite growing imperial conflicts and despite seriously contemplating leaving the International Telegraph Union in 1901-2, Britain became ever more closely involved with the three limbs of the regime, and even deepened cooperation with Germany as war neared. We show that this explanation fits the data better than either historical “struggle for control” or “capture” accounts or the key international relations and political science theories. Finally, we show that our analysis has implications for understanding trajectories of state formation.
