ABSTRACT
Regimes can be defined as sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations. Principles are beliefs of fact, causation, and rectitude. Norms are standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action. Decision-making procedures are prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice. This usage is consistent with other formulations. Keohane and Nye, for
instance, define regimes as “sets of governing arrangements” that include “networks of rules, norms, and procedures that regularize behavior and control its effects” (Keohane and Nye 1977: 19). Haas argues that a regime encompasses a mutually coherent set of procedures, rules, and norms (Haas 1980a: 553). Hedley Bull, using a somewhat different terminology, refers to the importance of rules and institutions in international society where rules refer to “general imperative principles which require or authorize prescribed classes of persons or groups to behave in prescribed ways” (Bull 1977: 54). Institutions for Bull help to secure adherence to rules by formulating, communicating, administering, enforcing, interpreting, legitimating, and adapting them. Regimes must be understood as something more than temporary
arrangements that change with every shift in power or interests. Keohane notes that a basic analytic distinction must be made between regimes and agreements. Agreements are ad hoc, often “one-shot,” arrangements. The purpose of regimes is to facilitate agreements. Similarly, Jervis argues that the concept of regimes “implies not only norms and expectations that facilitate cooperation, but a form of cooperation that is more than the following of short-run self-interest” (Jervis 1982: 357). For instance, he contends that the restraints that have applied in Korea and other limited wars should not be considered a regime. These rules, such as “do not bomb sanctuaries,” were based purely on short-term calculations of interest. As interest and power changed, behavior changed. Waltz’s conception of the balance of
power, in which states are driven by systemic pressures to repetitive balancing behavior, is not a regime; Kaplan’s conception, in which equilibrium requires commitment to rules that constrain immediate, short-term power maximization (especially not destroying an essential actor), is a regime (Waltz 1979; Kaplan 1957: 23; Kaplan 1979: 66-69, 73). Similarly, regime-governed behavior must not be based solely on short-
term calculations of interest. Since regimes encompass principles and norms, the utility function that is being maximized must embody some sense of general obligation. One such principle, reciprocity, is emphasized in Jervis’s analysis of security regimes. When states accept reciprocity they will sacrifice short-term interests with the expectation that other actors will reciprocate in the future, even if they are not under a specific obligation to do so. This formulation is similar to Fred Hirsch’s brilliant discussion of friendship, in which he states:
Friendship contains an element of direct mutual exchange and to this extent is akin to private economic good. But it is often much more than that. Over time, the friendship “transaction” can be presumed, by its permanence, to be a net benefit on both sides. At any moment of time, though, the exchange is very unlikely to be reciprocally balanced.
